Chiricahua Mountains | Drought-stricken land

Herewith attached are a few photos for you to pick from, from Eliz and my observance of our wounded planet, and celebration of life. The photos are all from the Rucker Canyon divide in southeastern Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains, south of Cave Creek and Horseshoe Canyon, and just east of Price Canyon, which were the locations, respectively, of the 2009 International Wilderness Guides Gathering, the 2009 International Renewal Fast, and another fasting location from years before. 

The fire which consumed 90% of the Chiricahua Mountain range last year was caused by several decades now of extreme drought. Simply put, the snow rarely falls anymore. This Sky Island mountain range is home to spruce and aspen on it’s summits, and tough desert grasses and cactus on its lower slopes. This mountain range is home to the most abundant diversity of cold-country Rocky Mountains and sultry southern Sierra Madrean flora and fauna in the world. But for over twenty years now, the winter snow storms that brought abundant and life-sustaining moisture to the mountains have become perceptibly fewer in number and scanter in depth. These earth-changing conditions have brought a fevered dryness to the landscape.

Now, add to these deadly natural conditions, the Chiricahua Mountains have become a selected route of traffickers and the forces that chase the traffickers. Failed draconian policies and criminal greed that govern international immigration and the smuggling of certain plants that have been christened illegal, made it mandatory for a group of people in the trades to cross through the mountains in tinder-dry May of 2011. They started a campfire that began the Horseshoe 2 Fire, which burned out of control for months until the coming monsoon rains of July. The desperate need to appear to be “fighting” the fire caused the U.S. Forest Service to light a backing fire, ostensibly to slow the southward progress of the fire. Yet, as we witnessed on our day of Radical Joy for Hard Times, their “managed fire” merely added to the toll: thousands of charred acres, destroying ancient forests, historic trails, fragile watersheds and the inhabitants of these mountainsides.

A difficult slog up into the mountains, the day was very hot and the trees and cover all gone. The previous year’s monsoonal rains had utterly washed away soil and trail, leaving mountainsides exposed, down to rough cobble and boulder fields. Wisps of ash still danced like wraiths as the wind picked into the charred bole of a juniper or oak or pine. We walked together quietly. Our three small dogs gamely follow and lead us. I have walked that mountainside six times and I know trails. But that trail constructed by the CCC in the 1930’s has been totally washed away. We cross-country’ed up into the burn looking for “signs’ ‘.

Before we ventured up into the burn Saturday morning, we were encouraged and thrilled by the concentration of life in the Rucker Canyon itself: whiskered screech owl, long-eared owl, Swainson’s thrush, painted redstart, a raucous cawkus of elegant trogon, and feasting on a dead cow, a flock of turkey vultures. LIFE. But a mile up and away from the canyon, on those steep hot slopes, exposed to the numbing vastness of the torched mountains, we stopped looking. The desire to go up just one more ridge, in hope, was gone. And we huddled in the shade of a small rock outcrop, rested, drank water, and headed carefully through the loose rocks back down.

Halfway down we stopped again to rest and found the fire-bleached bones of a small mammal. Squirrel? Small fox? We couldn’t be certain. But here, with this tiny spirit, we made our prayers. Here we expressed our complicity and our quiet outrage, and we prayed for healing. Healing rains and snows, healing of hearts and minds. We knew that the mountains would regrow into new and perfect vegetative variation. Animals of many kinds will always inhabit the landscapes they are given. There will be LIFE. There will be LIFE.