The Mormon settlers were not the first Europeans to enter Utah. A month after the Continental Congress signed the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 a mission from Santa Fe, consisting of six explorers and a cartographer headed north, led by Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante. They were looking for a route from Santa Fe to the Pacific that would avoid passing through the lands of the hostile Apache, these latter lying between New Mexico and California. Escalante discovered the Ute (whom he called Yuta) Indians, less hostile than the Apache, but no route to the west coast. Passing northwards from around present-day Zion National Park, Escalante’s party headed as far as Utah Lake (where they heard of the Great Salt Lake from the Ute), and then turned eastwards, crossing over the Rocky Mountains and they finally made their way back to Santa Fe via Colorado. Escalante wanted to colonise Utah and set up missionary stations, but Spain was a rapidly declining power at this time with enough problems holding on to its territories, and his mission left little evidence behind apart from a few placenames such as the Escalante River.
It was almost another 50 years before another set of white men came here, collectively known as the Mountain Men. They were explorers, trappers and adventurers and their main target was the humble beaver, millions of which inhabited the streams of the mountains. Beaver (because its skin was waterproof) hats were all the rage in Europe and America and large amounts of money could be made from their pelts. In 1823 the Hudson Bay Company sent a party under General William Ashley to the area around the present-day town of Logan in northern Utah, and one of their members, Jim Bridger, was the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake. The Hudson Bay Company employed a policy of leaving enough beaver for self-regeneration, but they were pushed out of this area by American trapping companies who killed and skinned everything they could, with disastrous consequences. These trappers often subcontracted the work to the Native Americans, on occasion gaining $2000 worth of pelts in exchange for a $20 rifle. The result of this boom was that the beaver (and even the humble otter) were almost wiped out by 1840 – as was later to be the case with the buffalo – and the era of the trapper was over 20 years after it had begun. The beaver was saved from extinction by the development in China of silkworm cultivation and a change in fashion thenceforward to silk hats.
People like Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith and Peter Shane Ogden amongst other Mountain Men knew the mountain territories of northern Utah, the Uintas and the Wasatch like the back of their hands. They were skilled at living off the land, following trails practising survival skills, often spending a year in the field before returning to sell their pelts to agents and exchanging their gains for whiskey, guns and other commodities, at a designated, annual, wild drinking and whoring rendezvous. The one near Pinedale, Wyoming in 1833 is often seen as the apogee of mountain-man culture, and is still re-enacted by addicts every year. Jim Bridger was possibly the most interesting of these Mountain Men, living ‘native’ for many years and picking up several Indian languages in addition to Spanish and French. He could not only follow any trail it was said, but also tell how many people were on it, what their heights and weights were, what the sexual composition of the party was and what animals were attached.
When the Mormons arrived in 1847, they indicated that they wished these semi-civilised Gentiles to depart, and they actually bought out Peter Ogden. However, Bridger and the Mormons never hit it off, and he reputedly told Brigham Young that if he ever raised a bushel of corn in the area of the Salt Lake, he would give him $1000. Bridger had retired from trapping by the time the Saints arrived and had set up a trading post at Fort Bridger in Wyoming with his financial gains, living there with his Indian wife. Bridger refused to remove from an area included in what the Mormons saw as their promised land of Deseret, and which, moreover, was a key supply and communications point on the emigrant trail. A group of Danites (the name given to the Mormon para-military enforcers at this time) arrived and, had he not escaped, may well have killed Bridger. Jim’s own account states that:
I was robbed and threatened with death by the Mormons, by the direction of Brigham Young, of all my merchandise, livestock, in fact everything I possessed, amounting to more than $100,000 worth, the buildings in the fort partially destroyed by fire, and I barely escaped with my life.
Ironically, Jim Bridger is commemorated on the huge LDS memorial at the This is The Place park in Salt Lake City, without any mention of these events.
As with the Mountain Meadows Massacre it would appear that cupidity on the part of the still-poor Mormon community, as much as religious zeal, was in evidence in the expulsion of Jim Bridger from Deseret. And if Bridger’s estimate of his losses are accurate, it shows what a solid fortune he made out of his trapping activities. Brigham Young never came to claim his $1000 from Jim Bridger when the Saints made the desert bloom and raised corn, but Young’s Danite avenging angels gained goods worth a sum many times greater that that owed when they drove the last Mountain Man out. They also gained control of the Fort – and levied a tax on any passing emigrants who were not Mormons – as they did at all the forts and ferries along what later became known as the Mormon Trail.
The Mountain Men are not forgotten, being commemorated in many placenames in Utah and at Fort Buenaventura State Park in Ogden, where there is a replica of the first trappers’ fort set up in this area. Here regular re-creations and re-enactments of the traditions and skills of the mountain men take place, complete with all that dressing-up and role-playing rituals that Americans appear to love more than any other people. We dress up differently for the mountains nowadays, not in buckskin and beaver pelts, but in hi-tech gear that the Mountain Men managed quite well without. And, with our maps and stoves and GPS navigational aids – do we have anything remotely comparable to the Mountain Mens’ survival skills? Utah’s mountains are also less threatening places for modern Mountain Men (and Women) than of yore, being largely denuded of dangerous animals and hostile natives. And though it is the image of desert which is conjured up for most people by the name of Utah, as much if not more of the surface of the state consists of mountain ranges.
It is true that the mountain ranges of neighbouring Wyoming, Colorado and even Nevada are better known than those of Utah, but in my opinion they lack the variety of mountaineering available in Deseret. There are mountains at the southernmost part of the Rocky Mountain chain, arising from the dessicated Colorado Plateau, and mountains soaring out of the vast aridity of the Great Basin – as different a geographical context as it is possible to imagine. This is why I have visited them half-a-dozen times in the last decade. In all those trips I have not encountered another European, still less a British walker. Winter lingers long in Utah and many mountains are still inaccessible in late June due to snow – deep, soft, dry snow which is purgatory for walking, though excellent for skiing. Then comes July and August which are very hot months – and when there are additionally the bugs to contend with. Undoubtedly the best time to visit Utah’s mountain ranges is in September and early October, when the snow is mostly gone – as are the bugs – and the autumn colours in the mountain forests surpass anything you will see in the more famed Appalachian mountains.
Having travelled across the Atlantic and landed at Salt Lake City, which lies at an altitude of about 4000ft, a good way to limber up and acclimatise is to visit nearby Antelope Island – an experience which gives you a real sense of being in the middle of the Great Salt Lake itself. Here almost the last remaining herd of buffalo in the United States was saved from extinction over 100 years ago, and on the island they still roam – but they are more canny now and more aggressive and faster than they look, so it is wise to keep your distance from them! The island contains a fine summit in Frary Peak, which is about a 2250-ft vertical hike from the trailhead (a leaflet is available at the Visitor Centre). The trail leads first to a false summit and then you are confronted by an exposed rocky ridge, which the path contours below and subsequently rises up to attain the main summit at 6596 ft above sea level, giving unsurpassed 360 degree-views over the Great Salt Lake to the peaks of the Wasatch Range to the east and of Nevada to the west. You may feel yourself echoing Brigham Young’s actual words when he first saw the Great Salt Lake in 1847 as he peered out from under the canvas of a wagon in which he had been recovering from illness, ‘This is the right place. Drive on’. Antelope Island had been visited for the first time two years before Young saw the Salt Lake by Kit Carson, whose infamous contribution to the history of the Native Americans I have already retold. Carson was a guide on the Fremont Expedition that year, which arrived on Antelope after crossing the Wasatch range.
As, in a way, it had been Ben Lomond that had brought me to Utah, it was fitting that it was the first major local mountain that I climbed there. Mike drove me northwards from Ogden through the little towns of Willard and Perry in what, though struggling to survive, is still primarily an orchard area, and swung me off the road to have a drive around and look at Brigham City, a delightful little grid-plan ‘Mormon’ town, its tree-lined streets ranged with restored century-old stone and wooden buildings. In a country whose rural architecture can too often be summarised as Clapboard Gothic, the Mormon settlers certainly knew how to build pretty little towns. What Stegner said almost 75 years ago still holds true,
There are in Mormondom very few of the typical western shack-towns with derailed dining cars and false-fronted stores, and rubbish strewn vacant lots and desolate, treeless, grassless yards … As a people Mormons have a great deal of civic pride.
We cut back south up Box Elder Creek and Mike’s 4WD groaned and shuddered to the trailhead, which, as often in America I find, is too high, easing accessibility overmuch. But if we had gained a lot of height, leaving the car in the woods in the lee of Black Mountain, we still had a fair distance, some four miles, to walk to the summit. This was an easy walk on a fantastic path, all the more delightful as it was almost entirely in an out of the forest of pines and aspens as we walked, only becoming bare mountain a little below the summit. Also, being on a high ridge, the track serves as a belvedere all the way with magnificent views over the Great Salt Lake. The summit fell away suddenly, down a steep couloir, to the houses of suburban Ogden. We shook hands on the summit, which has a visitors’ book and a US flag, and I said to Mike, ‘Well, that’s two of the Ben Lomonds done, I just have a couple to go.’
‘You mean there are more this this one and the Scottish one?’ he asked. Yes, there’s one in Tasmania and one in New Zealand and I think maybe one in South Africa,’ I replied, ‘but this is the biggest one.’
I thus returned the compliment of those Utahns who had climbed the one in Scotland and had said to me of it, ‘This is the real one.’
There are bear warnings here but there are very few sightings, indeed the main objective danger is the local hunters, armed to the teeth and camouflaged in military kit, out killing the scant game that remains. I am no defender of blood sports, but at least in Scotland, the deer have a chance as they are stalked under strict estate protocol. Here high-velocity rifles with telescopic sights would appear to give any poor beast that strays into the path of these hunters little opportunity of survival. Subjective perceptions can be misleading, but my sense of unease was not lessened having driven past stores with un-reassuring signs advertising GUNS BEER AMMO – not, I would have thought, a safe combination of merchandise.
Ben Lomond lies in the Wasatch Range which is actually the final bastion of the great chain of the North American Rocky Mountains, and runs from the northern border of Utah down south of Salt Lake City. It is a splendid range of mountains, reaching almost 12,000 feet on Mount Nebo, and is rugged and deeply wooded – though with most of the peaks accessible to strong walkers without more than minimal technical ability. Possibly the queen of the Wasatch Range is Mount Timpanogos which lies to the southeast of Salt Lake City, where the actual trailhead is two miles beyond the famous Sundance ski resort, at about 7,000 feet.
There are not many Ute placenames in Utah, apart from that of the state itself. Possibly there were many more, overlain later with names given by Mormon settlers. Today the local names tend to be of two kinds, one being the strictly literal tradition of American topynomy, eg Red River, Grey Mesa etc, the other consisting of names taken from Mormon or other biblical mythology, like Moab, Koosharem and so forth. Given this paucity of indigenous names, we are fortunate to have a wonderful Ute Indian name for a mountain in the Wasatch – Mount Timpanogos. This is an Indian female name, supposedly that of a ‘princess’, though I am not sure the Ute or other Native Americans had princesses, but we will let that pass. This is one of the most popular mountain ascents in Utah, and it well merits its popularity. Formerly there was even an annual ‘Timp Hike’ in which many thousands took part but this has been thankfully discontinued due to environmental concerns regarding erosion.
It is a great mountain to climb – there is a wonderful Alpine feel about it. An ascent of this summit has great variety, huge waterfalls, big cliffs (which the hike circumvents), a herd of wild goats, a glacier, though this is actually a permanent snowfield rather than a real glacier, and Emerald Lake, a high alpine tarn lying below the summit cirque. This variety is added to by doing the walk in autumn when the colours of the forests give a rich patina of colour to the scene. Timpanogos is a tough proposition with almost 5000 feet of vertical ascent from the trailhead, and about a 12-mile round trip. However, I did not think it merited the two days recommended by my guidebook for an ascent and descent. Neither did my companion on the hike, George Rodway. Meeting up with him had been another example of the serendipity that the credible could have construed as God’s finger pointing me towards Utah in search of my ultimate Damascene conversion.
I had got in touch with him through our mutual interest in an historical mountaineering project and was amazed to find that he had just relocated to Utah, partly for work and partly for the outdoor opportunities. In his time there George had, like myself, fallen in love with Utah due to its climate and scenery, and also – like myself – had discovered that despite his unflinching scientific rationalism, the Saints were not such a bad lot after all and living amongst them was not too problematic. This gave us much to talk about on the ascent of Timpanogos.
The path is well-made and well-marked as it climbs up in doglegs to Primrose Cirque, where the ground falls away in a pine-covered plateau which was the final destination of many of the ill-equipped and unfit hikers who had started off with us. This path curved round through rich, short undergrowth below Roberts Horn, and the summit of Timpanogos was now visible as was the ‘glacier’, a steep, short snowfield running down to Emerald Lake. Here there is a damp and miserable stone shelter with a concrete floor where people are able to overnight though I’m sure most would prefer to camp – or sleep out in the open. At this point a group of young kids, in shorts and trainers, and carrying cans of beer, who had more of less run this far, decided enough was enough, and headed back downhill. From here the path winds away from the summit, then doglegs back on the ridge, over talus and scree, to the top, where there is a steel shelter (again damp), originally built by the map makers. Many walkers vary the return by a descent of the ‘Timp’ glacier, which is short, but steep. Seeing some heading off that way in trainers and with nothing but a stick for support, it was easy to understand that there have been several accidents here. Without ice axes, we declined the ‘glacier’ and retraced our steps.
The Wasatch is the most southerly of the Rocky Mountain ranges, but Utah also possesses, in the Uintas, the only section of the entire Rockies that runs east to west. On my next visit George and I planned a trip to Kings Peak, Utah’s highest summit, lying in the Uintas – and he had also promised a further treat in store for me. His work at the University of Utah involves experimental physiology and he offered me the chance to be tested for the effects of Viagra on acclimatisation to altitude; not only that, but there was a promised fee of $250. I saw myself stuffing my pockets with the pills and heading with the cash for the bordellos of Nevada afterwards. But like all best laid schemes of mine this one was to gang agley. To hit the Uintas before the onset of the expected snows of October we headed there just a full day after I had landed in Salt Lake City, and George decided that was not enough time for me to have acclimatised properly to have recovered from jet lag. ‘Bad science,’ he said. Bad Luck, I thought.
To get to Kings Peak you have to drive out of Utah through Wyoming and back into Utah – trust me. I was willing to give Wyoming a second chance after my Pinedale experience, but the contrast in crossing the state line from Utah was immediate, confirming former impressions. The people became visibly more shabby – even dirty – the cars were more battered, many of the houses in disrepair. And instead of the syrupy Mormon Utah smile, everyone appeared to have that Dick Cheney (a local man) smug sneer. Our route took us past Fort Bridger, which recalled the famous Mountain Man, and then through Mountain View and down a long dirt track drive of 25 miles to the trailhead at Henry’s Fork, back on the Utah side of the border.
The Uintas is a remote wilderness area, and contains the largest mass of land above the treeline outside Alaska in the whole of the USA, with a claim to possibly being the biggest area of real wilderness land in the whole country outside Alaska as well. Even with the forestry and other roads which intrude like fingers into the area, it is a long walk to the main peaks of the range which contain Kings Peak, and a cluster of neighbouring summits which also breach the magic 4000-metre level. (The Americans still count in feet, so that’s 13,130 ft.) From the trailhead it is a full 16 miles to the summit of Kings Peak and a vertical height gain of over 5,000ft, and most people take three days for the climb. One in, one up, one out. The well made trail trends along the river through woods of autumnal aspen and then opens out into a landscape of clumps of pine set in a grassy alpine meadow, with the wall of the Uintas ahead.
We hiked in on a glorious sunny September evening, taking about three hours to do roughly ten miles and camped in the vicinity of Dollar Lake. After eating we hung up our food supplies on a tree, for this is bruin country. I had noticed that all the bushes had been stripped of berries already and wondered what else there was for the bears to eat before hibernation, for which it was still too early. Us? My thoughts turned to a poster at the trailhead which had told of an Australian hiker who had disappeared recently in here, and I uncomfortably thought that he would by now have followed the digestive route where the berries had gone before.
Next morning we were again weather-favoured and the sun rose and warmed us on a fresh autumnal day. From the campsite our route rose towards the aptly named Gunsight Pass, a cleft in the range, and then frustratingly lost height as it contoured round the southern side of King’s Peak, before rising again to Anderson Pass. To the south was the emptiness of Painter Basin and the Uinta River. It reminded me of a huge Cairngorms landscape, or more fittingly, of a larger version of Norway’s Jotunheimen mountains. From Anderson Pass it is about 600 feet of talus to the summit of King’s Peak, but I was struggling. Only 48 hours off a transatlantic flight and now at over 13,000 feet, I could have done with that Viagra. So I sat to enjoy the view and sent George on to bag the summit for the expedition. He observed on his return that it was the roughest and most unstable scree he had ever encountered. It had been quite a long day and we enjoyed our evening by the camp fire.
We stopped at Mountain View on our way back for a burger. It was rural Wyoming, American flags outside and inside, trucks in the parking lot with guns in back, guys with cowboy hats, big bellies and checked shirts eating in a silent aggressive way. A sign on the wall with a picture of a cow said ‘Vegetarians! My food shits on your food!’ Despite all this, the waitress was noticeably friendlier than had been my hostesses in Pinedale. Looking around I noticed a row of tin cans – beer, beans, beer, beans – hanging by the door labelled Redneck Chimes. George suggested it might be a kind of post-modernist ironical comment and that I should take a photograph of the chimes.
‘Or it might be a trap,’ I returned, ‘They shoot any liberal pinko commie pervert who dares to take a picture. Let’s go.’
I may warm to Wyoming one day, but not yet. However with its population of only 250,000, the least of all the US states, it is a consolation to know that only 0.065% of all Americans are from Wyoming.
The mountains so far described have an semi-Alpine feel about their rugged summits … but Utah has a quite different style of mountaineering in the southern part of the state. Here out of the dry lands of the Colorado Plateau rise isolated mountain ranges which are the water towers of the desert, feeding it with the life-giving liquid from the melt of the winter snows. Some of these mountain ranges are very remote and with little infrastructure. The Henry Mountains for example south of the tiny town of Hanksville, was the last area in the entire of the USA outside Alaska to be mapped and is still today one of the least populated regions in the whole of the nation. The map showed several settlements and ranches which I found to be actually abandoned, so it is an area where you have to be totally self-reliant on these isolated peaks. I am sure it must have been climbed before, but when with some trepidation I left the dirt track and hiked to the summit of Cass Peak, to which there was no trail, I found that on the summit there was no cairn. Back in Blondie’s café in Hanksville, the locals were admiring, ‘That’s real back country out there,’ one muttered admiringly into his biscuits and gravy. I had impressed a redneck.
I had seen Tukuhnikivatz more than once before climbing it, indeed I had seen it from Cass Peak. On my second visit to Arches it had been framed through more than one arch on my walk, its incongruously snow-capped dome in semi-desert country giving evidence of the reason why the mountain range in which it sits was called La Sal. The original Spaniards on Escalante’s exploration who saw these mountains could not believe in snow in this climate, so they thought the mountains were made of salt. But snow here it does, even in early October as I discovered on my third trip to Moab, seeing the recent fall and being told that the mountain road to La Sal was closed, as the dirt roads become quagmires when wet. I had to remain in Moab for a couple of days doing other walks and explorations whilst the road dried out. In the evening I was to appreciate that whilst the Spanish name for the range is inaccurate, the Ute Indian name for Tukuhnikivatz itself is profoundly apposite, as it means ‘The Place Where the Sun Shines Last’. And, watching the setting of the sun from a Moab vantage point allows you to see that some freak of geography means that, though it is not the highest summit in the La Sal range, the pyramidal summit of Tukuhnikivatz is indeed graced by the last rays of the setting sun. Outside of the Uintas these are the highest mountains in Utah.
I also wanted to climb this mountain as another of my favourite chapters in Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, ‘The Island in the Desert’, describes how, desirous of a change of scene from Arches National Park, he had taken a couple of days off from wardening there and climbed the mountain, spending a night out on it. This fine piece of writing had some of the quality of Stevenson’s chapter in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, where the Scottish travel writer describes a night under the stars. Abbey had climbed the mountain in August, I was there later in the season and, as already noted, with fresh snow already a possibility, I had no desire to repeat Cactus Ed’s noctural adventure, rather just wanted to make the basic daytime ascent. Abbey had actually approached the mountain from the north-west, and even in August had to contend with the snowfields on that side, and almost had a serious accident whilst descending. I was going in from the south-east, an area clear of snow.
Driving south from Moab you pass through lands that were initially farmed by the Mormon settlers but today are increasingly receding from cultivation, signs of derelict irrigation systems and abandoned farmsteads littering the route. This land is so marginal that its use for agriculture is economic madness. Today only 2% of Utah’s GNP is provided by agriculture, and in reality if you factor out the open and hidden subsidies the farming community gets from national and federal government, the sector has a negative effect on the state’s economy. But because of its iconic importance in Mormon mindset, and the political effectiveness of the farmers’ lobby, it continues to survive – and indeed, to distort the use of resources like water. In a water-starved Utah, 30% of the precious fluid is devoted to farming. The La Sals have been worked for forestry and grazing for over a century. On this walk you are more likely to meet cows rather than buffalo, sheep rather than bears.
At La Sal junction I turned east and headed for the La Sal Pass, where the trailhead lay at the amazing height of over 9,000 feet, reached by a 10-mile dirt track road with a couple of shallow (normally … ) fords on the way. As I ascended the road I had the unusual sensation of entering into ever thicker tree cover, the exact opposite of the situation at home in Scotland, or indeed Europe in general, where this declines as one ascends. The road ended just past Medicine Lakes, a delightful spot where a grassy meadow was being grazed by some cattle. It was a fine sunny day, though fresh at this altitude, and as soon as I stepped from the car I felt my breathing to be a little laboured. In the clear air the summit looked tantalisingly close.
From the trailhead the track passed through a forest of spruce trees, and then debouched onto a wonderful grassy meadow which followed the edge of the forest, before climbing to the subsidiary ridge that ran down from the summit of Tukuhnikivatz. The gentle gradient of the meadow steepened and a faint path led to the main ridge which connects Tukuhnikivatz with Mount Peale, its slightly higher eastern neighbour at 12,721 feet. From the ridge it was about 500 feet of moderately hard going on the loose talus which has by now replaced the carpet of grass on which I had so far walked.
From the summit was visible the country I had come to know, Arches, Canyonlands, Monument Valley. Abbey wrote that:
All around the peaks of the Sierra la Sal lies the desert, a sea of burnt rock, arid tablelands, barren and desolate canyons. The canyon country is revealed from this magnificent height as on a map and I can imagine, if not read, the names on the land.
– and so now could I. And the La Sal range is truly an oasis in the desert as Abbey said. The eye falls away from the summit over rich meadowlands and a patchwork quilt of forests which all peter out the lower they get, and eventually disappear into the desert itself. But La Sal not only adds colour and form to the landscape, from its slopes comes the bulk of the water for the surrounding region, in the form, occasionally of rainfall, but mostly of snow melt. These are the Water Towers of south-east Utah.
Tukuhnikivatz is an enjoyable, though easy summit and it makes a more demanding – and more rewarding – day to cross to its neighbour Mount Peal, which, despite its greater height, is not such a good viewpoint. It is about a mile from the col aforementioned. The ridge between the two summits has a section called the Razor Fang which gives an easy scramble with a bit of exposure, but this can be avoided by descending a couple of hundred feet on the southern side if it seems intimidating, as things can do if you are on your own.
The Mountain Men did not confine their explorations to the strict boundaries of modern-day Utah, and I am sure the reader will allow me a little geographical licence to do the same (especially as the territory originally claimed by the Mormon settlers as Deseret extended well beyond the present area of Utah itself) and to wander a handful of miles across the border into Nevada, for a magical mountain experience I would recommend to anyone. I had no intention of climbing Wheeler Peak when I left Salt Lake City to drive across the Great Basin. My intention was to probe into Nevada in pursuit of some further information about the miners’ unions of the Mountain West, in the towns of Ely and Eureka. The trip gave me that, and it also gave me Wheeler Peak.
Highway 6 takes you to the Mormon town of Delta, set in an irrigated area on the edge of the Great Basin, which is a huge area where all rivers flow inland with no outlet to any sea. From Delta it is a long and lonely road, over 100 uninhabited miles to the Nevada border. The road passes though desert landscape and skirts the stunning and shimmering Sevier Lake, a smaller version of the Great Salt Lake, and then crosses over arid mountain ranges through places like Skull Rock Pass, before leaving Utah and heading thence for Ely. It was just after crossing the border that I saw Wheeler Peak, so different from the other rolling desiccated desert ranges in the Great Basin, and I marked it down for an exploration on my return journey.
The peak lies in the Great Basin National Park and, like most US Parks, the easing of access philosophy means that a paved park road goes to the trailhead – where there is also a campsite – at over 9000 feet. That leaves you with about 3000 feet and four miles of hiking to the summit. In no way is Wheeler Peak by this trade route a hard mountain, in fact I ascended and descended it in little over the four hours that the guidebook actually suggested it would take to just ascend the mountain. But it is a wonderfully enjoyable mountain to climb, with constant great views all day. Wheeler is like something misplaced from the European Alps, heavily glaciated, as well as possessing permanent snowfields, and with a big face gathered round a rugged cirque below a skyline of ridges and towers. A proper, almost visually perfect, mountain. The ascent through aspen and bristlecone pine forest gives you constant views of the peak from different aspects, and then the route climbs over easy rock and scree up the shoulder to the sudden summit – and a vista down into the deep corrie below. As I scampered downhill I remember thinking, ‘That was the best mountain day I have had since the Gran Sasso d’Italia in the Abruzzo Mountains last year’, little suspecting there would be an unexpected Abruzzo codicil that evening.
The choices of accommodation in Snake Valley were limited. There was the Border Inn just inside Nevada which I had passed and noted was a gambling motel, so I tried my luck in Baker, the only other habitation for a long, long way. The dusty little town had an RV camp, but luckily also a small motel with a gaily-painted restaurant attached. I washed and rested pleasantly outside my room as the sun went down, before heading to eat.
The owner was of a slightly taciturn disposition, but the menu looked better than burger, and it was, good homely Italian cooking. I sat eating and listening to Mozart being played on the CD player and admiring the collection of film posters on the walls. My host was a devotee of European film of the 1960s, I could see … Godard, Fellini, Bunuel … . Between courses I got up and looked at the large collection of second-hand books which was for sale, and was astonished to find Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and much Italian literature including works by Ignazio Silone, who had written great novels about the peasants of the Abruzzo under Fascism.
I chatted to my host about Silone, and he warmed just a little – but not enough for me to be emboldened to ask how the hell he had got to Baker, and from where he had come. This man had a story to tell, I felt, though he did not tell it to me. Despite his reserve he did recognise in me enough of a kindred spirit after I had told him I was a writer, and was working on a travelogue about the South-West, to hand me a leaflet about the campaign against the plan to pipe the water of Snake Valley to Las Vegas.
‘Write about that,’ he said.
It was the usual story. To feed the ever-increasing needs of the Sodom and Gomorrah of Sin City, the aquifers of this region were to be drained and piped out, making a fragile ecosystem ever more fragile. Another chapter in the eco-genocide of the US South-West.
And yet, and yet, so much of wonder and beauty remains, in the desert below and in the mountains above.