The desert, any desert, is indeed the valley of the shadow of death.
—JOAN DIDION, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
TRYING TO PREPARE FOOD ON THE SUMMIT OF TELESCOPE PEAK WAS like trying to cook in the backwash of a jet engine. Only cold. I hauled out my little camp stove, and, in the shelter of some rocks, finally got some water boiling for a starchy, carbohydrate-laden specialty I liked to call “cheddar risotto”—instant rice covered in dehydrated cheese powder. At one point, banging about in the darkness, hunched over like Gollum to avoid the wind, I put my gloved hand down on the still white-hot stove. My glove melted and burned, and the heat singed right through to my palm. A stifled scream was heard by none thanks to the hurricane-force winds.
Somehow, during the lighting and fueling process, I spilled the fuel for my cookstove. It pooled in the little nook in the rocks I was huddled in. I must have inhaled the toxic vapors the whole time I was cooking, because as I got up to serve the gloopy, cheesy mess I’d made to the students I’d brought up to camp near the peak, lights exploded in my head. I felt nauseous and woozy. I was just able to serve the kids their food before practically falling over, head swimming from the fumes. My vision blurred, my balance faltered. I thought I might pass out, so groped my way back to where my gear was stuffed in a crevice in the rocks.
I found, as I lay just a bit away from the kids in the darkness, that I had burned a large hole in my jacket as well, at some point resting it against the stove. My little kitchen area reeked of fuel and burnt nylon. I stuffed some crackers in my mouth for dinner and in the vague hope I could quell the urge to vomit, and spread my sleeping bag in a brutal cleft in the rocks to try to sleep.
It’s said that George Mallory quipped “because it’s there” as his reason for climbing Everest, and that profound response has since been used to explain space travel, plumbing the depths of the ocean, and eating the Awesome Blossom at Chili’s. What’s often omitted is that Mallory died on Everest, which deflates the existential logic of his most famous epigram.
In a way, however, I understand what Mallory meant. The whole Mojave Desert region held a certain fascination for me as a native New Englander. The road to Death Valley from Los Angeles winds along the Owens River. A dry, hot region bordered by the Mojave Desert and the High Sierra, the valley has been the stage for gold prospecting, cowboy movie backdrops (John Wayne was a frequent visitor to the town of Lone Pine to film Westerns), and fiercely pitched battles over the ownership of the water that flows through the Owens. Driving through the desiccated air on the way to Death Valley, I could taste dust on my tongue, the sweet tang of desert yucca, piñon, and sage. The ground is rusty and broken, cracked and burnt like some gigantic pottery mess left too long in the kiln. It’s otherworldly, quite simply, and I wanted the students to experience that, the remote desolation of the place.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a huge movement toward the conservation of wild lands in America. This movement was led by famous cranks such as John Muir, but was often bolstered by the moneyed, white elites of the era. In terms of preserving the deserts of Southern California such as Death Valley, J Tree, and Anza Borrego, Minerva Hamilton Hoyt stands out as a leader among the early desert conservationists.
Born on a Mississippi plantation right after the Civil War, Hoyt married a wealthy physician and finally settled in Pasadena, California. After her husband died, she became a crusader for saving the deserts, as she felt automobile traffic and development were wiping out the natural landscapes. Her reasons strike a familiar chord with anyone who’s visited these places: “The desert with its elusive beauty,” she wrote, “possessed me, and I constantly wished that I might find some way to preserve its natural beauty.”
She became a soldier in a campaign to save these natural spaces, traveling across the country exhibiting desert flowers and cacti, and knocking on the doors of elected officials to try to convince folks of the necessity of preserving these majestic landscapes.
In Hoyt’s writing, as well as the words of contemporaries like Muir and other early conservationists, the natural world gets represented as this tabula rasa, a pristine Eden that needs protecting. “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees,” Muir wrote. True enough—I’ve had plenty of moments that feel pretty groovy when I’m out and about in the very places Hoyt and Muir worked to keep safe from development, agriculture, sunburned dirt bikers, and off-road enthusiasts. But in all the beautiful writing by these folks, all the soaring rhetoric, the erasure of the Indigenous peoples of the deserts and mountains is so complete, so absolute, it is easy (and a privilege) to hardly take note of their existence at all. Reading about these early enviro-warriors, it becomes clear what they wanted: to preserve beautiful places for the enjoyment of white people. Muir practically comes out and says it: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.” He’s literally describing me, a stressed-out suburbanite in need of some woodsy balm.
The grim fact is that these incredible landscapes were made available first and foremost by removing the native peoples who lived there. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in my life in the High Sierra; Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks; the deserts of the Mojave, J Tree, and Death Valley, as well as East Coast wild areas such as the Green Mountains and Adirondacks. My own enjoyment, the very lifestyle I not only value but that constitutes a huge part of my identity, rests squarely in the reality of the disenfranchisement and genocide of native peoples. These vast, pristine tracts of land were not empty. They were populated by diverse peoples and cultures, had a human history stretching millennia before Patagonia puffy jackets and wicking layers. And this isn’t ancient history. Native peoples still living around J Tree, for example, include the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, and Serrano. Unceremoniously kicked out so that white dudes like me could rock climb and hike and snap selfies.
The legacy of white monopoly of wild spaces is a tough one to navigate. The erasure of native peoples has been so obscenely complete that rarely is a second thought given to the ancestral occupants of the land. Sometimes, at best, some well-meaning liberal will acknowledge they are visiting native lands, but it’s a nod, a brief mention, followed by a figurative emotional shrug. What can you do? Whenever the reality of Indigenous genocide, institutionalized dispossession, and theft is brought up, the reaction is the same. Us white people purse our lips, furrow our brows, and shake our heads in remonstrance of the sins of our ancestors, like a mother pooh-poohing her naughty child for some minor infraction. Then a big sigh, and it’s on with the business at hand. After all, what can you do?
These incredible places where I’ve found so much joy are now managed and regulated by the very government that 86’d Indigenous peoples in the first place. Death Valley was once part of the lands of the Timbisha Shoshone, a desert-dwelling group that eked out their existence among the Panamint mountains and dry deserts. When the government tried to develop a homeland for them, they hired a designer known for his sensitivity to Indigenous peoples named Billy Garrett. The Timbisha Shoshone rejected his plans, not for some aesthetic principle, but because the process of approving the plans and getting permits was too bureaucratic That remains the true evil, I think, of the way in which native peoples have been usurped of their birthright homelands. White power structures aren’t always racists in hoods with burning crosses. Sometimes, they’re hidden in plain sight in the monotonous inertia of institutions, molding the landscape to their desires and self-perpetuation. That’s as scary as any trail of tears.
Telescope Peak is an 11,331-foot peak only a dozen miles from Bad-water, the lowest point in the continental United States at 282 feet below sea level. It is said that the elevation gain from Badwater to the summit of Telescope Peak is similar in scope to the rise of Mount Everest as it juts up from the Tibetan plateau. When driving into Death Valley, visitors could get a sense of the dramatic rise of Telescope as it rose majestically from the desert valley floor.
The great central rift of the eponymous park is a low-lying, incredibly arid desert that receives barely measurable precipitation each year. It is not a place that welcomes life, though life in myriad forms stakes out a tenuous existence in a place that reaches summer temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Only a six-hour drive from Los Angeles, the park is enormous, but a drive down into the inner areas brings the dedicated visitor to a region that is like some strange Martian landscape scooped up and dropped in California. I wanted the kids to feel that dislocation you only get in hard-to-reach places, a place of no-placeness that makes you search for something in your interior geography to orient yourself.
We visited in December, the only time the temperature is bearable. The sky was an achingly beautiful, cloudless blue. The area around Death Valley—the Mojave Desert, the Panamint Range, the White Mountain Range, as well as the Sierras to the west—represents an incredible panorama of reds, whites, grays, and browns, like a massive earth-toned set of crayons had been used to color the landscape. You’d be hard pressed to find a more complete collection of burnt umbers and beiges anywhere else in the world.
Death Valley National Park is home to the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. Exempting only regions in Alaska, there is nowhere that is more remote, desolate, and empty than Death Valley. If I was looking to give the kids a wilderness experience, I had chosen the right place.
The father of one of the students had wanted to come with us. I had initially planned for just myself and another teacher, Ned, to lead the trip. But the man was insistent. He was a big guy, rotund, with long motorcycle-guy hair, like a linebacker past his expiration date. A gruff demeanor. His daughter, Gabrielle, no longer lived with both her parents; she lived predominantly with her mom. I could see that the dad was trying to use this trip as a way to bond. A way to spend some time with his girl, who was a full-fledged adolescent and came with all the concurrent eye-gouging frustrations that brought.
We’d set out from the bottom of Telescope Peak with high hopes. It was warmish even though it was winter, in the sixties. We’d driven in and camped the first night at the base of the trail right by the parking lot, thus able to take advantage of cooler-food like hot dogs and chips and sodas. I noted early on that Gabrielle’s father, Mike, wore a leather jacket—the classic black motorcycle zip-up worn by badasses since Brando in The Wild One I had given him the same gear list I’d given the other kids, which focused on light, outdoor gear. Windbreaker shells, down jackets, fleece, not a lot of cotton, the usual outdoor adventure stuff. His jacket alone looked like it was ten pounds of dried cowhide and metal.
It’s a vital skill to wake early on rigorous mountaineering trips to ensure that you get all the daylight possible to traverse steep, technical ascents. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never been good at getting kids out of camp early and hitting the trail to begin racking up the miles. I’m a lounger. I wander around in a stupor, packing, then repacking my gear, eating pancakes, drinking a fourth cup of coffee, admiring the view, scratching myself, and just enjoying the deaf ear and blind eye nature turns toward bodily noises and effluent.
But hit the trail we did, around mid-morning. Mike was hurting from the get-go. He overdressed right away, not realizing that lugging a pack was the fastest way known to humankind to raise your core temperature. His backpack was a geographical feature in and of itself, as it appeared to contain enough gear for Everest and a small sofa to boot. The thing towered above his head, stuck out on both sides, and was strapped and wrapped with various bags, random gear, and hiking doodads. He looked like he was being buggered from behind by a garbage heap.
If there is an outdoor equivalent to the Myers-Briggs personality test for children, it’s trekking in the high country. They start out fast. The real go-getters race up the trail, bouncing along and talking loudly, shattering any hopes that fellow outdoor enthusiasts might have of bird watching or meditating. The speedy, energized ascent only lasts about seven minutes, and soon the kids are sitting on the side of the trail, complaining about one of three things: hunger, weather, or boredom.
Then there’s the other contingent of kids who start slow and grumpy, know they won’t like it from the start, and maintain a consistent barrage of well-thought-out arguments about why it’s a dumb idea to go backpacking. I can’t help but have a soft spot in my heart for the complainers. They are so steadfast, so true to their creed. The sheer commitment they show to grousing about hiking is admirable. I’ve had some kids who complained nonstop on eight-day trips.
On one particular trip I brought my wife along as a co-leader. I was leading the kids off-trail to demonstrate orienteering skills (outdoor instructor talk for being “lost”). My wife, who had been bringing up the rear with the complainers, came bounding past me, face set and grim, her hands quivering with rage. “If you don’t go back there and shut those little shits up, I swear to god I’m going to kill someone,” she said, and marched off down the trail.
The two kids in question were video game–addicted, suburban idiots who had been eager to take advantage of the fact that my wife had ears so they could pour every last syllable of whiny, bitter complaint into them. Eventually, she just couldn’t take it anymore, and stormed to the front of the group.
We continued the slow climb up Telescope Peak. The kids spread themselves out along the trail. The route was carved into the side of the mountain; any attempt to leave the path would have hikers scrabbling up a forty-five-degree slope of broken shale. Telescope Peak is a classic climb in that it’s monotonous and markedly un-fun.
Mike began to look worse and worse. Altitude can affect anyone, and most who ascend beyond ten thousand feet feel some effects: headache, nausea, dizziness. Altitude sickness resembles a hangover. Once up in the mountains, it never seems all that bad till you hoist your pack and strap it on at eight, nine thousand feet, then start climbing a trail reminiscent of Satan’s Stairmaster. You notice it then. Your posture begins to resemble your eighty-year-old grandmother, and little spots have an annoying, blackfly-like habit of dancing in front of your eyes. Your breath is ragged and raspy, and conversations, sentences, words are often left half-finished and unsaid. Thinking becomes groggy and spacey. Sort of like being really, really tired and stoned, but with none of the endorphins. Mike was struggling, and I knew I had to do something.
“Mike, you want me to take some of your weight?” I asked as delicately as possible. His sunglasses had slid down the sheen of sweat on his nose, and his long hair was coming out of his ponytail and was plastered to his cheeks. His jowls were quivering with each hard-fought breath.
“We, huh, huh, close?” he asked, gasping.
“Ah, no. We’ve gone about a half mile,” I said. He gave me a look that said, in very plain and clear terms, that I was an idiot. I faded back and let him be.
By noon we’d barely gone two of the eight miles needed to reach the summit. We slung off our packs in a saddle along a ridge, hunkering down out of a strong chill wind. We broke out our food, stuffing our faces with whatever didn’t require cooking. The enthusiasm of the group had definitely diminished in an inverse relationship with the views, which were becoming more and more epic the higher we went. “Just look at that,” I said, extending my hand, gesturing to Mars-like mountain ranges of red and scarlet that undulated to the horizon. The kids stared at me with undisguised hatred.
After a brief pause we began to get moving again. The kids groaned and complained, and I’m pretty sure I heard the phrase “child abuse” more than once. We all shouldered our packs and started up the trail. Mike still sat, legs splayed clumsily about, looking exhausted.
“Hey, Mike. I can take some weight,” I said, waiting for his daughter to be out of earshot to save him the embarrassment.
“This wasn’t what I expected,” he muttered, his voice low and accusatory.
“Sorry about that, Mike. It’s just, you know, we try to do these more rigorous trips to help the kids push themselves.”
“I know why you do them,” he growled. Our relationship, fraught to begin with, was deteriorating.
The day got later and later. The trail got steeper. The route up to the summit was a classic traverse, with the trail zigzagging up the face of the mountain. We soon reached the altitude where only bristlecone pines grew, and the wind blew unabated from whatever Pacific storm that birthed it. It got colder and colder, and kids began to whine with a particular panic in their voices. I sent Ned along with the faster group to make the summit, and I hung back with the laggers, who soon consisted only of Mike. He seemed to get that he was dragging the whole group down.
“You, huh, huh, go on, huh, huh, ahead. Huh, huh, with the kids, huh, huh,” he wheezed. He did not look good. The kids were my responsibility, but now I had to factor in this guy as well. I was honestly concerned about him blowing a cardiac gasket on the trail at some point. I knew that if I left him to his own devices, the chances were good he wouldn’t push himself out of guilt. He would go at his own pace, maybe even just stop. Which was fine, as long as he didn’t die on me. I had a spotless record as far as death on trips was concerned, and I really didn’t want to break my streak.
“I’ll be back to check on you,” I said, and hiked on up the trail toward the kids. Night was coming. Ned was up ahead, and I passed the kids, who were strung out along the mountain, and finally, after an exhausting jog up the trail, caught up with him for a consultation. We decided to get the kids to drop their packs; Ned would grab the stuff for the shelter and head up to the summit before nightfall. There was no place to camp where we were, only a narrow goat path along the steep mountainside. We could take turns ferrying the packs up the rest of the way once we got the kids settled. The kids gleefully dropped their packs, bringing only their headlamps and sleeping bags, and followed Ned up the mountain. This all took some time, and so I raced back down the trail, leaving my own pack, to check on Gabrielle’s dad.
I found him looking despondent, sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree. He resembled a huge pile of spilled laundry.
“Mike, hey man. How are you? Doing okay?” I bent to look at him closer. He still wore his sunglasses, though we were in the shadow of the mountain, and his lower lip was trembling from either cold or exhaustion.
“This. Is. Bullshit,” he said. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant—his lack of experience, the whole notion of backpacking, maybe the human condition? I was pretty sure a debate was not what he was looking for.
“Mike, I’m going to carry your pack for you, okay? That way we can get you to the top. Kids are already up there. Ready?”
He lurched to his feet, and I took his pack. It weighed slightly less than a Buick filled with pudding.
We struggled up the trail together, though without the pack’s weight, he seemed able to make it. I noticed one of his knees was severely knocked, and wondered what sort of chiropractic nightmare I’d just induced in this 240-pound man.
By the time we reached the summit, it was basically dark and the wind was screaming. The summit of Telescope Peak is a short little ridge. The camping spots are small, rock-ringed ovals, often just big enough to contain a sleeping bag or a one-person tent.
I had, in my zeal, and with the understanding that it only rains once every thousand years in Death Valley, omitted tents from our packing list. My theory at the time was that we could spread out on the ground, stare up at the desert stars, and experience a transcendent moment of natural serenity. What I had not counted on was that the altitude and howling winds would drop the temperature precipitously. What I had thought would be an excellent character-building experience was quickly turning into a dumpster fire.
Ned and the kids were crouched in the lee of rocks, trying to avoid the knife-edge of the wind. Ned eyed me skeptically.
“I probably should’ve brought a tent,” I said.
I got Mike to one of the little hollows and helped him pull out his sleeping bag. His face was pale, and his pulse rapid. He looked like he was coming off about a weeklong bender. He took off his boots and climbed wearily in, fully clothed, like some large butterfly in reverse, if butterflies resembled the singer Meatloaf. The wind whipped by above his head, but lying down in his little hollow, he was out of the worst of it. I left him and scurried back to Ned and the kids.
The kids were huddled behind a rock wall, only about two feet high, that someone had once constructed. Ned was digging a tarp out of his pack. The kids were genuinely scared, and the temperature was dropping fast.
We worked together as quickly as possible, securing the tarp as a shelter to get the kids out of the wind. It was growing dark, and the temperature was now decidedly uncomfortable. The kids were rather mute, their reptilian brains kicking into gear and directing them to dive into their sleeping bags and conserve heat. The wind was picking up, and gusts blew around us.
This was when I tried to cook a meal for my charges and ended up huffing camp stove fuel and nearly asphyxiating myself in my little rock cleft.
Sleep was not to be had. I was so sick from the fumes, and trying to sleep in my little crevice was like trying to sleep in the jaws of a backhoe. I felt like it was breaking me apart just to lie there. I wrestled with my bag, climbed out, and checked on the kids, who at least were fed and packed together warmly at this stage, playing with their headlamps and farting and giggling, oblivious of the horrors nature was inflicting on us.
Headlamp beam bouncing around, I headed out to find Ned. I might have glimpsed the firmament wheeling overhead, showering us with the Milky Way’s radiance, but I was so ill from the gas fumes I just scuttled over the rocks. I slipped and scrambled across the ridge as the wind sliced into me. Iridescent blue-white patches of ice shone in my headlamp’s light.
I found Ned hunkered in a small site just below the branches of a bristlecone pine. He had his own little stove going, with a hot, steaming brew of miso soup just beginning to simmer. He had hung his headlamp in the low branches of the bristlecone pine, giving his little windless pocket a nice, warm glow. He had a small cutting board and paring knife, and was chopping fresh kale. A bowl of couscous and dried beans sat ready to add to the soup. There were some aromatic spices in tiny, lightweight plastic jars, and between Ned’s knees was a hot, steaming mug of what looked like freshly brewed chai tea with real milk.
“How was dinner?” Ned said amiably, humming some happy tune. Not about to be dragged down by such pleasantries, I thought I’d bring Ned back to reality with some sharp words of reproach for neglected duty.
“Mike, he hasn’t eaten yet,” I began.
“Oh, I brought him some food,” Ned said.
I faltered. Ned smiled pleasantly, and then bent back to his now-ready miso. I grumbled something about checking on the kids, and shuffled back along the deadly path to my own frozen coffin. I had carried Mike’s lumbar-impacting backpack up the hill, and he got the gourmet macrobiotic meal prepared by Mahatma Gandhi. I wedged myself into my sleeping bag and tried to sleep through the nightmare night ahead.
Dawn came blue and freezer-burned to the top of Telescope Peak that next morning. A weak light poked out from the mountains to the east, illuminating the steely sky. The temperature was extreme, to say the least. I felt like one of those mummies National Geographic features seemingly every other month, all frozen and twisted and warped and stuffed into rocky crags in the Andes.
I wasn’t dead, though it seemed a viable option at that point. I clawed open my pack and pulled out some food, anything, to feed the kids. My hand throbbed from the burn I’d given myself the night before, and the fuel I’d inhaled left my head feeling bloated and ballooned. I pulled some oranges from my pack that were frozen solid as rocks, and a Hershey bar or two for the kids to split. Just moving out of my sleeping bag was excruciating. The wind cut like a knife and howled into the hole I had burned in my jacket the night before. I scuttled over to the bivouac where the kids lay and peered inside.
Clearly, it’d been an uncomfortable night for all. Some were shivering, others passed out still sleeping. There was a rime of ice coating the inside of the blue tarp, and more than a few pairs of eyes stared at me with wide, uncomprehending shock.
“Is it morning?” one of them asked. I looked into her eyes, glad I could finally deliver some good news.
“Yes. It’s morning. We’ll start heading down soon,” I said.
I’ve never seen kids so eager to leave a place in all my life. They all just maniacally gathered their gear, or most of it, and took off, arms full of backpacks, yelling frantically about getting the hell off this mountain. I was alone, picking up the discarded items they’d left behind, shivering in the dawn. Soon I was joined by a well-fed and rested Ned, who helped me break down our bivouac. I headed down, teeth unbrushed, stomach grumbling. About a quarter mile down the trail, Ned and I remembered Mike. We dropped our packs.
We found Mike tucked into his sleeping bag, still fully clothed, snoring peacefully. The bright sun of dawn had yet to wake him. His jowls quivered slightly with each long snore.
“He looks like a little baby,” Ned said. I had to agree. It was so peaceful sitting there with Mike as he slept, the way a sleeping whale would be peaceful. Instead of waking him, we sat on the rocks and watched the sun rise over Death Valley.