Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

  But when we arrived in the canyon of the upper Salt to spend a week poking around on the river and its tributaries, I still didn't see. We were a hundred miles from Phoenix, above the last of the dams and diversion canals, so the river actually had water in it, and the parched country rising around us possessed a certain craggy charm, but few people would call the place spectacular, at least not by the inflated standards of a region that boasts Zion and the Grand Canyon a few hours up the road. Furthermore, some two hundred people-families in motor homes the size of battleships, partyhearty adolescents with boom boxes wailing, weekend river rats sporting forty-dollar haircuts and hundred-dollar shades, pinkfaced good of boys knocking back beers-were camped along this stretch of riverbank, and a bumper-to-bumper parade of inflatable rafts bobbed past on the Salt's modest riffles from dawn til dusk. This canyon is plenty wild, I decided, but wilderness it ain't.

  I had, however, closed the book on Fisher and the Salt too soon. Fisher turned out to have a knack for sniffing out pockets of the desert-some in the very shadow of the Sun Belt's thundering herds-that have somehow managed to duck the heavy hand of the twentieth century. A mile or two downstream from the crowded campground, Fisher parked his beat-up 4 x 4 and led four of his friends, two golden retrievers, and me up a narrow canyon of the main Salt cut by a creek called Cibecue.

  Within minutes steep rock walls-a crazy mosaic of black volcanic diabase and serpentine folds of yellow sandstone-began to press in overhead, and the floor of the defile grew so narrow that we had to wade directly up the knee-deep creek, the waters of which ran fast and clear and surprisingly cold. A half-mile upstream, we rounded a bend to find ourselves in a natural cul de sac, a dramatic quirk of topography known in the local argot as a "rock box." Overhanging walls of polished stone surrounded us in a tight U-shaped grotto, with the whole of the creek spilling down from the head of this grotto in a free-falling fifty-foot torrent. Further progress up the canyon, it appeared, was going to demand some fairly interesting maneuvers, like unprotectable 5.12 face climbing in wet sneakers.

  Fortunately, it only appeared that way. Fisher directed us fifty yards back down the creek, where a rock pillar leaned halfway up against the east wall of the cliff. The pillar overhung its base slightly, but a greasy hand jam, a hidden "Thank God" hold, and an energetic mantleshelf led to the large ledge that capped the pillar; from there an easy scramble gained both the crest of the cliff and the whole of the upper canyon. In a few minutes all of us-including the dogs, who were strapped into makeshift harnesses and hauled up on a rope-were on top.

  The climbing was not technically difficult, but, Fisher explained in the unhurried cadence and soft twang of the rural Southwest, "Ninety-eight percent of the folks who make it up the canyon this far, which isn't all that many folks to begin with, turn back because the box looks so intimidating." Fisher, a short, muscular man with a Pancho Villa moustache and a vaguely melancholy air, then confessed, "When I first started coming to this canyon the climbing was even easier, but a few years back some guys from Flagstaff brought in a hydraulic jack and pushed off this big block that used to lean up against the pillar, making it a lot less difficult to get to the top. I wouldn't have done something like that, but I guess I'm kind of glad they did. Thanks to the boys from Flag, only a few parties a year go beyond the falls. We're what, maybe half a mile from that zoo on the Salt, but from here on up the canyon's still pretty much like it was five hundred years ago."

  Indeed, above the falls it felt like we'd entered an altogether different world. Even the vegetation was different: Because Cibecue Canyon is defended by formidable rock boxes at both its upper and lower ends, no cattle, horses, or sheep have ever found their way in. Consequently, the native riparian flora hasn't yet been displaced by cheat grass and other species that overwhelm the landscape where livestock graze.

  As we moved up the canyon, it opened up into broad parklands for a mile or two, and then necked down once again into a deep, twisting slot that at one point was barely six feet across from wall to dead-vertical wall. We spied an eagle's nest balanced two hundred feet above the creek on the needle-like summit of a sandstone spire. Not far beyond the nest we passed beneath a cliff dwelling, still largely undisturbed, built seven hundred years ago by the Mogollon (pronounced MUGGY-un) people, enigmatic contemporaries of the Anasazi to the north.

  Cibecue Creek, along with the Salt River and its other tributaries, drains the south slope of a landform known as the Mogollon Rim. The Rim, which slices diagonally across north-central Arizona between Flagstaff and Phoenix, marks the southern boundary of the enormous Colorado Plateau. With an abrupt 6,000-foot plunge in elevation, the Rim emphatically demarcates the high peaks and woodlands of the Rocky Mountains from the searing plains and basins of the Sonoran Desert.

  The Rim is dotted with scores of small, ramshackle mining and ranching towns, and the lower reaches of its slope descend right to the periphery of greater Phoenix and the city's two million inhabitants. But because the lay of the Mogollon region is so severe, many of its ten-million-plus acres retain an aura of terra incognita and shelter a thriving population of black bears, bald and golden eagles, mountain lions, deer, and bighorn sheep. Fourteen or fifteen noteworthy canyons-sporting names like Salome Jug, Hell's Gate, Dry Beaver, Devil's Windpipe-corrugate the Rim's precipitous face, and, aside from visits by the odd rancher or prospector, have remained unexplored for centuries.

  The charms of the Mogollon Rim were obscure enough that the Forest Service planned to offer the canyons up for commercial development in 1984; thankfully, this idea was nixed when a wilderness coalition, of which Fisher was a part, publicized the area and won protected status for it in Congress. This was a relief to Fisher, because to hear him talk, the Mogollon chasms present the finest canyoneering on the North American continent.

  That's quite a claim. The Colorado River has chiseled a six thousand-foot-deep, thousand-mile gash down the center of its namesake plateau, and each of the tributary streams that feed the Colorado-and each of the creeks and brooks that feed these tributary streams-has compounded this immense wound in the earth, transforming much of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico into a phantasmagoric labyrinth of red rock chasms. Literally hundreds of these canyons could be described as last great wild swatches of the lower forty-eight. Some have yet to be discovered; others exist as the province of only a few. How, then, in the name of John Wesley Powell, can anybody conclude that one, or two, or twenty particular canyons are somehow better than the rest?

  To understand why Fisher insists that the Mogollon canyonsmost of which are all but unknown even within the borders of Arizona-are more worthy canyoneering objectives than the more celebrated defiles of Zion, the Escalante, Canyonlands, or the almighty Grand Canyon itself, it is first necessary to understand what is and what isn't properly termed canyoneering in the eyes of Mr. Fisher, who is something of a zealot when it comes to this newly christened phylum of backcountry play. True canyoneering, according to him, is a hybrid of rock climbing, river running, and bust-ass backpacking; if what you're doing doesn't involve a healthy slice of all three, it's simply not the genuine article.

  Fisher's enthusiasm about canyoneering on the Mogollon Rim is owed to the complex makeup of the escarpment's underlying geology, that being a thoroughly scrambled pudding of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rock. The jumbled arrangement of hard and soft strata creates a canyon architecture that not only varies tremendously from drainage to drainage, but tends to be embellished with multi-tiered cascades, fiendish water boxes, and wickedly narrow slots. "Other places in the world have bigger and more extensive canyons than the Mogollon Rim," Fisher declares, "but nowhere are the canyons more special, and hardly anywhere are they more challenging."

  Fisher likes challenge as much as the next guy, but he is especially fond of the imposing design of the Mogollon canyons, because it helps keep out fraternity boys, gun nuts, ordinary duffers, and other riffraff. "I probably know a couple of hundred guys
who do slot canyons like the Escalante, Buckskin-Pariah, Zion Narrows. They're pretty spectacular places, but for the most part they demand nothing more than some tough hiking to get to. As a consequence, a place like Zion Narrows might get twenty people parading through it on a nice spring day. Whereas the narrows of West Clear Creek, which is the best known of the Mogollon canyons, probably doesn't see more than four or five parties in an entire year. Heck, there are four big canyons in northwestern ArizonaI'm not going to tell you which ones-that haven't yet had a single documented descent."

  The sparse traffic means that most of the environmental and cultural treasures of the Mogollon country remain remarkably unsullied. Fisher pointed out two canyons within eighty miles of metropolitan Phoenix that still shelter unexcavated cliff dwellings. He confessed, "I could probably make a pretty good living raiding cliff dwellings for Mogollon pots-people sell them for big money on the black market-but I couldn't live with myself. Among the canyoneers I know, there's a very very strong ethic about not disturbing anything in the cliff dwellings. One of my buddies found a beautiful pot, perfectly intact, buried up to its neck in the sand. He dug it up to have a look, then reburied it again-just up to its neck, exactly like he'd found it-and continued on his way."

  Rick Fisher can fairly lay claim to being the world's leading authority on the Mogollon canyons and the myriad secrets they contain, having explored more of them than any person alive, but it wasn't until the late 1970s that he first visited one. He made his initial foray while a student at the University of Arizona after hearing rumors of a strange and wondrous place called the White Pools, supposedly tucked somewhere in the upper reaches of West Clear Creek-a tributary of the Verde River that flows off the Rim thirty miles southeast of Sedona.

  It took him a full day of bushwhacking through crumbling cliff bands and a sea of catclaw thorns just to descend from the rim to the canyon floor. That night he was awakened by something rustling around inside his pack; when he turned on his flashlight to investigate he was greeted by a coiled blacktail rattler staring him in the face. Moving up the creek the next morning, the walls of the canyon narrowed to a vertical-walled slot; at one point three large logs were jammed between these walls sixty feet overhead, sobering testimony to the force and height of the waters that surge down the canyon during flash floods.

  A mile into the narrows, Fisher encountered the first in a series of what he calls "water boxes"-pools that are too deep to wade and impossible to climb around-forcing Fisher and his two companions to swim. The difficulty of swimming with a fully loaded backpack, not to mention keeping its contents dry, eventually convinced Fisher to start carrying a tiny inflatable raft-small enough to fit easily inside a pack, but buoyant enough to float a week's food and gear in front of a swimmer-on subsequent canyoneering efforts. Such mini rafts were soon widely recognized as essential pieces of canyoneering gear, but not before the chairman of the Phoenix chapter of the Sierra Club drowned in 1979 while attempting to make it through the West Clear Creek narrows without one.

  For all the trials of Fisher's first Mogollon trip, the experience turned him into a canyoneering fanatic: He has been back to West Clear Creek more than ten times. He has also gone about methodically bagging most of the other Mogollon canyons, constantly refining his tools and techniques along the way. "One thing I learned pretty quick," Fisher says, "is that every Mogollon canyon is different. And a slight difference in the geologic makeup of a canyon can make a huge difference in the gear you'll need, the techniques required, the best season to attempt a particular descent. What works in West Clear Creek won't necessarily work in Salome, what works in Salome won't work at all in Tonto; a beautiful place in May can be deadly in July."

  Fisher also learned how to divine the location of the most interesting canyons-which according to the prevailing canyoneering aesthetic are those with the narrowest slots, the most photogenic waterfalls, the deepest, clearest pools-from telltale contours on a U. S. G. S. quadrangle. "To find a good canyon on a map," he says, "first you look for a peak high enough-which means about eight thousand feet in this region-to catch the rain. Then you analyze the size of the catchment basin above the canyon you're interested in: It generally has to cover at least ten miles by twenty miles to result in a stream with enough flow to cut a decent canyon. Next, you examine the closeness of the contour lines: They have to indicate a formation that's both deep and very narrow; you can have a really really deep canyon, but if it's too wide there won't be anything interesting in it."

  "Finally," Fisher continues, "you check out the geology. If the geologic makeup isn't exactly right, most of the stream's water will sink into the ground, even in a large drainage system, and you won't wind up with any pools or waterfalls, which are what I go into canyons to find." By weighing all these factors collectively, he maintains, you can usually determine whether any given canyon is worth a visit.

  But not always. For a number of years Fisher had noted a chasm on the map-he calls it Crystal Canyon rather than its real name to keep its location secret-that looked fairly promising in every regard except its geologic makeup, which was uniformly igneous. "That," he says, "usually results in a pretty boring canyon, so I gave up on it. Turned out I was wrong. Like way wrong." One day a pilot who knew of Fisher's obsession with canyons told him that he'd happened over Crystal and noticed "some really big wa terfalls." Fisher immediately decided to hang the geology and go have a look.

  Getting into the canyon involved hiking across a plateau that was crawling with a particularly aggressive race of black diamondback rattlesnakes ("they were only three or four feet long," Fisher relates, "but thick as a muscular arm, and with these real broad, evil-looking heads") and then scrambling down to the creek bottom over two hundred feet of vertical rimrock. Some Mogollon petroglyphs eventually led the way to a route through the basalt cliff bands, but, Fisher insists, "it was serious climbing all the same. Those Mogollon dudes were pretty fair climbers, and they sure weren't afraid of heights."

  The risks Fisher took, however, paid handsome dividends. Not only did the waterfalls prove to be all Fisher hoped they'd be, "but there were cliff dwellings in the canyon, and some of the deepest, clearest pools in all of Arizona. And the walls above one of these pools were studded with millions of quartz crystals, some in huge clusters. They weren't gem quality, but they were incredible all the same. So, you can understand why I've tried to keep this canyon a secret. You can go in there any day of the year-I've been back six times-and I guarantee you'll never see another soul."

  Obsession is a funny thing. One can only speculate what quirks of upbringing or chromosomal architecture cause some people to go overboard on Rotisserie League baseball, while others become Shriners or dedicate their lives to growing the perfect tomato; who's to say why Rick Fisher has wrapped his life so tightly around the canyons of the desert Southwest?

  For the better part of a decade Fisher has been visiting the Mogollon canyons at every opportunity, for work and for play, documenting their otherworldy forms in thousands of photographs, testifying before Congress to protect them with official Wilderness status. He has used the canyons' considerable charms to successfully romance more than a few women, unsuccessfully rehabilitate scores of juvenile delinquents, and introduce a like number of handicapped children and assorted city slickers to the pleasures of the backcountry.

  Paradoxically, however, to the extent that Fisher is known at all in the world at large, it is not for his association with the canyons of the Mogollon Rim, but for his deeds in the barrancas of the Mexican Sierra Madre, about which he has written a popular guide book, and where, for the past several years, he has derived the bulk of his livelihood working the adventure travel racket.

  It was in the Sierra Madre, in 1986, that Fisher pulled off his most noteworthy canyoneering accomplishments to date: descents of two of the deeper canyons in North America, the Sinforosa and the Urique. The latter was the site of Fisher's closest canyoneering scrape to date, and it had nothing to do
with Class VI white water or radical rock climbing.

  Fisher took two companions on the Barranca de Urique trip, a woman named Kerry Kruger and her boyfriend, Rick Brunton. The three had paddled and portaged a small rubber raft down the canyon for three days without incident when they passed from the state of Chihuahua into Sinaloa, a district notorious for its marijuana and heroin cultivation. That night they pulled off the river to camp at the confluence of a small side creek, and Fisher set out on foot to search for some clear drinking water. Almost immediately, he blundered into a cornfield that looked unusually green; when he looked more closely he saw that each cornstalk supported a young pot plant. "I walked quickly back to the boat," Fisher remembers, "and said, `Guys we've got to load up and get out of here quick."'

  Fisher explains that the campesinos in that part of Mexico "can't begin to understand why rich gringos would take the trouble to float down their remote river unless they were spies for the DEA, hunting for drugs. We paddled like hell for an hour to avoid a confrontation, but the river went around in a big meander, so all our paddling brought us right back by the pot field. We came around a bend, and both sides of this narrow river were lined with scraggly looking men armed with rifles, squatting down on their heels. One guy was standing; he was dressed in a nice shirt and a nice cowboy hat and carried an automatic pistol instead of a rifle. He called out to us to come over, saying he wanted to buy some cigarettes. We replied, `We don't smoke, it's bad for your lungs.' For some reason they all thought that was pretty damn funny."