Finding Abundance in Desolation
We speak of our man-made disasters only in terms of property value and human life—we're wrong about that too
One Saturday afternoon, a little more than a decade go, I set into the Desolation Wilderness for my weekly long run. It wasn’t an unusual part of my routine. I didn’t track miles necessarily, just hours.
I’d start mid-morning before the sun was too high and finish sometime in the late afternoon when I was getting too hungry. I didn’t have a phone or a map or a watch or headphones or whatever. Those things get in the way for me. If I got thirsty, I’d drink from a stream or an Alpine lake, and when I got tired, I’d sit down on a stump, maybe take my shoes off and splash around once in a while. Sometimes, if the day was just right, I’d stretch out on a found slab of granite like a lizard and take a nap.
Desolation Wilderness is aptly named. Though there are plenty of tourists or day hikers to pass that smell like their own personal brand of BO and detergent and whatever kind of energy bar they’ve got on them, you get a couple of miles in on any of the serpentine dirt trails and it’s just you and stands of mountain hemlock, ponderosa pine, and western juniper.
The mule ears score an endless cartoon backdrop setting while piles of decomposed granite act as a natural pathway underfoot. The soil is nutrient-rich, and even the gentlest fall rain packs it down into a thick clay. It’s a runners’ paradise.
It’s actually paradise in general.
This particular afternoon I was ready to turn back after what seemed like a few hours. I’d even taken a dip in one of the small lakes that had been named by someone, I’m sure. I was hungry, and I remember being a little more tired than usual, disoriented perhaps—like someone had spun me around a whole bunch playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
So I turned back around and retraced my steps a little. I was usually good at doing out-and-backs, being sure not to stray much from the main trials, or if I did make a turn or two off the worn path, to do so when there was a natural fork in highlighted by a landmark: a stream, or a lake, or a meadow.
But this day, I was a little lost in my own head and not paying much attention to where I was at. And suddenly, as in all things in life, I looked up and realized, oh shit. I’m lost.
I’ve learned, in these situations, it’s best to take a beat. Gather yourself up and figure out if where you’re at is somewhere you recognize at all. Usually, if you’ve been going into circles, you can find a telltale sign, your shoe’s print on the ground is a good place to start.
But nothing seemed to be tracking. I looked up at the sun and though it had made its apex and was slowly making its descent west, going the opposite way (due east) seemed like it was only getting me further in.
The heat of uncertainty and nerves began crawling up and down my spine: OK, what do I do if I’m going to have to spend the night (it was early fall, and while the temperature drop wouldn’t have done me in it certainly would’ve made things uncomfortable) plus I was getting even more hungry, looking at the waist level scrub of the manzanita, huckleberry oak, and mountain pride penstemon wondering if there was anything to forage at eye level or below .
Elevation gains and dips didn’t provide any immediate answers for me either. I’d scale a granite boulder just to look out and see what a dozen generations before me had seen, a great green canopy set against the endless blue of the sky. I was out there all right. Even the black eyes of the ground squirrels and chipmunks, darting around completing their daily winter prep before sundown, seemed to take on a sinister look.
So I sat down again and thought about it, and I guess there wasn’t much more to do besides try to walk back down the most recent ridge I’d traversed and try to find a more main artery. Right direction or wrong, I might pick up a landmark or two or maybe a stay hiker.
So I came down the mountain past numerous lakes and streams, thinking about the brown and golden trout who were darting around one another, wondering if this was my fate now. Was this my moment to let it all go, to become some kind of Jeremiah Johnson wearing the pelt of the yellow-bellied marmot and other common rodents? I smiled at the notion of a fully realized beard used for something other than office work and pulled my hat down low. Find me if you can civilization—I am one with desolation now.
Not long after that, I stumbled across the arterial trail, and though it was unmarked, there was plenty of two-way foot traffic complete with a discarded Clif Bar wrapper bleaching out in the underbrush.
I went the opposite way of where I thought I should go; having lost enough at blackjack, I knew sometimes in these type situations, your instinct was the exact opposite of your true north and plunged ahead. About a half-hour later, I watched a mirage draw closer. It was man and a woman, a couple, laden with one giant supply backpack and another that hid, somewhere in it, their tiny little charge lathered in sunscreen and asleep from the undulation.
I came upon them—suddenly as it turns out—the man jumped and let out a quick scream. “Is the trailhead nearby?” I practically screamed into his ear.
He pointed me down the path, said it was probably another half mile. I came out three miles from where I parked and walked back on the shoulder of the highway the rest of the way, sucking on exhaust while pangs of hunger had now radiated to my fingertips.
All of my thoughts go out this morning to the residents of Desolation who are losing their forever home, who quietly shared it with me for a moment: the Steller’s jay, the black bear, the mule deer, the western gray squirrel, the golden trout, the bighorn sheep, the Clark’s nutcracker, the long-eared chipmunk, the red fox, the spotted owl, the mountain chickadee, the spotted grouse, the mountain bluebird, the American dipper, and even the golden eagle—you deserved better friends.
We sold you out and torched your home. For what? For nothing. For profits for the few in the name of some temporary societal gain, some ease of living that ended up not being easy at all.
Thank you for allowing me safe passage. And I’m sorry, deeply and with everything that I am, for what we’ve done and, more importantly, all that we didn't.