6/11 – 6/13
Every survey has an instruction sheet with information like driving directions to the access point, a topographic relief map showing the 16 survey points, and a name for the survey bestowed by a past technician. The instructions also tell if the survey is a “backpacker” — far enough from the nearest road to be worth hiking in and camping at the transect the night before. Today I surveyed “Nightmare at Cripple Creek,” my first backpacker of the season. I read to the end of The Sixth Extinction yesterday — it was a day of rest except for the evening, when I climbed up to camp. Most of the mountaintops were a huge burn area. According to notes from past surveyors, the fire came in the past ten years. As I ducked skeletal branches and lifted my knees over endless blowdowns, I looked around at a landscape dominated by invasive cheatgrass and mullein. I kept having to stop and pull the prickly grass seed heads out of my socks. The new Pangaea, as Elizabeth Kolbert called it, rising before me not a mile from where I finished her book.
The transect description, courtesy of past surveyors:
“Steep, rugged, brushy terrain with geological chaos. Mostly PJ [pinyon-juniper] with the occasional CR [cliff/rock]. 2018: Lots of BU [burned] area. Finishing all 16 points would nominate one for surveyor hall of fame. Not any one thing that makes this area rough, just that it has it all — Dense brush, the rocks are loose — there are small cliff bands it is STEEP and its a long steep climb up from the AP [access point]. 2017 – NW corner of transect is burnt, which makes it easier to navigate…until all of the trees fall down. 2018 – Most trees had fallen, navigation was insanity.”
When I realized I wasn’t going to finish all 16 points, somewhere around point 4, a zen-like acceptance came over me and I realized I was enjoying the walks between them. At that moment, with my guard down, I swung my thigh into a cholla cactus and pulled it out spiked with 19 needles. When I finally got back down to the car I took a bath in Eightmile Creek.
Instead of driving back to Cañon City the way I came, I decided to keep following Phantom Canyon Road (great names around here!) upstream to the town of Cripple Creek. Turns out this area was home to the largest gold rush in United States history. Mines still operate here, posting No Trespassing signs and churning the local mountaintop into a monumental ziggurat, one giant step at a time. There’s also some of the best rock climbing in USA, and dinosaur fossils. I turned off the highway at a place called Dinosaur Flats. The flats must have been in the other direction; this road had my wheels stuttering over chalky exposed rock through PJ hills. I saw no one — thankfully, because I was driving uphill straight into the setting sun — but heard distant gunshots doing target practice every few minutes. Vague idea of searching for something. Not sure what I was hoping for— to find a fossil?
~ ~ ~
I’m onto my next survey, way up in the hills past an outpost called Turret — just a dozen wooden buildings tucked between yellow granite outcroppings.
It’s another backpacker, so I bushwhacked down the gulch in time to be here the evening before. Fabulous spot. Lying atop a granite rampart looking over the Arkansas River and across a broad valley toward the Collegiate Peaks. Breathing the warm air as the clouds turn from pink to black. I’m not wet, but my body feels like I’m in a hot spring.
