November 2019

Books read:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
The Plague by Albert Camus
No Fear: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf

Trails walked:

Chalk Canyon Ruins near Cave Creek (Nov 6th)
Boulder Bob’s cabin site near Sunflower (Nov 12th)
Lake Pleasant trails (Nov 19th)
Montana Mountain near Superior (Nov 25th)
Bell Pass in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve (Nov 29th)

Song of the month:

Feelin’ Good Again by Robert Earl Keen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILoGKT7YIw

I first started recording my thoughts for this blog one year ago when I turned 60. November is my favorite month and not because it contains the day of my birth (although I guess that doesn't hurt). November is when I can start truly hiking in the desert on a consistent basis. November is the time of year we generally hold our elections to decide the fate of our nation, state, county, city. Baseball season has passed and I can finally focus on football. And of course the month contains my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. I love this holiday because it's all about the 4Fs of life: Family, Friends, Food, and Football. No lying to kids about fat men in red suits or giant bunnies with baskets of candy. No explosions freaking out dogs and veterans with PTSD. No teenagers ringing your doorbell asking for candy while wearing no costume at all. There seems to be less stress during this holiday and more fun and time to reflect on what to be thankful for during the previous year. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Enjoy this month's blog...and check out my first blog from November 2018 to see how much more verbose I seem to be getting since then.

Song of the Month: Since my favorite holiday is in November, I thought that a song about returning home after being gone some time would be appropriate. Robert Earl Keen is one of the great Texas songwriters, along with Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett (and many others). Feelin’ Good Again is fun to play on the guitar, and is a great concert song of Keen’s as everyone sings along to the chorus at his shows (just like the line in the song “My favorite band was playing an Otis Redding song; when they sang the chorus everybody sang along”). There are several great lines in this compact song, but the one that always gives me goosebumps is when he stares across the hall and sees the woman he loves has shown up to share the moment of his returning home with him:

And I wanted you to see 'em all

I wished that you were there

I looked across the room

And saw you standin' on the stair

And when I caught your eye

I saw you break into a grin

It feels so good feelin' good again

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I reviewed this author’s novel Americanah in my February 2019 blog. I stated then how much I loved her writing and promised to read as much of her other work as I could. I finally got around to it. Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel set in the 1960s between Nigeria’s independence from the UK in 1960 and its bloody civil war from 1967-1970. It won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, given to the best original full-length English language novel written by a woman. The Seattle Times’ Mary Brennan called the book "a sweeping story that provides both a harrowing history lesson and an engagingly human narrative.” I couldn’t have described it any better. Famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe commented: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers."

The story is brilliantly told in 4 sections. The first section is set in the early 60s and sets up the characters. The second section is set in the late 60s and portrays the characters’ lives drastically changing due to the civil war. The third section goes back to the early 60s and fills in some of the tantalizing details that explain so much of why the characters are who they are. Then the final section culminates with the horrors of the civil war and its final impact on the characters and on all the people of Nigeria. This epic novel follows twin sisters Olanna and Keinene who are somewhat privileged daughters of a Nigerian businessman, along with Odenigbo (a professor who is Olanna’s love interest), Richard (a British ex-pat who is Keinene’s love interest), and Ugwu (a teenage house boy for Odenigbo). The novel explores issues ranging from love and betrayal, to war and politics, to colonialism and tribalism, to racism and women’s empowerment, to forgiveness and shame. These are heavy topics and Adichie handles them as though she has lived a lifetime of joy, pain, suffering, and love. A couple of lines from the novel:

“The only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian only because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Your life belongs to you and you alone.”

The silence was charged with things unsaid.

There were tears running down her face. There was something magnificent in her rage.

When they listened to Radio Biafra, Ugwu would get up and walk away. The shabby theatrics of the war reports, the voice that forced morsels of invented hope down people’s throats, did not interest him.

Chalk Canyon ruins near Cave Creek:

In January of this year Hiking Buddy (HB) and I walked the 12-mile Cave Creek Trail from Seven Springs to Spur Cross. Near the finish, some horseback riders asked if we had seen the Indian ruins. We had no idea about ruins but decided to head back here someday and find them. This was someday. And it was some day! We started at the Spur Cross Conservation Area parking lot just north of the city of Cave Creek ($3 per person fee). Sometimes, all things conspire to make for a perfect hike, and this was one of those times. The weather was great (just as it was getting too warm, clouds and light rain moved in), we explored ancient ruins (a 30 room Hohokam pueblo from 1200 CE), saw beautiful petroglyphs (the largest collection in the Cave Creek drainage), we experienced adventure and danger (we slid down the cliff below the ruins to Cave Creek drainage while dodging cactus and dislodging microwave-oven-sized boulders), saw a rare desert tortoise in the wild, and ended with a beautiful creek walk among colorful trees whose leaves were changing. After 9 plus miles of this adventure, we were pretty tired, but also really happy for the experiences we’re able to have in this beautiful state.

Cactus Shrugged

Only one of the 30 rooms has been excavated

Built in metates for grinding corn and mesquite beans, while admiring the view

Petroglyphs

More sophisticated petroglyphs - the artists carved nearly the entire rock

There used to be a ranch here, but it's been overgrown

Fall color

Water, the key to life and beauty in the desert

A shy desert tortoise refused to come out of his shell

Headed back to the car

The Plague by Albert Camus: Camus won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957 for his body of work as a French writer. I had previously read his novel The Stranger and enjoyed the absurdity of it, sort of like Kafka’s The Trial. He led an interesting life, born in Algeria, left for Paris to study philosophy and then the war broke out and Paris was invaded. He joined the French Resistance during the war and wrote and edited the banned resistance publication called Combat. The Plague was written in 1947 and was set in the French Algerian city of Oran, on the Mediterranean coast sometime in the 1940s (likely after the war). I read the 1991 translation by Stuart Gilbert. Like all translated novels, I will never know the true feeling and meaning in its original language. I would say that overall the novel was interesting as it explored how people react in various ways to evil (the bubonic plague in this case). I wasn’t riveted by the work and more looked forward to finishing it than to reading it each day. But there were interesting ideas and characters in the book that I think were muffled somewhat by the translation I read. Maybe the lack of female or Arab characters was one reason I wasn’t riveted, as that seems unrealistic.

The story starts out with a few rats dying in the streets. Nobody took much notice, until many more rats were dying, then the cats disappeared, and then people started to get sick. And eventually a full-fledged plague was ravaging the city and the gates of the town had to be closed. The story centers around a doctor and a few of his friends that are helping relieve the suffering and philosophizing about life and the human condition. Normally I love this type of novel and I suppose had I read the original version, I would have enjoyed it more. But as it was, it was an interesting read with interesting characters. I loved this dialogue that took place between the doctor and one of his friends:

“What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this doctor?"

"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."

"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"

"Comprehension.”

I guess that explains why anyone does anything to help a greater cause…. understanding the situation and just knowing that something must be done. I can relate to that.

Boulder Bob’s Cabin Site near Sunflower: Well, if HB and I thought last week was an adventure, then this was a harrowing enterprise. But first, a bit about Boulder Bob. The story goes that a paranoid schizophrenic named Robert Dupuy was discharged from an Illinois asylum sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. His first reported appearance in Arizona was for a mining claim he made at Boulder Pass near Sunflower. He built a couple of stone and log cabins, a stone grinder to make concrete, and a 150-foot long wall 5-6 feet tall that ended in a rock window. How (and why) one guy did all this work with large boulders is a mystery. I suppose he could have had help, but there’s no way any heavy equipment could have made it up here. All that’s left of the cabins are the foundation, some walls, and a chimney, but the grinder and 150-foot wall and window are still holding up after all these years (a guy in the hikeaz forum said he visited the place in 1973 and the cabins were still mostly intact). I believe this was a tortured soul. He died in 1956 and is buried in the Arizona State Hospital cemetery (supposedly).

To get there (the cabin site, not the cemetery), we parked at the Bushnell Tanks trailhead just north of Sunflower and walked along the now closed Forest Road 22 along (yet another) Sycamore creek for a couple of miles of very easy and pretty hiking. Then it was another mile south on an old jeep road, then we followed an old pipeline ditch across some scrambly dirt (where 3 deer bounded away from us), crossed a wide arroyo, and uphill to Boulder Pass through thick mesquite and scrub oak (once again we left a lot of our DNA up here and I should have worn a long sleeve shirt and pants like HB, but I didn’t, and I paid the price). Around a quarter mile down the other side of the pass we finally found the cabin site. There are some pretty good cairns to help you find the place from the arroyo, but the hiking is through very thick brush with lots of pointy things aching to draw your blood. The site didn’t disappoint, however. This guy was pretty imaginative to live here in the middle of nowhere while building whatever it was he was building. It’s impressive. HB and I theorized that the wall was either to prevent corrosion in the stream bed or to make a terrace for farming. Or maybe he just had to have a project to keep himself busy to prevent the madness from returning. Who knows? We hiked back to the trailhead via part of passage 21 of the Arizona Trail, which was not as easy as the forest road, but provided some nice views from up high above Sycamore/Boulder creeks.

A "shoe tree" near the trailhead

Trailhead right off of the Beeline highway

Closed forest road 22

Rusting bodies of 1950s era cars

Thick brush did its best to capture our DNA

On Boulder Pass looking down to the arroyo we crossed. Mt. Ord in the background

Boulder Bob used bottles built into his cabin, likely to provide light

Sacred Datura - known hallucinogen - perhaps Boulder Bob partook

Portions left standing from one of the cabins

A sort of retaining basin?

Concrete maker

A window into Boulder Bob's madness?

Different view of the window

150 foot wall, hand built!

Nice color along Sycamore creek on the way out

Color along the creek

Leaf strewn trail

Trail art

Souvenirs of a tough hike

No Fear: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: Chaucer is considered the father of English literature and was the first writer buried in the now famous poets’ corner in Westminster Abbey. I’m not sure what to make of this version of the famous 14th century tales by Chaucer. Although it’s generally agreed that the original version was incomplete, there still are supposed to be 24 tales. This No Fear version, which was developed for young adults and teens, had only 6 of the tales. I liked the way the book was set up. The original text was on the left-hand page, with a modern (and very entertaining) translation on the right-hand page. I wish that the publishers of this version had included all the tales. But I suppose it’s a good introduction to this material. The old English writing of Chaucer’s is, for me, impossible to understand (see example below). I started out reading the original version and then the modern translation. However, it got to the point where I understood hardly any of the original and eventually just read the modern translation part. The tales begin with a group of pilgrims meeting at a tavern. These pilgrims were on their way to Thomas Becket’s grave in Canterbury. Becket was killed in the 12th century by supporters of Henry II due to religious differences. Upon his death, he was sainted by the Pope. Evidently in the years after his death, many people made pilgrimages to his grave-site.

Back to the book, the tavern host suggests a contest to the pilgrims. Each would tell a story on their way to Canterbury and back. The person with the most entertaining story would receive a free meal at the tavern. So, the book then goes about the journey with various characters telling their story, with some sort of intermissions where the pilgrims would discuss what they heard or argue about whether the story was worthy or not. What struck me the most was the raunchiness of some of the stories. I suppose that the translators took some liberties with the poetry, but it was pretty clear that Chaucer really was liberal in his storytelling for that period of time. Fairly graphic descriptions of sex and death, plus lots of philosophical debates about male/female relationships, a woman’s place in society, religion, royalty, rich vs poor, etc. Many scholars believe that his tales were Chaucer’s way to paint a critical portrait of English society at the time.

Here’s a small sample to show you the original text vs the modern translation:

Original text:

‘Hastow nat herd,’ quod Nicholas, ‘also

The sorwe of Noe with his felawshipe,

Er that he mighte gete his wyf to shipe?

Him had be lever, I dar wel undertake,

At thilke tyme, than alle hise wetheres blake,

That she hadde had a ship hir-self alone.

And ther-fore, wostou what is best to done?

This asketh haste, and of an hastif thing

Men may nat preche or maken tarying.

Modern translation:

And haven’t you heard how nervous Noah was before he’d gotten everyone on board the ark? His wife gave him so much trouble before getting on the ship that I bet he’d have given up all his animals not to deal with her if he could. Point is, we’ve got to hurry if we’re going to make all the necessary arrangements to survive. We don’t have much time.

Therefore, I read only the modern translation....

Lake Pleasant trails:

Three straight days of rain were predicted, so HB and I decided to see if we could beat that rain by heading to someplace close by. Lake Pleasant Regional Park is part of the excellent Maricopa County Parks and Recreation Department. The Hohokam people inhabited this area along the Agua Fria river from around 700-1450 CE. Miners, ranchers, and farmers eventually settled in the area. In 1927 the Agua Fria Water and Land Company owned by WH Beardsley built the first dam which was designed by engineer Carl Pleasant. In 1993 a new dam was built which tripled the surface of the lake to 10,000 acres. Water for the dam is received mostly from the Colorado river via the Central Arizona Project (CAP), but also from the Agua Fria river. CAP pumps Colorado River water into Lake Pleasant during the fall and winter months and releases water during the spring and summer to meet higher demands. The water is released for agricultural areas in the west valley, along with residential areas as far south as Tucson. About 4 years ago the park added some new trails to add to the paltry 4 miles that had previously existed. Now there are around 14 miles of hiking trails. We parked at the North entry station in the Northwest portion of the park and combined the Cottonwood, Pipeline, and Yavapai trails to make for a nice 8-mile hike with great views of the lake and of the rugged Hells Canyon Wilderness area west of the lake. We ate lunch in Pipeline Canyon Cove which we shared with a Great Blue Heron (the spot, not our lunch). Our timing was perfect because we got back to the coffee shop just as the rain started (and it didn’t stop for 3 days… that is a lot for Arizona).

The fairly new trails were well marked

Pleasant views

More Pleasant views

From Yavapai Point

From the Yavapai trail

A view of Hells Canyon wilderness to the west (HB and I climbed that square top hill in the middle previously)

Looking down at our next trail, Pipeline and the cove it leads to (center-left)

Pipeline Cove, our lunch spot

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf: This post is gonna be lengthy, and it could easily have been much longer. There is so much to say about this guy. Alexander von Humboldt may be the most famous unknown scientist in the English-speaking world. Andrea Wulf has set out to change that. Here are some of the things named after Humboldt: 3 US counties, colleges in the US and Europe, a bay, a fort, a state park, a wildlife refuge, a river, a salt marsh, a lake, a ghost town, Dewy-Humboldt in Arizona, Humboldt Illinois, Humboldt Kansas, Humboldt Iowa, Humboldt Ohio, Humboldt Wisconsin, Humboldt Saskatchewan, Humboldt Nebraska. The Humboldt name graces multiple mountains and mountain ranges, forests, national parks, waterfalls, glaciers, and an ocean current off the west coast of South America. Animals and plants including, penguins, squid, bat, monkey(s), skunk, snail, an entire genus of flowering plants, legumes, endangered cactus, a beetle, river dolphins, a carnivorous plant, oak, orchid, lily and mushroom all bear his name. Humboldt is in outer space, the moon has a crater and a basalt plain named Humboldt, and two asteroids bear his name.

In 1869, for the celebration of what would have been Humboldt’s 100^th birthday, thousands of people turned out in the streets of the largest cities in the US to celebrate. 25,000 people watched a statue of him revealed in Central Park (It's still there on 77th Street and Central Park West). But 50 years later, in 1919 some cities in the US started burning his books, and all other books written by German authors. After World War I, there was rampant anti-German sentiment in the US and in the UK. So, his name and his accomplishments were all but forgotten among non-science English speaking communities.

The 2015 book by Andrea Wulf sets out to prove why he was so famous at one time and why he should be even more famous in the world today. Alexander von Humboldt and his brother Wilhem were brought up in an aristocratic family in the late 1700s in what was then called Prussia (today’s Germany). His father died when they were 9, but his mother made sure they both got the best education possible. Their mother wanted to be sure they would pursue a stable career in the government and Alexander appeased her wishes by becoming a mining inspector even though he had bigger dreams. As a mining inspector, he spent lots of time outdoors and became educated in geology and on the impact mining seemed to have on the local environment and on the health of the miners. As soon as his mother passed away, he quit his mining job and started making plans to sail to South America to study the jungle and the Andes.

From 1799 to 1804 he and his science partner hiked, canoed, and climbed all over the northern half of South America, including parts of current day Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Then he headed up to Mexico and Cuba and then on to the United States. His adventures alone would have made him famous, but the scientific and cultural information that he collected and shipped back to Europe were unheard of at the time. At the end of his journey he managed a meeting with Thomas Jefferson who was the 3rd president of the United States at the time. The timing was perfect because Jefferson had recently completed the Louisiana Purchase and was very interested in our new neighbors to the south. Humboldt had an abundance of information on the Spanish territories (today’s Mexico, Central and South America) which turned out to be critically important to US national interests. They met several times over a one-week period before Humboldt headed back to Europe to write about his incredible journey. Humboldt and Jefferson got along like best pals. They had very similar personalities. Humboldt’s only issue with Jefferson was on the topic of slavery. In his travels through New Spain he saw the ravages of slavery and was passionately abolitionist. In his scientific study of the nature and people of New Spain he saw no discernible differences between whites, slaves, and natives which was not the view of the majority in the English-speaking world at the time.

Humboldt produced several volumes of books describing his voyage. His writing was influenced by the famous Prussian poet and philosopher Johann Goethe whom he had befriended prior to his voyage. He was the first scientist to write in such a fluid and poetic manner on so many different topics, from ocean currents and temperature, to astronomy, to botany, biology, anthropology, geology, and what we call environmental science and climate science today. His big breakthrough, and thus the title of the book, was seeing that all the world and nature was connected. His brother Wilhelm always believed that Alexander’s mind with its near photographic memory was specifically created to connect ideas. He noticed the same types of plants growing at specific elevations in different parts of the world. He noticed how deforestation changed the soil and created flooding and less fertile lands. He noticed how cash crops like coffee, sugar, and indigo which the Spanish were cultivating for shipment to Europe were destroying the soil and the natives were very poor or starving because there was less land to grow crops to feed their families. While back in Europe, he spent most of his time in Paris, meeting and debating with the great minds of the time about nature, ecological issues, imperialism and colonialism. He criticized unjust land distribution, mono-cultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous working conditions – all relevant issues today. His views on the negative impacts of colonialism prevented him from getting UK approval to travel to India in order to study the Himalayas.

While back in Europe he befriended a young 21-year-old activist named Simon Bolivar who later in his life used Humboldt’s books to help revolutionize South America and free themselves from Spanish rule 30-40 years after the US rid themselves of British rule. He also met Alessandro Volta, inventor of the battery, and he met with Charles Darwin who was inspired by Humboldt’s South American journey to board The Beagle for his famous voyage of evolutionary discovery in the 1830s. Others who were inspired by Humboldt’s work were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, George Marsh who wrote “Man and Nature”, and Ernst Haekel who invented the term “ecology.”

When Humboldt turned 60, he completed a grueling 10,000-mile journey across Russia to its border with Mongolia and China to study the plants, animals, and people of this relatively unknown region. Once this was complete, he started work on his magnum opus, Kosmos, which he worked on until the day he died at 89 years old. Kosmos was a bold attempt to document the entire universe, from the far reaches of space to the inner core of the Earth and everything in between.

Of course, my favorite extract from the book is the following and it explains why I love to walk in nature:

“Humboldt had always walked, from his boyhood rambles in Tegel’s forests to his trek through the Andes. Even as a 60-year-old, he had impressed his travel companions in Russia with his stamina, walking and climbing for hours. Voyages on foot, Humboldt said, taught him the poetry of nature. He was feeling nature by walking through it.”

Montana Mountain near Superior: This past summer, the Woodbury fire burned 124,000 acres in the Superstition Wilderness. That’s around 75% of the wilderness area. It was heartbreaking for me because the Superstitions contain the best desert hiking in Arizona. When we hiked Mt. Peeley in June, the plumes of smoke coming from the fire were massive. I decided to hike Montana Mountain, which borders the Superstitions to the south, in order to get an overhead view of the area. HB was healing a leg injury, so I was on my own for this one. To get to Montana Mountain you take the Reavis Trail Canyon trail.... yes, in this case a canyon is named after a trail…. weird. Elisha Reavis (photo left) was a miner who was part of the gold rush in California. Like most of those miners, he wasn’t very successful. He ended up in Arizona, searching for gold in the Bradshaws. Eventually he gave up mining and squatted on some nice land in the Superstitions near what is now called Reavis Ranch in the mid-1870s. He raised fruits and vegetables and would haul them down the now-named Reavis trail, over Montana Mountain, down what is now the Reavis Trail Canyon trail, and then on to Superior, Globe, and Florence where he traded his crops for clothes, equipment, and ammunition. He did this for over 20 years until he died near his hut at Reavis Ranch.

The drive to the trailhead was a big part of this adventure. It’s only 6 miles from US60, but the last 2 are a doozy! Several stream crossings, and in some cases driving up the stream itself. And there was a bit of water after the big storm we had the previous week. I ended up parking about a quarter mile from the trailhead because it was getting very sketchy and since I was by myself I figured I would not push it. The first 3.5 miles of the trail mostly weaved in and out of Reavis Trail Canyon which had nice water flow and the last of the leaves changing color on the sycamores, cottonwoods, and alders. The last 2.5 miles climbed over 2,000 feet to the top of Montana Mountain and was a lung burner. The Arizona Trail passage #18 follows this trail as it enters/exits the Superstitions. I saw only one person on the entire hike, and he was hiking the AZ Trail north to south, so he was about two-thirds done. He told me that the Superstition Wilderness where he walked was like a moonscape due to the fire. I ate lunch on top of the mountain which had tremendous views north, west, and east into the wilderness, and south towards Picketpost Mountain. It was pretty obvious where the burn was as you can see in some of the photos. Later this winter we will head into some of those areas to experience the “moonscape” at ground level. After lunch, I hustled back to the car in order to beat the sun setting. I wanted to drive the sketchy part of the road in the daylight. I was pretty footsore and tired after this 12-mile hike and thought about Elisha Reavis hauling his wares up and down this trail (and further) on a regular basis. People out west in those days were much tougher than we are these days.

See! Reavis Trail Canyon Trailhead

Driving up the creek

No mas! Park the car and walk from here

Nice reflecting water in the canyon

Reflections

Trail art

Coyote?

View to the East from near the top

View to the Southeast from near the top (hiked from the canyon bottom below)

If you squint, you can kinda see why they named this Montana Mountain

Looking into the now very barren Superstitions

Looks like a moonscape

Obligatory dead tree shot

Deadwood

Luckily the fire didn't make it here, otherwise this grass would have provided lots of fuel

Nice vegetation here in the canyon bottom

An old corral (now THAT was a lot of work)

Heart rock on Bell Pass

Bell Pass in the McDowell Mountain Preserve:

I was able to get in a post-Thanksgiving day hike with daughter and her wonder dog this year. Thanksgiving evening we had a big wind and rainstorm, complete with tornado warnings, which is practically unheard of in the valley. The storm cleaned the air out perfectly and left some beautiful cloud formations. The McDowell Mountain Preserve is another valley jewel. Over 200 miles of trails only 15 minutes from my house. We chose the Bell Pass trail since it offers some well needed exercise after all that food we ate the previous day. It's around 3.5 miles each way and gains 1,200 feet, most of that in the last mile or so. Up on the pass there are great views of Fountain Hills, the Phoenix metro area, and Four Peaks (although this day they were shrouded in clouds). We walked another quarter mile north of the pass in order to get a spectacular view of the Superstitions on this crystal clear day. A well spent afternoon with my daughter (and her dog), and a good way to work off all those pies.