Scott Thybony - The Painted Desert: Land of Wind and Stone

T rees fall away as the highway leaves the mountains, thinning to a scatter of junipers.Soon nothing remains for the eye to settle on but the roll of grasslands and a far-reachingsky that curves down to the Painted Desert. A faint line of cliffs marks a horizonso far away I recognize it only from memory. But thats enough.

Spanish explorers called the region where Im going El Desierto Pintado, a name revivedin its English form three centuries later. Cross the badlands when the light separatesat the end of day, and the choice of names becomes obvious. The landscape turns prismaticin a flare-up of colorwhat I always thought were countless hues. But Americans willrun the numbers given half a chance, and some enthusiasts have managed to identify168 distinct colors and shades.

Pressed between the Little Colorado River on the south and bold escarpments on thenorth, the Painted Desert curves for roughly 200 miles across northeastern Arizonafrom near the Zuni River to the Colorado. Much of the wind-carved expanse lies withinthe Navajo Indian country, and forms the geographic tissue connecting Petrified ForestNational Park with Grand Canyon National Park.

To reach it, photographer Dave Edwards and I follow Highway 89, running north fromthe San Francisco Peaks to the reservation town of Cameron. We are taking two trucksas insurance in case the weather turns or the mood hits us to head off in separatedirections. We bring food, water, and spare gas to last four daysenough time tocross what for me is the heart of the desert. Our route will follow a forty-milesweep of cliffs, running roughly north and south, between the Hopi mesas and theancient ruins of Wupatki.

Its a region lying beyond the river where the roads fade into a narrative landscape.Each butte is a remnant of an older story, half remembered, worn to fragments. Wherewere heading, the present thinly coats the past the way living dunes drift acrossbedrock. Thats the way Ill tell it, letting my memories of the place become partof the story wherever they outcrop.

Already the drive through familiar country north of the peaks has released a flickerof images. Roads branch off where Ive been stuck in the mud and buried in snow drifts.I know which volcanic cones were swept by wildfire, and where the elk gather in thefall. I remember Basque sheepherders trailing their herds past the homestead wherewe lived, and cowboys from the CO Bar Ranch driving cattle to winter range. I recognizethe places where Navajo medicine men pray for rain and where Hopi priests leaveprayer feathers. I recall reading Zane Greys account of traveling horseback throughhere on his first encounter with the mythic West, and saw the myth reshaped whenCaptain America pulled into the Sacred Mountain Trading Post in a scene from EasyRider.

For a number of years, I lived in a remote homestead without electricity and heatedby wood. Water had to be hauled thirty miles from town, the last eight up a dirtroad to Indian Flat. In winter our nearest neighbors lived at the trading post ninemiles away. While living at the ranch, I first began to explore the Painted Desert.Each evening when I returned from town, the desert would appear far to the north,a band of light shimmering along the horizon like a mirage, more a place of the imaginationthan solid geography.

Images overlap in crossbedded layers along the highway, and beneath them lies thedark and tangible history of an older frontier. Kick the ground, and traces of boneand ash surface. The road passes the burned walls of Medicine Fort and the violentscenes sealed below Deadman Flat. Villages laid to waste and abandoned forever, victimsleft where they fell to be buried by drift sand. Some turn away from the hard past.On this trip Ill go deeper into it, so far back in time the bones themselves haveturned to stone.

The highway sheds 3,000 feet of elevation as we pass from winter into spring, frommountain green to the Triassic reds of shale and siltstone. Soon the two of us pullinto the Cameron Trading Post, a cluster of stone buildings above the Little ColoradoRiver and a bridge length away from the actual desert. Its the main event for ahundred miles, and judging by the crowded parking lot, few travelers can resist it.Tour buses, trucks pulling boats down from Lake Powell, rental cars returning fromthe Grand Canyon, and pickups in from the sheep camps all end up here.

Dave and I are no different. We leave the trucks to stretch our legs and pass somefossil tracks preserved in a flagstone walkway. The ancient reptile had an oversizepinkie resembling a thumb. This led early investigators to guess, wrongly it turnedout, that Cheirotherium walked in a cross-legged stagger, a trait Ive always associatedwith our own species. Inside the trading post, we become separated in the thicketof trinkets and the press of bodies. A woman dodges past a rack of scorpions andtarantulas encased in globs of acrylic resin and makes a beeline for the jewelry.I overhear her telling a friend, I want to find something that enhances my self-worth.The old quest.

At the back of the store, a clerk spreads out a new Navajo rug that sells for $325.If you prefer an old weaving from the 1820s, they have that too, but it will costyou a thousand times as much. Past the rugs, I reach the restaurant, where a mansits alone at a table digging into a Navajo taco with its layers of beans, meat,and lettuce piled on a piece of Indian fry bread the size of a hubcap. The menu alsooffers Navajo stew without the mutton, which is like serving clam chowder withoutthe mollusk. I fill up a Styrofoam cup with coffee and leave it at that.

Outside, an older Navajo sits next to the yellow Your Wate and Fate scale, entertainedby the ebb and flow of tourists. He watches a boy return to the family S U V, sentby his father to retrieve something inside. Leaving the car, the boy shuts the doorand immediately realizes his mistake. He runs back to the store, and his father marchesout, angrily circling the car and testing every door. The boy has locked the keysinside with the headlights on. The mother stands back, holding her sons hand. Juststay away! the father orders, Just keep him away!

I hear the Navajo comment under his breath, Should have gone back to the car himself.

We need to get moving. A two-lane bridge carries traffic above the bed of the river,which is sunk a hundred feet below. Out of habit, I glance down to see if its flowing.Barely a trickle braids across the sands, a good sign. In the days ahead well betaking the back roads or no roads at all, so a little moisture will make the sandeasier to cross.

Early exploring parties called the river the Ro Colorado Chiquito, and over timeit became the Little Colorado River, one of those Spanish-English splices so commonin the Southwest. The river drains an immense 26,000 square miles of Arizona andNew Mexico, but the bed is often mud cracked and dust dry, a clue to the arid characterof the region. The headwaters of the Little Colorado rise high in the White Mountains,and during spring runoff the melting snows turn it into a real river for a coupleof weeks. It soon runs dry again, until floods flash through it in pulses during the summer rains. At thosetimes the floodwaters churn beneath the bridge, and before reaching the main Colorado,descend through a gorge cut 3,000 feet deep in less than sixty miles.