We've set out to find the site of Vekol, in the Vekol Mountains, of course. The day's drive
has lead us across one of the most vast and desolate stretches of the southwest deserts that
still remains. We have been in the flats most of the day, mile-eating, flanking one little
mountain range after another, and we're getting tired and the sun's getting low. Our
target will only be another fifteen or twenty miles, but we decide to leave it for the morning.
One of the maps, dated 1927, shows a road near where we are that goes up the western
slope of Silver Reef, a peak rising from the desert floor to our right. Camping on a western
slope assures us the finest of sunsets as we relax.
This desert is surreal in the truest sense, and each new combination of foliage and rock outcrops gives me a renewed feeling of discovery and exploration, and having thought that I'd seen every cactus on every cliff is invalidated every few minutes by a novelty: a cave on cliff near the road with a saguaro grown floor-to-ceiling at its mouth (we had to stop and climb-up and inspect this anomaly!). Earlier in the afternoon we'd crossed a broad wash and then the road went up onto a long, round ridge of grey gravels and few plants. That part of the jeep trail was smooth and hard and Rover was comfortable and safe at 50MPH. I'd noticed white tyre tracks, periodically, off of both sides of the road there, often in circles. I surmised that, despite the terrific distance from civilization (20 or 30 miles from the nearest home) and the fact that we'd not seen another truck all day, the tracks must have been made by kids doing "doughnuts" in the gravel in their borrowed family-cars; this must be a high-school boonies night-time hang-out sort-of area. If we weren't going so fast I bet we could have seen the fire-pits and beer bottles on both sides of that ridge. As the miles passed and the tracks in the desert persisted I recall thinking to myself that there sure is a lot of partying being done in these parts!
It should have been somewhere in the last quarter-mile. Our little road to the right still doesn't appear and I'm getting anxious: fearful that we'll be setting-up camp in the dark. I ask for a goodbeer to be sent up front, for a few minutes' drinking-and-driving at rush-hour, and promptly spill half of it on my lap as we bump through the next washbed. Finding old paths through the desert, even if they haven't been driven for a third of a century, is an art, but at midday it's not all that difficult: once you drive a car through the desert, even once, it leaves marks that the trained eye can see for many many years. When the light gets low, however, even before sunset, and not to mention after dark, the clues that you need to notice in order to find an abandoned road from the '30's which diverges from the jeep trail that you're on become shrouded in shadow and nearly impossible to discern. We've likely overshot the turn-off and stop to debate the question of whether to begin a back-and-fourth search that could possibly take until after dark. The very moment that we decided to go forward and look for another site, instead of chasing the specific road on the map, my mind opened-up to the possibilities and I was thrilled. Not another hundred yards down that road was a gorgeous canyon to the east with a grey gravel ridge right down the center. It looked inviting, comfortable, untouched, and offered the sunset view.
Out of respect for the pristine, and hatred for what our counterpart four-wheelers have done, both to the desert and to our reputation as a group, we have a rule that we never use the truck to blaze a new trail. After all, even desolate southwest Arizona already has enough trails, many formed fifty and sixty years ago, and they rarely go away. Even other folks blazing their own trails to their own campsites have left indelible tracks that often enable us access-without-guilt if their tracks aren't the kind that are going away. But this canyon to our right had no tracks. We got out and looked at the gravel (it was hard), the occasional little grass and pincushion-cactus, and a proposed pathway, some fifty yards up, but that's all, that would damage nothing and leave no tracks. We looked at each other expecting a dissenter and got none, so we got back into the truck and I turned it up the canyon.
Slowly, so very slowly and gently we crept up the gravel ridge and stopped at our campsite. We backed the truck around and turned it off and were aghast! Our tracks were bright white strips in the gray gravel. In fact they looked just like all those hundreds of circular tracks along that grey ridge this afternoon, the ones that I'd assumed had been made so violently and at high speed. It was too dark to investigate and too late to take back, so we made the traditional "ceremonial" fire-pit, set-up camp, drank beer, played music, and enjoyed a phenomenal sunset and then all those stars and meteors.
In the morning it was clear what had happened to the gravel and that it would not recover within our lifetimes. The earth there is a soft and silty white powder, and it is coated with a thin and even layer of grey volcanic gravel. While our feet would not pierce the gravel, the weight of the truck was enough to leave three-inch-deep troughs in the white powder and to push the gravel coating down in. When it rains the troughs serve as little rivers on an otherwise perfectly regular and smooth ridge, and erosion will take place there, further into the white dust, ensuring that the gravels will not be able to cover over the scars, nor even rise to the surface. Now that I recognize the phenomenon, I see it all over the western Gila River basin.
The next day we ambled over tremendous rocks up a creekbed that was the road to Vekol. When the going gets that tough it is usually an indication that its the wrong road (bad map reading) or that it has slipped into disuse for some good reason. If the reason is that the town site isn't on current USGS maps, and you're using a very old one, that's a very good sign, and if the reason is that there's now an easier way to get there (in the six decades since your map was made), that's a very bad sign. Noon found our road completely barricaded within a deep canyon by a rockslide of some twenty years prior. By three we'd found what the back way in would have been, now destroyed and fenced to ensure the sanctity of the new wildlife preserve, and nearby, found a natural tank too.
None of us was distraught about not having found Vekol after two wonderful days in the
sun, since we came for the quest, and we lived it all. We decided to go skinny-dipping in
the tank and relax. I took some good pictures (though not of the ghosttowns I'd intended
to) and assured my friends that the inaccessibility of Vekol was a wonderful thing, after all,
as it ensured that the site would remain untouched for many years to come. What fun is
that, one asked? "When you're up for it," I said, "we can hike the 12 miles in and see it,
but in the meanwhile it can remain a fantasy-ghosttown with better-than-average odds of
still having dishes on the tables." Personally, I'm going to leave that one a mystery so that
there will always be another quest that could be undertaken.
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