X The High White Peaks
Wild Rose Canyon has a lovely name, justified by a small clump of bushes that may bear wild roses sometime. The canyon, where it branches east from Emigrant Pass, is very narrow with precipitous sides. Emigrant Canyon itself at this point is walled by high cliffs so close together that the wagon track fills the gorge. A considerable stream, bordered with feathery trees, flows through the lower end of Wild Rose Canyon and down Emigrant Pass toward the Panamint Valley and Ballarat, but dies before it emerges from the cliff-like hills onto the long, stony slope that leads into the valley. Once more we had been deceived. From Pinto Peak the rocky cliffs appeared to rise directly out of the Panamint Valley, but a walk down the western descent of Emigrant Pass revealed the same long, brush-covered slope that we had learned to know so well.
The cattlemen had been there and gone away, leaving the cattle in Wild Rose for their spring range. The young steers huddled together, staring with their expression of fierce innocence. They had tramped the stream-bed into a bog and otherwise made camping at the mouth of the canyon unpleasant. A stone shack with an iron roof was located near the spring. It was rather a magnificent shack with two rooms, the inner one windowless like a cave. For some reason that seems to be the approved way of building sleeping-rooms on the desert. At Keane Wonder veritable black holes were the sleeping-quarters near the boarding-house. The shack had no floor and the uneven ground was littered with rubbish, as indeed were all the surroundings. The mess around the spring at Wild Rose bothered us more than the litter anywhere else. Perhaps it was because we were shut in on all sides by high walls, and there were no vistas nor even any beautifully shaped summits to look at. For once the desert was all foreground, little trees along the stream, little bushes, little stones. A tin can in such a small environment can hardly be ignored.
As soon as possible therefore, we pushed on up the canyon which widened into what looked like a plain surrounded by mountains. In reality it was level nowhere, but rounded down like a giant oval basin about five miles wide and seven or eight miles long. The mountains on the east and south were covered with cedars whose vanguard dotted the edge of the mesa under Mount Baldy, now become a great white mass, very near, led up to by a precipitous ridge broken into jagged peaks. Telescope Peak lay behind Baldy and was not visible. There was more snow than we had supposed in our survey from Pinto Mountain, it lay all along the jagged ridge, coming down in some places almost to the mesa. The northern wall of the canyon was composed of lower mountains. The one furthest east was a big, pointed, red mass, polka-dotted with little trees near its summit. Looking back whence we had come the mountains seemed to close the narrow gorge.
The cattlemen had told us that Wild Rose Canyon was full of water, but after we left the spring we found none. The big wash down the middle was dry—the boy must have seen it on some rare occasion when it had water in it—and the great bowl far too large and too rough to admit of much scouting for springs at the bases of the mountains. We had thought that we would see the deserted charcoal-kilns and thus find the spring which the cattlemen had described, but there was no sign of any kilns. We supposed that they were somewhere along the bottom of the precipitous ridge that led up to Mount Baldy. In that direction the mesa was so terribly cut up that we could not attempt to take the wagon there until we had first explored it, so we made a dry camp in the middle of the basin under the shelter of the eight-foot-high bank of the wash.
The wind had blown harder than usual all day with an icy bite from the snowy heights. During the night a racing cloud deposited snow on the northern hills which before had been bare. A real storm now became our fear, for a little more snow would defeat our project. Moreover Wild Rose Canyon is at an altitude where the cold at that time of year is intense, and we had to depend on the sun's fires to warm us sufficiently during the day to make life possible through the night. The "desert rat" became a bundle of misery. We had not realized the paralyzing effect cold would have on him. He sat and shivered, apparently unable to move or to think, so utterly wretched that Charlotte and I offered to give up the Panamints and "beat it" to a more salubrious climate. We could not bear to see our friend suffer; but he flatly refused, angry with us for even making the suggestion, saying that when he started to do a thing be generally did it.
The next morning was as cold as ever. Still the Worrier refused to consider moving out, and when the sun had warmed the great windy bowl a little, he went back to fetch more water from the spring by the old shack. We explored the base of the long ridge under Mount Baldy as well as we could, but failed to find the charcoal-kilns. However, it was possible to get the wagon over there, so in the afternoon we moved the whole outfit up to the first cedar trees. There the mesa became so steep that Molly and Bill could no longer pull the load. The Worrier had brought ten gallons of water, enough for several days, and the "desert-proof" horses were turned loose to find their way back to the spring at the mouth of the canyon. What either they or the cattle ate at Wild Rose remained a profound mystery to us. The mesa was covered with low, dry brush, interspersed occasionally with bunches of yellow grass. We could see the dark backs of the steers like spots moving through it, but it looked like anything rather than a spring feeding-ground.
Camp-in-the-Cedars was charming. A real tree had become a wonderful object. For once there was plenty of wood and the Worrier kept himself warm chopping and carrying. After the feeble little fires of roots and twigs to which we had been accustomed, that blazing, crackling camp-fire was a rich luxury. Dinner was a banquet. Our bed was laid under a big piñon tree through whose tufts of fine needles the enormous stars looked down. We had a glimpse through the far-off mouth of the canyon of distant peaks, vague in the starlight. The wind rose and fell softly through the pines and cedars, like the breathing of the great white mountain beneath whose side we slept.