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A Day in the Gila Wilderness — The Physics of Beauty
Last updated on Thursday, July 17, 2003
The author at the Gila Cliff Dwellings. Photo by Peter Russell sharclif 
At Jordan Hot Springs, in the Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico, I lie full-length in the warm water. Ringed by ferns and lush vegetation, this deep pool is sheltered against a massive rock covered with spongy moss. The water temperature is about a hundred degrees. Tiny yellow wildflowers bloom at the pool's edge. I look up at a sky patterned in racing clouds and sycamore branches. A swallowtail butterfly circles the stalk of a purple bull thistle. Somewhere, anxiously, a brown towhee trills. A blue jay scoffs. I sink and slide and dream deeper.
If I listen closely - in this dreamy state - I can hear the wilderness whispering around me. Up and down the Gila River comes the murmur of secret lives: caddisflies, dragonflies, damselflies, trout, suckers, tadpoles, toads, lizards, snakes, mice, muskrats, foxes, badgers, bobcats, peccaries. The rare coatimundi drowses in the trees. Further up the canyon, mountain lions and black bears live discreetly. At twilight, after supper, we will surely see deer or a herd of elk.
A thousand different species whisper in my ear. Surrounded by otherness, by the non-human, I myself am just another mammal, lounging near the river bank. Gratefully, I let the warm water loosen my sore muscles. Carefully, I try to listen.
* * * *
This morning, my family hiked seven miles from the trailhead at Scorpion Corral to Jordan Hot Springs. The first part of the journey runs through dry rolling hills dotted with juniper, scrub oak, and piñon pine. Occasionally the trail crosses an outcropping of rhyolite or patch of pink, eroded stone. When our children were smaller, we used horses to ferry them and our supplies. On this trip, with some complaining, we all carry backpacks. Energetically, my nine-year-old son takes the lead. Behind my husband, our twelve-year-old daughter sings softly to herself. At one point we stop to watch a red-tailed hawk. I take off my pack and wiggle my shoulders. Looking south toward the Mimbres Valley, I can see three main colors: the parched yellow of grama grass, the dark of evergreen trees, the pale blue sky. Nothing else. My bones seem to elongate and grow hollow. Something in this view calls out to those parts of the body which have always yearned to fly. The hawk soars out of sight, its wings steady, purposeful. Something in me follows.
After four miles, the trail begins its descent, down Little Bear Canyon to the Middle Fork of the Gila River. Now we enter a cooler and wetter world. The path narrows until we are walking on a stream bed with gray rock rising intimately above us, so close we could extend our arms and touch each wall. Emerald-green algae swirls in a puddle. Insects hatch and burrow in the mud.
At a small cave, we stop again to admire a pictograph - a squiggly red line, a possible lizard. Not so long ago, hikers could still find prayer sticks and arrowheads in this rock shelter, artifacts from the ancient Mogollon culture. These hunters and farmers left this area around A.D. 1300, and pictographs like this one may be a thousand years old. As usual, I am thrilled, touched by this sense of our deep history.
When my family emerges from Little Bear Canyon, we stumble dramatically into the light. Streaming down from the center of the sky, reflected in the water and trembling cottonwood leaves, bouncing up from banks of white sand, the sun seems to explode around us. The Middle Fork of the Gila looks grandly like a river, with ripples and pools and a fiery gleam disappearing around corners left and right. Tall red cliffs define this canyon floor, their tapered ends sculpted and strange. Yucca and cactus grow in the crevices of these rocks. Below the cliffs, walnut, sycamore, cottonwood, willow, wild grape and Virginia creeper follow the river. Such shifts in environment, accomplished in a few hours or even moments of hiking, are not unusual in the Gila Wilderness. On some day trips, I can walk from the Chihuahuan desert to a sub-alpine forest. Diversity is the rule, with five life zones, and a thousand microclimates.
Now, for two more miles, we cross and cross again the shallow Middle Fork. We like to camp right beside the Jordan Hot Springs, and we are anxious to reach our favorite site. Once there, my husband begins to set up a tent. My son wants to fish. My daughter wants to be alone. I go to the hot springs, just above the river bank, to this deep pool sheltered against a massive rock.
* * * *
The road to the wilderness.
Photo by Peter Russell
The Gila Wilderness is America's first designated wilderness and the Southwest's largest. The wilderness itself - 558,065 acres - is surrounded by the Gila National Forest, a vast 3.3 million acres. The 202,016-acre Aldo Leopold Wilderness also joins with the national forest. Altogether, this is a big chunk of wild land.
In 1981, my husband and I bought a much smaller piece of land in the Mimbres Valley, thirty miles east of Silver City, New Mexico. When we climb the ridge behind our adobe house, we can see the green edge of the Gila National Forest. Farther north, beyond sight, is the invisible line that separates the Gila Wilderness from a more mundane world. In large part, we came here for this very reason - to be close to wilderness.
For us, like many Americans, the word "wilderness" has a numinous quality. We think of John Muir marching through the "sublime wilderness . . . as if in some vast hall pervaded by the deepest sanctities and solemnities that sway human souls." We remember Thoreau's caution, that "in wildness is the preservation of the world." Intuitively, we understand that for ninety-nine percent of human development we fed directly from the earth. We imprinted on wilderness, and we still carry that life inside us, like an ancient psychic root. An important part of me is still a hunter and gatherer. An important part of me still draws pictures on rock walls (in the form, perhaps, of essays on the wilderness.)
Today, after fifteen years of living next door to the Gila Wilderness, I am just beginning to understand some of its complexity - and its irony. Like many people, I once thought of wilderness as a place to get away from people, a place where I could meet Nature alone. Indeed, the 1964 Wilderness Act specifically states that wilderness should provide "outstanding opportunities for solitude." Furthermore, "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain."
Yet the story of the Gila Wilderness is very much a human story. The Mogollon people lived here for thousands of years; their pueblo-style villages grew to as many as four hundred rooms. The Apaches probably came in the sixteenth century, and Chief Geronimo called these mountains his home. Eventually the Spanish also claimed the Gila, and the Mexicans, and the Americans, always conquering and being conquered, always feeding from the land. By the late nineteenth century, the headwaters of the Gila were severely overgrazed by cattle and sheep. In 1924, the conservationist Aldo Leopold helped create the Gila Primitive Area, the first formally protected wilderness in this country.
Forty years later, the 1964 Wilderness Act further defined a National Wilderness Preservation System of over nine million acres. Mining activity was allowed until 1984. Motorized vehicles were strictly forbidden. As a political compromise, the grazing of livestock, where established before the act, was permitted indefinitely.
Ironically, in some parts of the Gila Wilderness, the most common animal I will see is a cow. One-third of the Gila Wilderness is grazed - and many say it is over-grazed. An important controversy in this area concerns the Diamond Bar ranch, which has a permit from the Gila National Forest to run cattle in the wilderness. In 1987, in an effort to move cows away from the denuded stream banks, the Diamond Bar rancher asked to use bulldozers to put stock tanks in the Gila Wilderness. Local environmentalists protested. Bull dozers in the wilderness! The conflict became a touchstone for wilderness issues nation-wide. Ten years later, that conflict still rages.
Ranchers and environmentalists both feel betrayed. Both are bitter. (In 1993, I wrote a book called Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West. Despite its bellicose title, the book's middle-of-the-road approach put me in the crossfire - not a comfortable place to be.) In the end, the concept of "wilderness" is a legislative one. And what happens in the wilderness will be determined, largely, by politicians and lawyers.
Today our wilderness system has grown ten-fold - to over 94 million acres. Two-thirds of that is in Alaska. Ironically, again, regulation has become the key to "managing" this land. On wilderness rivers, recreationists pack out their own human wastes. In the wilderness ethic, going off trails is frowned on. Gas stoves are better than campfires. Wildflowers should not be picked. It is not easy to be a visitor. Perhaps it is, too much, our nature to dominate. Perhaps, for this reason, we need the lessons of wilderness.
* * * *
Gila Wilderness meadow. Photo by Peter Russell 
It is dark at night. This is something I don't usually notice, not under my bright electric lights, making a snack in the kitchen, helping the children with their school work, watching a video, or settling down with a book. In my comfortable adobe house, I determine when night falls. I turn off a switch.
Here in the wilderness, darkness has its own schedule. My little flashlight and camp stove are only acknowledgements of this larger power. Here I do not try to hold back the night. It is dark. It is time to sleep. But first, let us look at the stars.
We walk away from camp, careful not to fall - one more time - in the river. These red-rock cliffs shut out much of the sky. Still, a white swatch of the Milky Way runs above us like another river flowing over our heads. That bright universe seems so close, not a million miles away, but right here, within our reach. Long ago, I think, this is what the Mogollon people also did at night. They stood here at this spot and looked at the stars. They saw this beauty and they suddenly felt: this is the definition of beauty.
Later, when I am asleep, the moon rises. I wake and put on my glasses and unzip the flap of our tent. The ground is cold under my feet. Looking up, I see a round yellow ball balanced perfectly on a tower of rock. The river murmurs and whispers, a music I have heard all night, under the layers of my dreams. I smell the wet earth, a scent of pine. Here it is again. Beauty. "The physics of beauty," Aldo Leopold wrote, "is one department of science still in the Dark Ages. Not even the manipulators of bent space have tried to solve its equations."
* * * *
Back in 1981, my husband and I thought we would spend most of our lives, or at least all our weekends, hiking in the Gila Wilderness. We imagined month-long camping trips. We imagined seamless days and nights, under the sun and under the stars. In fact, we quickly became distracted by other adventures: building a house, growing a garden, becoming parents. Today we both work at full-time jobs, and our children prefer more modern excursions - an afternoon at Wal-Mart or a quiet day in the bowling alley. We don't visit the wilderness as often as we'd like.
But this does not mean that these visits are any less important. Each time we go, I feel refreshed. Each time, a green song hums in my veins, quick and light-hearted, for days afterward. The complexity of the Gila Wilderness - caddisflies, dragonflies, trout, foxes, lions, photosynthesis, decomposition, erosion, evolution - dazzles me anew (rather more, say, than the complexity of Wal-Mart). My psychic battery is recharged. I have been reminded of my place in the natural world.
In the end, in a world of over five billion people, we can not visit wilderness too often. We must tread more lightly than that. Wilderness is a concept we hold in our minds, an idea like God or love that may be experienced rarely but that remains crucial to our sense of being. I may never walk the wilderness of Alaska, and there are many canyons in the Gila I will never see either. I am simply happy that these places exist. I hold them in my mind. I cherish them. Somehow for me, in the heart of wilderness, I begin to understand the physics of beauty.
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