Pacific High: Adventures In The Coast Ranges From Baja To Alaska

Index

Prologue: Between the Sea and the Sky

ON THE FIRST of January, at dawn, with winter rain pounding on the windshield, we set out on a journey of nine months from Baja to Kodiak, a tour of North America’s coastal mountains high above the Pacific.

We began with a sense of discovery, allowing ourselves to wander where impulse would take us. I foresaw little of the path ahead, but, trying to understand the world, I would explore, identify, interview, read, photograph, dig in the dirt, and climb to the next horizon, all the time searching, all the time hunting, hunting. I wanted to see for myself, to learn by doing, to realize what was happening by being there. But mostly, my wife, Ann, and I looked forward to simply delighting ourselves day after day in new and extraordinary places.

Exceptional by any measure, America’s longest nearly continuous mountain mass stretches for 3,600 miles as a marathoner crow might wing his way from the southern Baja Peninsula in Mexico to Kodiak Island in Alaska. Within this reach, 740 miles lie in Baja, 790 in California, 290 in Oregon, 150 in Washington, 530 in British Columbia, and 1,130 in Alaska. It’s like driving from San Francisco to Miami and then up the Atlantic coast to Philadelphia and having it all be mountains.

Though I knew that hills and steep slopes rise up behind Los Angeles, and in San Francisco, and from the rugged seashore almost anywhere along the Pacific, my awareness of the Coast Range as a continuous chain of mountains with its own identity was vague at best. I think this is the case with most people, including those who live along the way. Yet all I had to do to grasp the bigger picture was look at a relief map of the continent. Right away the darkly shaded slope at the border of our western ocean popped out as the boldest, most continuously definable feature anywhere to be found. In that moment when my eye followed the crescendo course of the mountains up the Pacific coast, the concept for our trip was born.

Most often known by the familiar names of its subranges — Santa Monica, Olympic, Saint Elias, and many more — this collection of mountains is usually referred to in the plural: the Pacific Coast Ranges. But after traveling the whole way, southeast to northwest, I now recognize the mountains’ continuity and so use the singular: the Pacific Coast Range. Along this length measuring the whole sunset edge of North America, the subranges link together like the ends of interwoven ropes. For Ann and me, the months ahead and the revealing stories of adventure and belonging would be linked in the same way.

If the West Coast were only a matter of soil meeting sea, it could be a New Jersey, a Louisiana, a Bangladesh. But the land here at the Pacific shore is rugged and uplifted. The mountains give the place its character and a certain magnetism that has attracted pilgrims and pioneers, refugees and escapees, seekers of opportunity, beauty, and love.

For generation after generation, people have packed up and headed west, and beyond the seaward slant of the Coast Range, you can’t go any farther. So here they stayed. Others emigrated from the south, still others from the west, across the water. Some thirty-six million people now live on North America’s Pacific edge, most of them in seven large cities within sight of the mountain country I would explore. Here where high expectations collide with capricious reality, the continental plates also collide, setting off earthquakes that rupture the earth into some of the world’s most dramatic scenery.

The legendary storms of the Pacific mercilessly hammer this shoreline, and the mountains force clouds up over ridgelines and summits, agitating the weather even more. Rainforests, snowfields, and glaciers result, and the rivers carve valleys and canyons unlike any others on earth — spectacular landforms that I could only begin to picture from what showed on the maps.

Nature thrives here in ever changing arrays of life. Consider the ancient trees, the whales’ migrations, the cry of eagles, the bugling of elk. Yet nature is also under attack here as viciously as anywhere, maybe more. Just look at the clearcutting, the oil spills, the smog, the engines of urban growth. I knew that the prognosis was grim for much of what I cared deeply about, and the more I learned about the problems, the more I was inclined toward despair. Yet having hope is essential, so I aimed to search out special people who seemed connected to their native or adopted ground — people who loved their place and strived for better stewardship. I wanted to see what they were doing to face the future in uncertain, troubled times.

Starting out, my mind and spirit were open to the mystery of foreign cultures, the spareness of aridity, the tension of seismicity, the heat of fire, the exuberance of the vast, the abundance of rot and rebirth, the kindness of strangers, the indomitable rules of climate, the triumph of life, the limits of the earth. I wanted to see it all, Mexico through Alaska, an idea at once challenging and playful.

It excited Ann as well. An adventurous soul, she had been leading educational wilderness trips for Outward Bound when we met on a river in Idaho six years before. Immediately we knew we had much in common and much to hold us tightly together. After a youth spent in New England, the Rockies had become her adopted home, but the draw of the Pacific, and the unknown, pulled on her as they did on me. I love mountains, and I love the ocean, she said. So, sure, I’d love to see it all.

Ann was writing a book that had demanded her attention for three years. Work remained, but she ached to cut loose. And this was the year to do the trip, we both agreed. We had no children of our own, no mortgage to burden us, no rent coming due the first of the month, no home to tend except for our well-equipped van and the big, round earth under our feet. Ann’s manuscript was easily portable, and in another year she would start a new book with a challenging plan for research. Plus, our van had already clocked 90,000 miles, and with an eye on reliability, I hesitated to sojourn to the distant deserts in Mexico or the far North once it topped the 100,000 mark. Can you finish your book while we travel? I asked my wife.

I’ll be jealous of you having fun while I’m sitting and writing, she answered honestly, but let’s give it a try. If I work as we go, I should be done before we hit Alaska.

With the critical spousal go-ahead, my heart began to leap at the possibilities before us.

With great care we loaded the van. When I had bought it seven years before, I customized the well-windowed rig by raising the roof so I could stand up inside. Behind the driver’s seat, alongside a long window, I built a table for writing, cooking, and other work or projects. Wired under the hood, an extra battery powered two lights and a computer for typing. Crawling underneath, I bolted a propane tank to the chassis to fuel a miniature furnace inside. Our two canoes and kayak lay lashed to the roof rack, and a whitewater raft hid, rolled up, inside. Cross-country skis and a mountain bike rounded out our fleet. We carried clothes for all seasons and a full complement of kitchen gear. Plus books, lots of books. Maxing out the van for this trip, we added an extra six-gallon water jug and several crates of nonperishable food. I stocked up on fuel for the Coleman stove and filled the propane tank for cold mornings, long sieges of bitter dampness, and the possibility of snow.

The whole setup was comfortable, efficient, and satisfying in both physical and metaphysical ways. In it, we own and consume little but see and experience much.

I was all puffed up with feelings of freedom and self-sufficiency and motivated by the promise of the open road. The words of Henry David Thoreau, written so long ago, inspired me still: Rise free from care before dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home.

chapter 1

Into Baja

FIRST LIGHT began to etch the rocky eastern horizon, and a rooster crowed for about the hundredth time since it had begun waking me up at three A.M. Soon it would be light enough for me to evade the chain-link cholla and other spiny cacti — no casual challenge on my route to the top of the mountain.

Crawling out of bed while Ann still dozed in the cozy back of our Ford van, I drew in a deep breath of anticipation. At times like this — at the beginning — life is full of wonder, and the sharpened edge of the unknown quickens my heart. The deep blue behind the morning stars promised a clear day, a day full of possibilities. The empty space out there somehow drew me to it. Nothing diminished my eagerness to get out and see what was around me, to learn what I could about this part of the earth. After dressing warmly and grabbing my camera pack and water bottle, I was on the way, aiming to meet the sunrise at the summit.

Except for the roosters’ machismo calls, the village of San Javier, six hundred miles south of the border on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, lay still and silent. The surrounding dry mesas stood boldly in black as the day began to glow behind them, refracted light just beginning to reveal important details that tell stories on the ground. At the edge of the one-lane dirt road, cobbles and sharp-sided stones had accumulated from both directions: some raked off by road graders, others thrown out of people’s gardens, each an effort to bring human order to a harsh and resistant land. I left the road and struck out cross-country.

The gray, unshadowed light began to glow on the swollen, pleated skin of the cardón — cacti up to forty feet tall with bold trunks pointing toward the heavens. Their stubby arms jutted out or curved up, a signpost of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. A close relative to the saguaro cactus of old TV westerns, these charismatic cacti seemed to welcome me, but underfoot and too close for comfort lurked pincushions, protruding nails, spiked trip wires, and the snakepit twinings of curled cacti with nasty barbs ready to pierce me at the slightest misstep.

Where I walked there was no trail, so I tried to be careful, and wondered, Is growing old a matter of becoming ever more cautious? I hoped not. I was forty-eight that winter and still felt the reckless indomitability of youth. Like many fools, I failed to recognize myself as middle-aged, though I had been so for some time. I didn’t really like being careful, but out in that desert, greater knowledge definitely bred greater care.

This morning my yearning had to do with beginnings. I wanted to be on the first mountaintop of my Coast Range exploration for the opening moment of the day.

Beginnings are fragile things, promising, portentous, consequential, painful. But my goal seemed simple enough at face value: I wanted to stand on top of the mountain for sunrise. Deep into Baja, I wanted to sense the beginning of the day, of the trip, and of the mountains that run nearly nonstop through Alaska. By climbing to a high point of ground, I hoped to sense the power of the place, to feel its life and its history in my bones, to imagine its future, and mainly to belong there in some satisfying way. If I didn’t feel all those emotions today, maybe I would on some other mountain before the end of our Baja adventure. And I knew that some of my grander ambitions would have to wait for their own good time during the nine months to come.

The arid slopes opened a bit more enticingly, and with soil and stone crunching underfoot, I moved up quickly into the spreading light. I found a goat path along the ridge. After twisting around the clutches of catclaw acacia, scrambling over basaltic rocks, and breathing heavily as I broke into a heavy sweat, I set foot on top of the mountain just before the fireball of sun pierced the horizon.

Propped against a rock and resting there after my prickly climb, I happily soaked in the scene of roughcut mesas while the light seeped down the east-facing mountainside next to me. In shades of brown, it was not a colorful mountain range, nor shapely in the sense of having sharp peaks or undulant and sensuous forms. Rather, I looked at a vast desert topography populated by domestic goats, a white cross propped on the next mountain, and a black flurry of vultures.

Though I couldn’t see the ocean, this was part of the greater Coast Range. The Baja Peninsula, seven hundred forty miles long, seventy miles wide on average, is the third-longest peninsula in the world behind the Malay in Southeast Asia and the Antarctic, but it’s the skinniest and most peninsular of the group. Mountains form the backbone of Baja, a seismically shifting, volcanically active land. Here, in the largest subrange, aptly named Sierra de la Giganta — Mountains of the Giantess — the view was typical, with harsh, dry country everywhere evident.

The fiery sphere of sun was doing its incandescent job, and with a dusty shine down below it illuminated the dome of a church, a three-story stone bastion of faith built by Indians long ago at the direction of Spanish missionaries. I tried to imagine those people, who had lived all their lives in wholly adequate houses of stick or thatch, suddenly confronting orders to cut, quarry, and haul rocks that might have weighed a ton in order to build this smooth-walled, high-roofed mission for the worship of a brand-new god.

Three centuries later it still stands as the centerpiece of the village of San Javier, made up of thirty houses or so from this vulture’s-eye view. The church is considered a healing mission, so icons of body parts, such as little painted arms and legs and hearts made of wood, are left there in hopes of milagros — miracles.

Beyond the mission, the town’s ditch system outlined small fields of onions with a border of green. The modest irrigation network was also built by Indians under the supervision of Spanish missionaries. One of the oldest irrigation systems in Baja, it predates by far anything now functioning in the United States. A canopy of olive trees planted by the padres lined the main waterway.

The town was waking, and even from eight hundred feet above I could hear the cry of babies, the murmur of women’s voices, a single, gruff shout of a man, the tinkling of a goat’s bell, the crow of a rooster still at it, and always, always the barking of dogs. The sounds built as the minutes passed — now the chopping of wood, the laughter of children, the cranking of a reluctant pickup, the rattling bounce of a capable truck on the washboarded road — all told, an audio microcosm of humanity on the earth.

The sun now beamed on the whole village, heating it up in a process that wouldn’t quit for many hours. Even there — way out there — the new light glinted off a bright red sign that advertised Tecate beer.

I descended quickly, making tracks back to the van, where Ann had prepared a breakfast of oatmeal. Not just any oatmeal, and certainly not the soggy mush of minute oats, her recipe included organic apples, raisins, walnuts, cinnamon, and nutmeg. As in all matters of food, Ann takes a healthful breakfast seriously.

What did you see? she asked.

The sun and the mountains, I synopsized, following with only the briefest elaboration. Tell me about what you wrote, I countered, knowing that she was refining the last chapter of her book about the history of America’s wetlands, worlds away from the aridity we faced at this end of the coastal mountains.

I had time to read over only a page or two. But look, let’s catch up later. Trudi’s due here any minute now. How’s this for lunch? Ann displayed a hunk of cheese, an apple, and two slabs of bread we had made in a covered skillet on our stove. Having consulted a phrase book, she made an irresistible offer with a tilt of her head: Te gustaría almorzar conmigo hoy? Would you like to join me for lunch today?

Because Ann grasped only a bit of Spanish and I knew none at all, I required the help of Trudi Angell. But even if I were bilingual from birth, I still would have needed Trudi’s help for what I wanted to do in the Mexican mountains.

With a name of circumstantial elegance, this woman had come to Catholic Baja in 1976. Quickly it became a part of her. Slowly she became a part of it. In Trudi, I knew I had found not only the guide I needed to help me learn about this foreign place but also the exact kind of person I was hoping to meet on my journey — one who loves where she is on this earth and lives with deliberate care for her place.

I was twenty, Trudi recapped, straining back through many good years as we bounced over a washboard road in her veteran truck. Ann and I had left the van at a site where we could camp for the night and crowded onto the front seat along with Olivia, Trudi’s delightful only child. My boyfriend back then taught ocean kayaking and led trips out of Mulegé. He worked for NOLS — the National Outdoor Leadership School. NOLS offers courses in outdoor skills and trains people to become teachers for outdoor programs.

To skip the intervening quarter century for the time being, let me just say that Trudi and her partner, Douglas Knapp, now ran trips of their own in a business called Las Parras Tours. Knowing of my interest in the remote mountains of Baja’s interior, she had agreed to take Ann and me on a three-day excursion to get the flavor of the Sierra de la Giganta and to see people on the way. Here’s our first stop, Trudi said, stepping on the brake and allowing our dust to overtake us. Rancho los Dolores.

The house was adobe brick and could have been ancient. An outdoor kitchen enjoyed the shade of a thatched roof and the privacy of walls made by weaving sticks together. Trudi and a prancing Olivia were greeted by hugs from Maria Luisa Veliz, Maria’s mother, and her mother-in-law, who was quite old and wrapped tightly in a dark shawl. They all stationed themselves near the hornilla, a clay-bottomed wood-burning stove that smelled delicious with warming tortillas.

The women’s dresses — beautiful florals — were spotlessly clean, there in a smoke-puffing kitchen with a floor made of dirt. Was this how they always dressed? Or were they spruced up for us? Some things — a lot of things — you just don’t ask.

They welcomed Ann and me with smiles and did not hesitate in their animated Spanish conversation with Trudi. They gave her a bag of homegrown oranges and grapefruit. They chatted about the fields, the weather, the road, whatever. Trudi offered Ann and me an abbreviated running commentary, leaving out most of the news but still giving us the gist of their everyday chat.

That was fine, but all the while I couldn’t help but wonder how their lives in these remote mountains related to the larger world. How was the civilization out there pressing in on them? Not knowing how to get a grip on my question, I finally asked Trudi to inquire, How have your lives changed in recent years?

Suddenly they all fell silent. They had to think about this. Eventually, haltingly, a consensus was reached and cautiously expressed. We used to be very poor. We had no cars at all. Now we are wealthy in comparison.

That was it. I could see how these good-spirited women felt. They liked their cars, of course. We all do. But I wondered: As the commercial culture tentacled out to these people, what was happening to their land? How were the changes affecting their families?

Leaving the women and their conversation, I wandered alone into a patchwork of fields ranging from very small to an acre. Several men — fathers, sons, and grandsons — hoed weeds, thinned onions, and tinkered with irrigation flows from a gravity system that diverted water out of a spring, shunted it through a concrete sluiceway two feet wide, ran it into a cement cistern plugged with a hand-carved block of wood, and then dropped it into a stone-lined ditch feeding the furrows of the irrigated fields. This system — from gravity flow to wooden plug — struck me as appropriate technology. It had survived continuous use for several hundred years. Unlike the salt-poisoned, selenium-laced, leached-white soil and noxious weedlots now common in big western irrigation systems and factory fields elsewhere in Baja and in California, the plots that these men tended looked good. They looked as if they could produce for another few centuries, maybe forever.

For all its differences, the workday scene reminded me of generations-old photos of subsistence farming by my own ancestors in the Appalachian Mountains. The men wielded long-handled hoes and broad-bladed scythes, all hand tools. The midwinter light at those lower latitudes rubbed a golden cast into everything it touched.

Old Enrique Veliz, with a thick, white mustache, white shirt, black pants, and soil-covered sandals, smiled at his family and leaned on his hoe.

Enrique, podría tomar tu foto? May I take your picture? It was one Spanish phrase I had been able to memorize.

Sí. No es problema.

Your garden, it’s beautiful, I offered in English with a sweep of my hand and a smile.

Sí. He nodded. I wanted to know more about how he did it.

Do you rotate your corn and onions year by year?

Sí.

And how do you fertilize the fields?

Sí.

I waited a moment in quiet appreciation of my welcome. Gracias, I offered, and retreated toward the house and the women.

I was impressed by these rural Mexicans’ friendliness, a manner I noticed perhaps because of unfriendliness I’d encountered elsewhere. As I walked back, it occurred to me that they probably didn’t even think about it. It was simply the way they were. Well, at least so long as Ann and I showed up with Trudi Angell.

With this window to life in the mountains of Baja cracking open a bit, we reboarded the truck and rolled on a little farther.

So, your boyfriend worked as a kayak instructor and guide, I said to Trudi.

Yes. I signed up as a student, and we paddled on Conception Bay. I loved the water. I loved the place.

As with most people, it was the sea, not the mountains, that had drawn Trudi Angell to Baja.

"I went home to Calistoga, California, but couldn’t get Baja out of my mind, so I bought a Klepper — a kayak you can take apart and fold up for shipping. When I came back in 1978, NOLS needed help. I bounced around in the desert looking for watering holes and campsites, scouting out trips for them. After that I ran logistics for a few years, driving the truck and dropping off water and food. It was a good introduction to the land. And to the need for water. The best part came at the end of the season, when a few of us loaded the kayaks and took a six-week trip of our own.

Then, in the winter of 1983, I thumbtacked five-by-seven cards up at the recreation equipment co-op in Berkeley. The cards said, ‘Kayaking in Baja.’ People called, so I gathered up a few more Kleppers and started doing trips for a hundred dollars a person. My partner and I rented a place, and in 1984 we ran seven trips, some of them all the way from Mulegé to Loreto. I guided everybody myself. Now we offer sea kayaking, whale watching, mountain biking, tours to missions and cave paintings, and mule-riding expeditions into the mountains.

Wondering why Trudi liked Baja so much when brilliant watery green mountains such as the Sierra Nevada beckoned so much closer to home, I asked, What do you like about it here?

Her eyes and face came alive, and she did not hesitate. "The openness. The wildness. Riding on a mule in the desert and discovering an oasis is a wonderful feeling. And I like the people. Especially in the mountains. The older people are part of the land here. We’ll run into a cowboy dressed up in the traditional garb of a deerskin cuera — a wraparound leather jacket — and I feel like I’m transported back a hundred years. You can’t get that feeling in the United States, certainly not in California."

And you like living in Loreto?

Yes, but our dream is to move up to the mountains. It’s one of many dreams you have when you’re out here. In Loreto, it’s nice, and the people are good. But it’s changing. The great landgrab has started, with big business rearing its head.

I immediately pictured the posh resorts of travel magazine ads. And this isn’t the style? I gestured to her truck and to the dusty route ahead of us.

"No. People are using the word ecotourism, but they don’t know what it means. Uncontrolled fishing is depleting the Gulf of California. Roads are opening up remote areas. The whole package is an awful intrusion, and the tourists don’t get much out of it. I know because I’ve seen that business; I’ve seen how it operates. The big resorts bring in their own vans to bus clients back and forth, so the tourists don’t meet the people or see the land. Now they’re talking about opening casinos. But no one needs this place to play slots and blackjack. They could do that in Tijuana."

Tell me, Trudi, I said, shifting the subject as we hit a rut in the road, how do you know all these farmers and ranchers up here?

It’s taken years, but once they understand what I’m doing, it’s easy. Once they get to know you, they’re quite friendly.

Trudi omitted that her reputation preceded her. When I arrived in Loreto and inquired as to her whereabouts, an English-speaking shop owner had said, Sí. Sure I know her. She’s famous. You just go down here and take a right and cross the dry wash and take another right, and so forth. Explaining some of the referred-to fame, another friend had told me that Trudi hires Mexicans to lead her tours. She uses local taxi drivers for her shuttles. She drives local people to the hospital when nobody else can. She loans money to local families so they can start small businesses. She does what very few gringos do when they go to Mexico.

For dinner we visited Guillermo and Bili Bastida. It was difficult to tell where home ended and restaurant began. The comfortable outdoor patio accommodated us and a few other people, including ninety-nine-year-old Loreto de los Santos and her eighty-four-year-old brother, Priciliano.

With Trudi’s help I engaged Guillermo and the older man in a discussion of range conditions. Though I’ve never worked as a buckaroo, grasslands have long interested me. After all, along with deserts they account for over half the land in North America and are what most of life — human and otherwise — depends upon in arid country such as Baja.

To put it bluntly, the grazing conditions looked pitiful. I had seen almost no grasses or forbs but rather cacti, thorny shrubs such as acacia, weeds spiny enough to kill a cow, and lots of mesquite. This coarse, thorny shrub ruthlessly invades deserts when grazing wipes out native grasses and when groundwater tables drop owing to the abuse of soil and streams. Mountain people around the world typically turn to raising goats when the range becomes too depleted for cows. And goats were what everyone here raised.

Are there fewer grasses now? I asked.

A long and animated discussion ensued. Trudi followed the volley but reported no score. After several minutes the talk slowed a bit and I asked what they had concluded. Trudi simply reported, There is less grass now, but they think it’s because it used to rain more. Their response seemed to be suspiciously reliant on the role of God. I could tell they were having trouble with the topic I had raised.

By way of explanation Trudi said, "Change, over time, is something they just don’t think much about. They think about today. Tomorrow, mañana, will take care of itself."

Mañana means more than just tomorrow. It loosely describes an outlook on life that runs deep in Mexican culture. It means We can deal with it tomorrow or Tomorrow will come regardless. One hears the word mañana often in Mexico.

Along the same line but in a slightly more hopeful vein, people here are also fond of saying, Si Dios quiere. God willing.

As longtime Mexico correspondent Alan Riding explained in his illuminating portrait Distant Neighbors, the future is viewed with fatalism, and as a result, the idea of planning seems unnatural. By extension of this personal philosophy, the health of the land simply exists. Its future will simply happen.

I tried to ask my question in a different way, and Guillermo, who worked as a farmer, not a rancher, reflected that there used to be more cows where there were now goats, and that a vine with yellow trumpet flowers tended to take over whenever the grasses were grazed off.

Trudi turned to me and said, I would love to have seen the rangelands before cattle and goats, but that would mean going back three hundred years, before the Spanish. Once I rode around to the top of a box canyon where cows couldn’t go. The grasses grew thickly there even when everyplace else was dried out.

Is there any effort to improve the range? To cut back on grazing and give native plants a chance to recover?

Trudi answered that during more extreme droughts, ranchers do their best to cull the herds and sell off stock before large-scale loss. They’ll pull cows off the range and give them a feed concentrate just to keep them alive until the desert plants sprout again. But in terms of any systematic effort to restore grasslands or improve the range, there was nothing to report.

Changing the subject, Trudi mentioned that Bili for years had grown plants used by naturopathic doctors in the United States. Her own little cottage industry supplied herbs that wouldn’t grow in the North. Her fifteen-year-old daughter lived in Loreto so she could attend high school, and she wanted to go to the university in La Paz to study medicine. Her son didn’t like to study and worked here with his father.

Do most of the young people leave the mountains?

Many do, Trudi answered. The population of San Javier is about the same as it was a hundred years ago.

Catching our drift, Bili offered, In the city, it’s very difficult for young people. They want to have a car. They want to own all those things. They think they’ll get rich quick but are not prepared, so they cannot earn money. They become disillusioned, and some return to help on the farms. They are happier when they come back. Yet according to Trudi, few actually do return.

This arid land — any land — can support only a limited number of people. In these mountains, which have been settled since the seventeenth century, when colonizing missionaries arrived, and by local Indians nine thousand years before that, there’s not enough water or land for more children to live on. So if there are more than two children per family, they pretty much have to go to the cities. Otherwise — and this has been happening for a long time — the pie of resources is divided into smaller and smaller pieces, pieces too small for a family’s livelihood.

Big families have been the norm, Trudi explained. Four or five children are common, and up to twelve is not uncommon. Sometimes I’m asked, ‘Don’t you want more children so it will be happier?’

Trudi pointed out that children here not only are considered the source of happiness but also supply labor and social security for the parents. Everyone seems to think that having lots of children is encouraged by the Catholic church. But more important, according to some knowledgeable observers, plentiful offspring are considered proof of male machismo. Furthermore, Mexican people have had an obsession with increasing their population ever since the Spanish invasion, when up to 90 percent of local populations were killed by soldiers or smallpox that the soldiers and missionaries brought over. The die-off spawned a durable cultural imperative to replace the lost people, and as with many aspects of Mexican culture, the past remains the present. The momentum continued on and on, with little change or consideration of the future.

Here in the mountains of Baja, the result was plainly evident. Even though the place is sparsely populated, water supplies and arable acreage are used to the hilt; the land is full. Children move to the cities. But at that point, a lot of new problems have only begun. In the cities, where nobody expects to live off the land, overpopulation is harder to recognize. People can survive even though their numbers exceed any reasonable standard involving the supplies of land and water, the economic welfare of mass numbers of citizens, the personal freedoms that are sacrificed in overpopulated places, and the most basic qualities of life that many Americans consider essential.

The lesson I took from the harsh hillsides around San Javier was that the ability of the land to support people is limited, and the many ways we have of avoiding that reality are delusions for which we will someday pay.

That night we camped at an unfinished cement-block shell that Trudi was fixing up with high hopes of a mountain home. In the morning, we all got ready to ride on mules to some remote ranches in the mountains.

We drove to Rancho Viejo, a goat farm, where we met Agapito, a stocky man with powerful features and dark skin, one of few local people with a good sample of local Cochimi Indian blood. He showed us to our mules. Raul de los Santos, the ranch caretaker, would be our guide. Trudi and Olivia mounted without hesitation and handled their mules as capably as cowgirls in Montana. Ann and I had ridden horses only once in a while over the years. But we each swung a leg up, and away we went.

Our route followed a dirt road deeper into the mountains. The mules walked and occasionally trotted. Following Raul, we veered off the road and onto a trail that cut back and forth across a dry wash. The land was exceedingly arid, with rock, dust, and cacti. The mesquite snagged at our pantlegs and at the mules’ bellies.

You can see why nobody hikes here, Trudi explained as she rode beside me. It really is mule country. Plus, the only water is at the ranches. If you’re camping, you have to stay there.

We stopped at the inviting home of Juan Bautista Romero and his wife, Chari. In their thirties, this couple, along with their three children, managed to live off an unaccommodating land and do it in good style.

Potted flowers brightened the patio. Separating an outdoor kitchen from the house and yard were beautiful screens woven from cariso, a wetland reed. Juan had picked the stems and then crushed, split, and pulled them open by hand. Once they were dried, he wove them into five-foot-tall panels. Strips of the inner wood of the cardón were used as lath along one wall of the house. The well, hand dug and four feet in diameter, never went dry, fed by the sparse and seasonal rainfall. Bolted to the side of the house was a two- by three-foot solar panel, the only new thing in sight. The first appliance that got powered was a fluorescent light. Second was a radio.

Juan and Chari grow onions and cows. Each cow needs two hundred or more acres of land. For comparison, that figure drops to one acre or less in temperate climates of the eastern United States. With cows and goats grazing heavily, there is little vegetation left for wildlife. Nevertheless, Juan shoots a deer occasionally, as most ranchers do, though rules supposedly restrict hunting to December and January. Raul added that he once guided hunting trips for bighorn sheep, but now there are few sheep left.

The ranchers chop wood for construction materials and for fires, though government regulations recognize the slow growth rate of trees in this desert and theoretically restrict cutting. Raul had recently attended a meeting held by officials who tried to explain the rules, but he suspected that people do what they want anyway. They have their regulations; we live our lives seemed to be the operative slogan.

After saddling up we departed again, the sun cooking us as we bounced along, but we were served cool drinks of water at three different ranches. Dirt or stone floors were kept clean by the women, and hand-dug wells provided surprisingly dependable water. Inside, pictures of Jesus appeared. Pinups more commonly decorated outbuildings or workshops.

Though the people seemed well aware of contemporary Baja, the ranches were resoundingly remote, and the people lived a good life that drew heavily on heritage. Yet, Trudi said, Many of the old ways are being lost. Before the road was drivable, everybody rode on horseback and stopped for visits on their way through. Now, people just zoom by in a hurry.

Late in the afternoon, at the end of the ride, we returned to Rancho Viejo, handed our mounts over to Raul and Agapito, and strolled around, awaiting an aromatic dinner that Angelina — Raul’s wife — was busily preparing.

In the American West, it’s impolite to ask how much stock a rancher raises. You might as well ask how much money he makes. So on my own I counted fifty goats in a pen. And others ranged wild. Without prying too much, I learned from Raul that a herd of forty goats could modestly support a family. The goats might go for forty dollars each when sold for meat, but primarily they are milked for goat cheese. The ranchers make the cheese and sell it to stores or to roving distributors.

Singing the praises of goats, Raul said: They drink little water. They eat rough forage and don’t need grass. In dry years you just cut off the tops of trees for them to eat. And if you lose one, it’s not like losing a cow, which costs a lot of money. The goats might stray five miles into the mountains. They are rounded up with dogs and on foot because the country into which they disappear is too rugged for horses.

At a dinner table long enough for many ranch hands, Angelina’s roasted goat tasted a lot like the rabbits my mother once cooked by a generations-old family recipe after I had plugged the quick little bunnies with my shotgun out back. Both had a delicious wild flavor. Along with the goat, we ate homemade tortillas just moments off the griddle and beans refried in lard.

As I chewed on the last bit of goat gristle because it tasted so good, some people from town arrived in a sport utility vehicle, made a friendly round of conversation with the people at Rancho Viejo, and negotiated a price for a goat. Raul polished off his dinner, headed over to the goat pen, strung a young animal up by a rear leg, and slit its throat, to the great joy of the dogs, which lapped up the blood from the rocks.

While I rode in the truck back to Loreto, with Ann following behind in the van, Trudi said, I don’t know how long that kind of life will last. In some form it’ll last quite a while, but the changes are coming. The government is saying that more land can be cleared for farming if they put in big wells farther down the canyon. But many of us fear that might take the groundwater away from these people. Near the city of Constitución they drilled a lot of new wells to serve what the Japanese and Mexican governments call ‘joint ventures’ to open up new farms. In the process they’ve ruined family wells, and now some of the new farms are already being closed down because the water didn’t last. Nature’s way of serving generation after generation here could be ruined almost overnight.

It sounded all too familiar. But keeping the mountain people’s lifestyle alive is Trudi’s passion.

There are ways of using the land well and helping these people, she explained. I’d like to set up a fund for local families to open bed-and-breakfasts and pursue other opportunities that take advantage of the place simply as it is. Anybody willing to come and visit Baja on its own terms can have a great experience. If I can play even a small role in keeping these mountains the way they are, I’ll be pleased.

A QUICK GLANCE at a three-dimensional map of the Baja Peninsula shows that mountains run with scarcely a break the whole way. Mountains everywhere are built by seismic or volcanic forces, and both have performed spectacularly here, where the southern end of the Coast Range is flooded on both sides by salt water.

Rising as seven distinct but interconnecting blocks, the Baja mountains are called the Peninsular Ranges and align north–south. They generally surge abruptly on their east side while sloping more gradually to the west, much like the profile of a breaking wave approaching from the Pacific Ocean. Various smaller ranges, volcanic in origin, pop up here and there above the desert plains.

Seismic rift is what made Baja and what separates it from mainland Mexico. Opening up the Gulf of California, this earthquake-induced parting of the lands began twelve million years ago and continues today. As the seafloor beneath the Gulf of California spreads apart, Baja drifts northwestward two inches per year on roughly the same shear line that becomes California’s familiar San Andreas Fault. In some millions of years, the mountains where we rode with Trudi will parade past what remains of California on their way to the big train wreck of rock and dirt that’s piling up at the northern limits of today’s Coast Range in Alaska.

But for the time being, Baja lies at the same latitude as Florida, and at fifty-five thousand square miles it’s roughly the same in area, though longer, skinnier, and profoundly mountainous, whereas Florida is just as seriously flat. For another comparative grasp of this foreign land, Baja California is one-third the size of Alta California, the United States’ California. The length of the two are comparable, but at Baja the sea fronts on both sides instead of on only one, which causes it to have two times the ocean frontage — three thousand miles, counting the jigsaw cutouts of bays and inlets. Unlike that of Alta California, the quiddity of Baja is wild, generally lacking in cities, military bases, nuclear power plants, and roads.

Considering all that, one might think the ecosystems and nature of Baja would be in good shape, but owing to even limited population growth in such a spare land and to a lack of regulatory effectiveness, they’re not. For example, few of the bighorn sheep that once grazed from end to end remain. Native riparian life has been lost because the groundwater has been depleted. The winter refuge of the gray whales is threatened by salt mines. On and on it goes.

Because this mountainous land rises next to the ocean, one might expect it to be stormy and rainy. But rainfall is rare, and here’s why. Sunlight, of course, shines directly on the Tropics and heats air the most at equatorial latitudes. Being lighter, that air rises and cools as it gains elevation. Quickly it reaches the dew point, at which it can no longer hold abundant moisture, and rain falls out to water the jungles of tropical latitudes. As it reaches a high elevation in the atmosphere — by now cool and dry — this air has to go somewhere when additional warm air rises up underneath it. Picture a ceiling fan pushing air straight up. So winds peel out to the north and south from the equatorial latitudes, falling back to the earth as they go, creating permanent high-pressure systems as they descend. These force other weather systems away and create nearly rainproof zones. That’s why the earth’s great deserts occur where they do, in two belts between 15 and 30 degrees latitude both north and south of the equator. Baja lies between 23 and 31 degrees north of it.

The limited rainfall splits into two distinct seasons — winter and summer — with most coming early in the year. This dual season is partly a quirk of winter storms imported from the Pacific and partly one of tropical storms that blow up from the south, bringing monsoons, or chubascos. Even in the desert, humidity during those dog days becomes unbearable to Americans.

The dual seasons of rainfall make the Sonoran Desert — covering most of Baja and a significant lobe of the American Southwest — the richest of all continental deserts in diversity of vegetation. Twenty-five hundred species of plants grow here.

All native life survives with splendid adaptations to local conditions. For example, through transpiration, leaves normally lose a lot of water, so paloverde trees carry out photosynthesis by tapping chlorophyll in their green bark and stems. The cardón cactus, living for two hundred years, can double its weight with stored water as its trunk swells, flattening the accordion-like pleats.

As a showpiece of Baja botany, occurring in the northern third of the peninsula, the cirio may rank as the strangest tree on the globe. Like a great inverted green carrot stick, it rises up to fifty feet high, with only the tiniest leaves, a mere fuzz, clinging to the trunk.

The elephant tree is my favorite, growing with a white, fleshy trunk and branches that remain fat for most of their length but then bluntly taper down to nothing, a stout little dwarf of a tree shaped to reduce evaporative loss. Incredibly, it has no thorns. Fifty species of acacia, five species of mesquite, plus ocotillos, cacti, and many other Baja plants, do have thorns — adaptations to discourage browsers here, where food is at a premium. Yet for all its harshness, the winter and summer rains can turn the land to dazzling