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Road Trip: Nacapule Canyon
In The Shadow of the Dragon's Tooth
"We ignore billboards for resorts and hotels and blondes in thong bikinis cozying up to Mexican beer. After all, we're on our way to a little bit of Nirvana."
Early October, and the high country is drenched. Rains turn to sleet and snow squalls over 9,000 feet. Unseasonable deluges flood the Animas and the Pine rivers, even washing away homes at Vallecito Reservoir. All this rain prematurely denudes the gold coinage of leaves from aspens, the leathery copper leaves of scrub oak. Stacks of firewood soak. Sunflower seeds float in the feeders. Time to head South for the bathwater warm Sea of Cortez. Time for the Sonoran Desert and Nacapule Canyon. My husband, Bill, and I pack snorkel equipment, swimming suits, kayaks, hiking boots and bug repellent. Happy grins in Spanish, wagging his thick wolfish tail, and jumps in the car.
It is about a six-hour trip, mas o menos, from the border to San Carlos. We take Mexico 15 and follow the signs for Hermosillo, about 260 km south. Driving is smooth as a glass of blue agave tequila on the four-lane toll highway. About 12.5 miles from the border, we pull over at Parking for Permits, where we fill out visa forms. Leaving, we are cordially waved through the Nothing to Declare lane, something we marvel at given our government's insulting intention to build a Berlin-type wall between our country and Mexico.
Sir Thomas Moore wrote that the desert is the mirror in which we discover our deepest, most uncared-for selves. The desert between Nogales and San Carlos is gorgeous. Stands of cordon cactus, both sentinel and organ-pipe, are kin to the stately saguaros of Arizona with their arms twisted heavenward and home to owls, woodpeckers, wrens and hawks. We look for black and tan caracaras among resident black and turkey vultures, Harris Hawks, Black and Gray Hawks as well as numerous falcons. The bird life changes drastically the further south we drive. Besides mesquite, palo verde and cactuses, there are brilliant saffron poppies, yellow brittle bush, rabbit bush, purple-flowered vines as well as a plethora of plastic flower bouquets that garland countless roadside shrines marking traffic deaths.
After negotiating heavy Hermosillo traffic, we drive for an hour or so south to the San Carlos turnoff. We ignore billboards for resorts and hotels and blondes in thong bikinis cozying up to Mexican beer. After all, we're on our way to a little bit of Nirvana. The first landmark is the Soldado Estero, an estuary system fed by fresh water springs and the tides of the Bahia de San Francisco, haven to tiger herons, American egrets, great blue herons, oyster catchers, brown pelicans, blue crabs and bottle-nosed dolphins that leap offshore from one of the most magnificent stretches of white sand beaches I know of. Ahead of us is dramatic Tetakawi, a double-peaked volcanic formation the Spanish named Cerro tetas de cabra or teta kawi for goat's teats. The Yaqui name for the peak means "tooth of the dragon." Tetawaki rises some six hundred feet and is red as dried blood on the far side of the marina.
I remember our first trip to Nacapule Canyon, led there by Norma Nunez who ran the Buen Café, a wonderful local coffee shop, featuring organic coffees, fresh granola, fruit and simple lunches. Norma also taught painting classes in her back rooms. Fervent environmentalist, she handpainted all the World Wildlife Fund signs in the Estero. On her day off, Norma led us along the trail up the canyon, pointing out ironwood, elephant trees, button cactus, and amate, an aromatic plant used to extract incense. She explained how rare and fragile the ecosystem of the entire canyon is as she led us to her magic place, that incredibly lush relictual desert oasis. I fell deeply in love.
Nacapule Canyon is found by following roads north out of San Carlos. It was easy to get lost in the maze of narrow dirt roads cut into desert chapparal and to end up at a ranchero rather than the canyon. Now, there are official blue road signs. We wonder if the canyon's been overrun by sqaudrons of well-meaning eco-tourists. We drive to the edge of the suburbs, then across a huge arroyo into desert. The land is peopled by cactus - ocotillo, cholla, barrel, pincushion and pencil - by mesquite trees, endangered ironwood, endemic cotton plants, yellow-flowering brittle bush, and billions of magenta morning glory-like flowers clinging to cactus and tree alike. Exotic boojum trees squat like upside down green carrots with strange skinny arms and tiny tough leaves. As we drive the lumpy road, heat melts desert to liquid silver shimmering. Dust devils, those microbursts of mini-tornados funnel dust and trash skyward. The road turns to jagged rock, and I begin to wonder if our All Wheel Drive RAV 4 will be adequate. It's a bone-rattling ride, but we make it. Ahead is the Sierra Aguaje, the coastal mountain range, a string of ghostly volcanic formations, where black, red, and carnelian-hued metamorphic strata shot with quartz fold over each other in elegant curves and curls that resemble bloody kneaded dough.
We put on hiking boots, hats, waist water carriers, and, despite the heat, socks, long pants and T-shirts. The trail is rocky, moderately strenuous. If we're lucky, we'll spot a chuckwalla, a huge sluggish-looking lizard that can run with incredible speed, a small Chichinoco squirrel, a boa constrictor or the rare tropical frog that haunts the pools. Here most plants sport thorns. When we walk into shade, gnats swarm around our eyes. The rocks are ideal habitat for rattlers, and I wouldn't mind seeing one. I admire snakes, but they are dangerous business for Happy bounding at the end of a leash held by Bill, who grew up in the Everglades and has an aversion to poisonous slitherers.
It is about a twenty minute hike into the canyon over the rock bed of a dry river. We skirt granite boulders the size of storage sheds, step over red pudding stones laced with quartz. I hear a wren, and see an acipiter soar. Its skree ricochets like hot rifle pings off the narrow canyon walls. Flies, bees and mosquitos buzz us as we climb. We slather on more repellent. Although relatively early, the heat is intense, in the 90s, and we soak through our hats and shirts.
To reach the first pool, we bushwhack through a melange of saw palmettos. In this wet year, they're almost impenetrably overgrown. Under those sharp-edged umbrellas, I imagine pods of dozing snakes, scorpions, millipedes and spiders, small slimey critters and sleeping phalanxes of Nile-virus-carrying mosquitos. I am careful where I step. I've survived scorpion and fire ant stings, kissing-bug assaults and a brown recluse bite, and I don't relish additional experience in the venom department. How stupid not to wear long sleeves.
Once through the palmetto thicket, we come to a stand of tall, sturdy Washingtonia palms and the first rather shallow tea-colored pool, where a graceful Nacapule fig grows, its bark wrinkled as an elephant's but almost silky to the touch. The fig resembles a beech tree, although it is far less gray, more a matte serpentine. Like cypresses, Nacapule figs have generous knees that make excellent seats. The air is humid, heavy, and I conjure a jaguar lapping from the shaded pool. Instead, Happy is knee-deep in the dark, fresh water, wearing a halo of huge dragonflies, dramatically lipstick red and neon green. He's already found heaven. Bill excitedly tells me that just before I broke through the brush, he saw a bright green-and-yellow frog, the extremely rare tropical hopper that lives in this micro-climate. I look around, frustrated that the frog has retreated from eye-shot, but relieved that it still exists at all.
After scaling tricky granite boulders, we reach the next larger, deeper pool. More dragonflies, diaphonous cloudlets of yellow, purple, black and orange butterflies, Tecate beer cans, Coke bottles, a styrofoam cup and other offensive human detritus also greet us. After collecting the trash in a bag and leaving it to pick up on our way back, we scramble over more boulders to find the cave leading to the next pool.
It's creepy scuttlling through the cave, but the reward is the pool, so lovely it could be a movie set. A sheer cliff forms one of its sides. A fig loaded with tiny hard fruit grows in shallow water near a larger cave at one end. I am proud I didn't panic going through the lower cave-I am no spelunker nor lover of small dark spaces. Feeling something on my elbow, a spider web, I brush it off. My hair moves without the benefit of any breeze, and before I can register that this is not good, I look down for the brief instant before my shriek, at a spider the size of my fist and a sickly wheat-color no spider should be, up close and personal with my naked, sweaty cheek. Forget identification. Or dignity. I smack the bugger away and run. Don't ask me what good it does to run from a spider that is flying away from you.
While Bill laughs, I focus on the pool where I hope I won't see how red my face must be. Not one, but five frogs hang or lounge half-submerged on shore. The size of leopard frogs, these amiable frogs have lovely golden eyes and are dark green going to grass green down to their infinitely delicate toes. Landing above them in the fig, a black phoebe cocks its head at me. Happy steps into the tannic water, and, to my surprise the frogs don't spook. They gather around his legs. I sit down and wipe my forehead, regretting that I slapped away the spider hitchhiker, who, after all, didn't harm me.
I see no trash at this pool, as if even the most careless visitor must have sensed this to be a special place. What has disturbed the absolute peace is me and my fear of spiders left over from childhood encounters with wolf spiders in a dank Michigan chickenhouse. There are no engine noises. No traffic. No human sound of happiness or of conquest. The phoebe sings, the hawk passing again overhead whistles like a sharp note on a bone flute. Butterflies flap brilliant wings. The frog quintet continues to float, looking at us without fear or even much curiosity. The chichinocos and boas remain hidden.
We stay here awhile, basking in a presence that is quickly dwindling from the world. I am stunned to think that this canyon, unique in all North America, creates its own climate, its own ecosystem. Here is a church I can believe in. My absolute awe, my humility in the face of what is unique, wild and self-sustaining comes closest to religion for me. Wild places and things don't need me or you or borders or steel-plated walls. I think of the fight taking place back home over immigration and illegal aliens, spawned in no small part by racism and nationalism. Nacapule Canyon daily creates its own beauty in a language we have so far failed to learn.
We head back down the trail, leaving nothing behind and collecting trash along the way so the next hikers might understand that is a cared-for canyon, a holy place that deserves our respect.
Pam Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of CUTTHROAT: A Journal of the Arts. She is the author of several books of poems, including the award-winning Without Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees. Her latest book of poems is SCATTERED RISKS. She lives with her husband, writer William Pitt Root, outside of Bayfield, Colorado.
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