Pinacate Recon

Pinacate Recon LARRY A. MAY If it weren’t for crazy Hal Coss,1 I would have missed falling in love with the Pinacate. Even today I get goose bumps just thinking about the place. The Pinacate shaped my life. When I came back from Vietnam, where I had been wounded by shrapnel, I was having physical difficulties, plus I had to redo my junior year because I had been drafted in mid-semester. Fresh out of the Army and veteran’s hospitals, I was only able to take two classes, sometimes three. When I returned to the University of Arizona that spring of 1969, my father pushed me around in a wheelchair to get me registered. I couldn’t write with my right hand, and I hadn’t learned to write with my left—I took my class notes with a tape recorder. Have you ever taken organic chemistry by tape recorder? I made it through and did okay, but it was hard. Soon I left the wheelchair behind. To pay my way through school and support my wife, Susan, who was also attending the university, I went to work out at Saguaro National Monument (now Park) as a seasonal ranger, starting out working for Hal.2 I really enjoyed working with him, usually on weekends, some nights, and all holidays. In the library at Saguaro I would devour every book on plants, animals, geology, history, you name it. I read practically the whole library out there. The rest of my time was dedicated to university studies. Two books in particular caught my attention. One was Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava. Another was New Trails in Mexico. Hal loaned me his personal copies so I could read them at home. I read them and reread them completely. They were like fishhooks, and I swallowed them right down to the sinker, both of them. Then I tried to find information on the areas that Lumholtz and Hornaday described in their early journeys into that country, but I couldn’t find very much. Ronald Ives had some good articles, and Julian Hayden was starting to fill the blanks LARRY MAY served twenty-eight years with the National Park Service and now lives in Page, Arizona, with his wife, Susan. He earned early fame for his whirlwind research trips to the Pinacate, including a four-year stretch when he made over 120 trips and spent 378 days in the field. As he looks back, he says that the books by Hornaday and Lumholtz sparked his relentless pursuits. Journal of the Southwest 49, 2 (Summer 2007) : 259-303 260 ✜ JOURNAL OF THE SOUTHWEST of archaeology. William Bull, geomorphologist, and Joseph Schreiber, another geologist at the U of A, steered me to other material, including work by graduate students Jim Gutmann and Charles Wood, and to the classic The Changing Mile, by Hastings and Turner. That material just whetted my desire to go to see that desert country for myself. In seeking empty and relatively little known places, I happily found one fairly close to Tucson. That led to my first trip to the Pinacate. My first was a five-day trip into the Pinacate without any good maps, only verbal guidance from Hal. A ranger friend, Rich Slonaker, came with me. Through trial and error we somehow found our way to MacDougal and Molina craters, down to Moon Crater, and into the sands just below it. The trip was rough for a beginner in the Pinacate, but that desert landscape enchanted me with its magnificent shield volcano, lava flows, and stark mantle of shifting dunes. I remember stopping and finding water in Papago Tanks and seeing a few of the craters for my first time. Oh! I’ve got goose bumps again! Right then I decided that I would go to on to graduate school but I would start researching the region now, in my junior year, to get a head start. So I began exploring and mapping every track and trail—every single one of them. I followed woodcutter trails and looked for a way to circumnavigate the mountain, if there was one. In some cases there had been maybe just...