So I went walking in Death Valley last month. It’s something I do every two or three years,
and of course I see the ironies of complaining that it gets ever more crowded
and less wild each time, but it’s what I do.
And I’ve been going there for 30 years, long enough to be able to
justify some grumpiness about change and decay.
There was snow on the high ground in Death Valley when I was there this
time, and some of the main roads were closed, and some were still washed out from
last year, which made the various trails and attractions that were accessible more crowded than ever.
Echoing Edward Abbey, I have been known to rail
against “industrial tourism,” not least because it reduces vast, diverse landscapes
to a series of sites and trails, scenic overlooks, points of interest, and so
on. You’re told what to look for; you’re
told what to see. Giving these things names
– the Devil’s Cornfield, Dante’s View, Zabriskie Point - only adds to the
problem. The “attractions” become a kind of checklist that you can tick off and
have done with.
So yes, visitors flock to
these designated sites but more than that, it means that a lot of visitors see
nothing except those sites; the 3
million acres of Death Valley are perceived simply as territory you cross on
the way to the next attraction.
Now, I’m not a complete
misanthrope, and when I’m walking in the crowds of New York or London I’m very
happy to consider myself part of teeming humanity. But when I’m in the middle of 3 million acres
of desert then I think it’s reasonable to want a little space to myself.
But the beauty part of this form of industrial tourism
is that if you choose to go somewhere that hasn’t
been designated as a tourist site then chances are you’ll not see another soul. And so I found myself stopping the car in
various unmarked bits of land, pulling off the road and parking, then just
walking off into the desert, walking for as long as seemed natural, and then
turning around and walking back. I was
to say “walking off into some unremarkable
bit of desert,” but the fact is, all of Death Valley is remarkable. You’d have to be as insensate as a rock (or a
moody adolescent) to set foot in Death Valley and not experience a profound
sense of the gorgeously threatening grandeur of the earth.
I ended up here:
And here:
And here:
I think I could probably just
about find my way back to these places, but maybe I couldn’t, and in any case
it doesn’t seem to matter so very much.
It is, as they say, all good. The
fact that these places don’t have names – Nicholson’s Loop, for instance – is
all to the good, if you ask me.
Still, I think there are some questions to be asked
about whether a walk needs a destination; and I don’t have an absolute answer. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good
journey’s end, a peak or a ruin or a scenic overview, I do: but they never seem
either necessary or sufficient for a good walk.
And in my miscellaneous walking this time in Death Valley I did find myself
thinking about two lines from the Dylan song Isis “She said where you been?/I said no place special.” But maybe that line doesn’t apply to walking since
there’s no such thing as “no place special,” because all places are special one
way or another, although that’s not to say that they’re all equal, or equally
interesting.
A walk around the rim of a volcanic crater whether
alone or in the company of others probably has more going for it than a walk
round the parking lot at K-Mart, but that’s no reason only to walk around craters.
You can see how a man might tie himself in knots with
these matters.
Anyhow, on the way
back from Death Valley, coming through Yucca Valley, I did a walk I’d been
promising to do for a while, in the Pioneertown
Mountains Preserve, which consists of a “modest” 25,500 acres, and the walk was
modest too, about two miles in each direction up through Pipes Canyon to
something known as the Olson Ruins. The
map you pick up at the Ranger station has them as “Olsen Ruins” but most
sources have the name as Olson.
I think you know I like walking in ruins, though I hadn’t done any
research about these particular ruins. And
so I walked up a clearly marked and perhaps slightly too well kept trail (a ranger told me they had high school
“volunteers” to keep it in good condition), past petroglyphs, Joshua Trees that
had been burned in the Pioneertown fire some ten years back, past willow beds, through
small scattered patches of snow.
Compared with Death Valley the landscape was tame, and there were one
or two other walkers but fewer than you’d have found on any recognized trail in
Death Valley.
And in due course there were the ruins, picturesque to a degree, and a
reasonable journey’s end, but nothing on the grand scale – just somebody’s
house, the roof and windows gone, and most of the walls gone too, though there
was one room you could actually walk into, that was completely intact, and the
corners of the cabin were more or less solid - you could see the chicken wire
construction.
As I said, I hadn’t researched the Olson Ruins, but once I got home, I
did. The story goes that the cabin belonged to an onyx miner named John Olson who’d been mining since the 1920s. He was still there in 1945 and one day he encountered
a young man living rough in the desert, a man in his early 20s (sources seem uncertain about his exact age) named Edward E. Emmery,
a soldier recently returned from Burma who had just (oh the irony) deserted from Fort MacArthur.
Olson, in his mid 70s, invited Emmery to stay in the cabin, and
conditions must have been crowded, and the two guys must have been in each
other’s way. But that doesn’t seem much
of an explanation for why, a few days later, Emmery shot Olson and fled the scene,
returning to the open desert, taking food from the cabin with him..
Four days later Olson was still alive and was discovered by friends and
taken to hospital, but he died there. Emmery was caught a few days after
that. Emmery claimed the shooting was accidental,
but nobody believed him, and he was charged with murder. I haven’t been able to find out what happened
to Emmery.
A cabin makes a good destination for a walk (there are quite
a few in Death Valley – and indeed a book about them), a ruined cabin is even
better, but a ruined murder cabin – ah,
that’s the stuff. I’m sure they’d get
more visitors if they named it The Olson Murder Ruins, but I’m very glad they
don’t.
