the birds were awake yet. Made my way slowly down the
last 15 miles of bad dirt road. The forest at the
camp looks like the fir forests high on Vermont
mountains. Then a couple miles along yuccas start to
appear. The big pines give way to junipers and
further down sotol cactus, until at the bottom you're
back to desert.
Chiricauhua National Monument is a geologic wonder,
something to do with tilted uplifts, splits and
fissures and big time erosion until what is left is
chimneys of all shapes and one size, very big. I
thought I'd bike up the canyon to the trailheads but
after 3 miles I felt about to die. So I turned
around, flashed down the road back to the campground
and got the car. Took a nice hike through the rock
formations. About half way back to the car I heard
some clomping behind me. A tour group riding mules
passed by carrying bodies that made even the sweaty
animals look good.
Did some housecleaning this afternoon. The car and
trailer look like they've been mud wrestling after the
30 miles of dry dirt roads. And dust got into
everything. Emptied the cooler and washed it, shook
out all the bedding and wiped down everything in the
galley. I still need to find a car wash.
Bought a book at the visitor's center, about the
cavalry out of Fort Bowie, near here, and their
pursuit of the Apaches led by Cochise and then
Geronimo in the 1880's. Most of the story is
predictable: white settlers, mail routes all moving
into Indian territory. Indians both fighting back and
stealing horses and livestock as they'd done
intertribally for ever. The army finally winning and
sending the Indians to the reservation. But Geronimo
had so angered the government that his tribe was first
sent to an arid desert prison then moved by train to
Florida, to a reservation in Tennessee and finally,
after Indian rights organizations (and some
progressive cavalry commanders who understood the
natives plight) got involved, allowed to return to an
Apache reservation in Arizona in the late 1890's.
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