and I imagine Earth will again resemble this haunting and seemingly infinite land when no one remains to appreciate it.
The Sierra del Pinacate embodies some of North America’s most striking contemporary themes: wilderness exploration, space travel, environment, contraband, nature’s delicate balance, immigration, and solitude. In the course of my occasional wanderings there by foot and truck, I have uncovered shining exemplars of them all.
When I first visited the Pinacate in the mid-1980s, the region fell under the jurisdiction of a Mexican bureaucracy seemingly too stingy to maintain the land’s pristine qualities. It was a staging ground for illegal foot and contraband air traffic, a feature that has changed only somewhat. Longtime Pinacate junkies—for the most part, an agreeably ornery bunch of weathered scientists, adventuresome artists, and hard-core campers—fear that more visitors there will forever damage the delicate landscape and ruin their magnificent and eerie turf. The Pinacate beetle, Eleodes armata, which when threatened stands on its head and gives off a slightly foul odor, provides both the region’s name and perhaps the best perspective from which to view this unfriendly land. Militant naturalist writer Edward Abbey, a man intimate with inhospitable desert land, described the Pinacate terrain as “the bleakest, flattest, hottest, grittiest, grimmest, dreariest, ugliest, most useless, most senseless desert of them all.”
Fernando Lizárraga Tostado, the Pinacate’s one-man ranger-caretaker-policeman-host-naturalist for most of the 1980s, appreciated the capricious relationship man has had to the land here. He worked for a Mexican ministry that appropriated less money for maintaining the Sierra del Pinacate than the U.S. National Park Service allotted for toilet paper in its adjoining land. Back then, Fernando told me, his bosses took away the trailer that housed his family and office, and he seldom got enough gas money to top off the tank in his pickup.
For many years, an American group gave informal aid to ecological causes in Mexico, including efforts to protect the Pinacate. The organization, Friends of ProNatura, gave a camera to Fernando as well as a two-way radio, typewriter, gas money, and data on bighorn sheep that roam back and forth between Mexico and the United States. In 1993, after years of agitation from naturalists, wilderness advocates, and environmentalists from both countries, the Mexican government declared the region a Biosphere Reserve, part of which lies within the Patrimony of Humanity—a UNESCO program that makes funds and preservation possible—in the Upper Gulf of California. Officially, the land is called La Reserva de La Biósfera de El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, and it includes the Sierra Blanca range to the south and the sand dunes closer to the Golfo de California on the west.
Fernando, in plaid shirt and brown trousers, invited me into his pickup after we met for breakfast in the Mexican border town of Sonoyta. “To use the Pinacate,” he instructed as we headed down the highway, “you must know the rules: The park is not closed to the public, but you have to register with me.” Even then, visitors were restricted to Cerro Colorado and Elegante Crater. Before using the land, visitors had to sign the Pinacate Pledge: “I am aware of the established rules and promise to promote conservation of this marvelous open-air museum.” Under a new system gradually implemented in the late 1990s, Mexico’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources has opened a visitor’s center and set up picnic tables at designated campgrounds. With more elaborate and explicit rules regulating noise, pets, hiking, cooking, and alcohol, the guidelines boil down to this: Behave yourselves!
Eventually Fernando and I drove south in his battered, muddy Chevy pickup, down narrow roads lined with clumps of creosote bushes and small paloverde trees. In the western distance, two low volcanoes interrupted the desert flatness. Fernando pointed out the tracks of some bighorn sheep. “The sheep—they’re illegal to capture, but we have hunters who come in here and shoot them for sport. They just want them for trophies. Someday they’ll be in danger of completely disappearing. For many years the hunters had an orgy of blood here.”
Lizárraga pointed to Celaya, a volcanic mountain he boasted was “rich in human history.” A little bit farther on he stopped the truck not far from Celaya and motioned me to follow him on foot. We stood near a slightly shaded area just above a dry natural water tank. “A long time ago an Indian community lived nearby,” he said, referring to the Hiac’ed O’odham, better known as the Sand Papago. More immediate to Fernando, though, was that for decades a Tucson archaeologist named Julian Hayden had come to the Pinacate and knew the contours of its land better than any other human. “I call this spot ‘Julian’s Fireplace.’ He stays here when he comes. He’s here for a day and a half and then he leaves. He talks to the coyotes, Julian does. He has good conversations with them! When Ron Ives died”—Ives was among the first modern scientists to study the region—“Julian tossed his ashes off the top of a hill near here. I want to erect a plaque here marking ‘Julian’s Fireplace.’ We call him ‘El Burro Viejo.’” A picture of the Old Burro hung prominently on the wall of Fernando’s home. After El Burro Viejo died in 1998 at age 87, some of his ashes were spread near Julian’s Fireplace.
Back in the truck we passed some kids kicking around a soccer ball at a few shacks that make up an ejido—a government-designated community on cooperatively tilled land. “They farm alfalfa, wheat, and cotton,” Fernando explained. “At least when there’s rain. And when it comes, it’s sudden. The sky darkens and the ground gets drunk.”
A few miles farther on we saw a couple of ragged men tending some goats. “There’s another ejido here, but it’s just a small operation. That little area”—we drove past a few ramshackle buildings by the road—“that’s Papalote. Illegals cross there up into a big arroyo on the U.S. side. From there they go to La Paloma, a ranch west of Organ Pipe,” the 516-square-mile national monument in Arizona just north of the border.
Poachers arrived soon after Highway 2 was paved in the 1950s. They hunted, they set up clandestine mining operations, and they carted away ironwood trees. The wood made good furniture and even-burning fires—and, they figured, it wasn’t doing anyone any good wasting away in El Gran Desierto. Depleting the Pinacate’s ironwood forest disrupted different food chains, including that of the bighorn sheep, who munch the leaves of ironwood and other trees for survival. When the poaching of ironwood trees by colonists became frequent in the mid-1980s, Fernando once confronted some poachers and switched from affable naturalist to authoritarian cop: Surrender your settlement documents, he reportedly ordered, or you’ll see the army next. The men had Fernando outnumbered and outgunned, but they gave up. At one point he was actually paying squatters not to cut a particularly large ironwood tree.
Just off the highway Fernando spotted tire tracks on a new, unauthorized dirt road heading back to a supposedly abandoned cinder mine. Cinder mining—illegal in the Pinacate—involves processing small cinder particles built up into cones that result from volcanic eruptions. The cinder itself finds commercial use as blocks and other construction material. Fernando checked the tracks, then talked with a tired old man we found sitting beneath a lean-to he had made from the nearest building material, the ribs of dead cactuses. “We have problems with unauthorized trails. I’ll have to call headquarters about this.”
Soon we arrived at the home of Pablo, a spry 71-year-old who lived next to a clandestine cinder mine which operated only a few months of the year. In season, the cinder from Pablo’s mine was trucked north across the border to a construction company in Phoenix. Pablo, the off-season caretaker for the mine’s foreign owner, was at this particular moment fixing his lunch. A grandson 50 years younger lived with him in a spare two-room shack with chickens and a dog underfoot. Pablo was delighted to have company and rambled on about his life and wives.
“Heh-heh, I like the young ones. I’m a robaverde. How do you say that in English?”
“You’re robbing the cradle,” I suggested.
Fernando unloaded two oil drums filled with water, enough to last Pablo until his next visit the following week. As we left, Pablo
