Trekking Along the Anti-Trail

MECCA HILLS WILDERNESS —  Hall Newbegin and his 50-pound backpack had a little 68-mile walk through the wilderness to reach this desert badland. No big deal for the 33-year-old, single Berkeley resident, who, with an environmental group called Desert Survivors, takes this sort of trip every so often as a getaway treat. This way, though, the trek wasn’t just for fun.

On this trip, Desert Survivors was marking the first complete phase of a long-term project--a border-to-border Desert Trail from Mexico to Canada. Since Feb. 3, members from as far away as Kansas have joined two- or three-day relay teams on an inaugural trek of the route through California. By mid-2002, they plan to cover all 656 miles, from the Mexican border through Death Valley National Park, passing along the group’s banner on each relay leg.

Newbegin hiked two relay segments before reaching Mecca Hills, just north of the Salton Sea in Riverside County, taking a week’s vacation for the cause. “You’re carrying this banner,” he says, “and the banner is going to make it to the border of Canada some day. That makes it exciting. It makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger.”

The Desert Trail was dreamed up 30 years ago as an anti-trail of sorts, taking literally the “leave no trace” ethos of the environmental movement. Unlike the Pacific Crest Trail or other long-distance hiking thoroughfares, the Desert Trail will have no signs, markers or constructed paths. Instead, it will be marked only on maps--in guidebooks put together by volunteers--and will be defined by compass bearings and landmarks.

The route crosses animal trails, desert washes, earthquake faults and back-country canyons, via some of the most remote lands in the West. So far, only the California route is finalized and detailed in guidebooks published by Desert Survivors.

In California, even experienced backpackers tend to avoid the desert, says Steve Tabor, president of Desert Survivors. It’s hard to rally public support to protect a land that people are afraid of, he says, the dumping ground for prisons, nuclear waste and trash. But the idea of a continuous desert route--the only one of its kind, through pinyon-juniper forests, atop sand dunes, alongside the stomping grounds of wild horses--might be intriguing enough to beckon a new generation of environmental activists to the land. “The Desert Trail fascinates people when they hear about it,” Tabor says.

Sometimes, though, people who spot the Desert Survivors’ T-shirts and hats--not to mention their bulging backpacks--mistake members for survivalists, or wonder if they have some connection with a “reality TV” show.

Actually, the group’s 850 members include longtime environmental activists and hikers in their 80s. Among the dozen diverse participants in Mecca Hills were a single mother of a 3-year-old, a 41-year-old software engineer from Palo Alto with her two teenage daughters, and a Borrego Springs attorney with his 15-year-old son.

For Bill Spreng, a 58-year-old telephone installer from Victorville, the Mecca Hills trip was his 60th in 11 years with Desert Survivors. This time, though, he finally got to walk the official Desert Trail in California, the group’s banner in tow, representing the work he and other volunteers did to determine the route. “It feels,” he says, “like I’m a pioneer.”

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The idea for a desert trail began with Oregon environmentalist Russell Pengelly in the early 1970s.

One day, he stood atop Steens Mountain and gazed across the southeast Oregon desert. There should be a long-distance hiking trail through desert lands, he thought, similar to the ones that wind through mountains. He started writing and talking about the idea, and, in 1972, with dozens of supporters, incorporated a group called the Desert Trail Assn. The group began coordinating volunteer efforts to determine a route through Oregon, California and Nevada.

So far, 1,100 miles of the trail has been mapped in California and Nevada. Work continues on mapping the remainder of the route through Oregon and, tentatively, through parts of Idaho and Montana.

Volunteers don’t have to get government approval for the route, because they aren’t clearing brush or erecting markers on public land. But they did seek advice from public agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management district in Hines, Ore., which now shows part of the Desert Trail on its area maps.

Another land bureau office, in northeastern California, worked with

volunteers on a section of the trail’s guidebook that covers High Rock Canyon, a National Historic Site. The guidebook will help visitors navigate the canyon, which is a four-hour drive from Reno, the nearest metropolitan area, says Roger Farschon, an ecologist in the land bureau’s Cedarville, Calif., office. “It provides a lot of good information . . . for people who want to get off those roads,” he says. “It’s a great service that the Desert Trail Assn. is doing.”

In California, Desert Trail Assn. volunteers began work on a preliminary route in 1975 and, in 1997, handed the effort over to Desert Survivors, under Tabor’s direction. Desert Survivors is a nonprofit group, separate from the Desert Trail Assn., that leads regular backpacking expeditions and works on desert-protection issues.

Founded in 1978, the group has lobbied for a proposal to protect the habitat of bighorn sheep and for the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, which preserves more than 6 million acres of desert land.

In the last three years, hundreds of members have joined Tabor on exploratory trips for the Desert Trail. Tabor eventually streamlined much of the earlier proposed route, dividing it into shorter, more easily hiked segments and adding wilderness areas that were created by the California Desert Protection Act. Guidebooks in hand, hikers who are experienced and careful will easily be able to find their way without markers, Tabor says, and get a true wilderness experience.

By contrast, on the 2,167-mile Appalachian Trail, there are thousands of markers to help hikers, who often bring along maps as well, says chief ranger Robert Gray of the National Park Service. Trees and boulders along the trail are marked with paint, and wooden signs point the way through the Appalachian Mountains from Maine to north Georgia.

But remote desert areas typically don’t have markers or many physically constructed trails, says Jim Foote, an outdoor recreation planner for the land bureau in Palm Springs. His office oversees the 24,200-acre Mecca Hills Wilderness, an area that has been detailed in several guidebooks. A concept like the Desert Trail is fine, he says, “as long as [the guidebook] makes it very clear that there are inherent risks of traveling in the back country without trails.”

In the desert’s back country, you can’t count on shade, reliable water sources or anyone to come along for help (and, in places such as Mecca Hills, cell phones don’t always work).

The Desert Survivors’ guidebooks include pages of warnings on possible hazards, including flash floods, rattlesnakes and rabid coyotes, and, Tabor, the group’s president, recommends gear such as “a comb to flick off cholla cactus joints”--the short, bristly kind--and pliers and tweezers for longer cactus needles.

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Spend enough time in the desert, the way Tabor has, and you know how to watch for the half-moon shaped burrows of the desert tortoise. You read the story of animal tracks, maybe following a kit fox’s pounce on a zebra-tailed lizard--which, Tabor insists, will pose for a picture if you talk to it softly in a sing-song voice.

Tabor, 51, a college dropout, moved to California from Connecticut in 1971, camping in Humboldt County and surviving on fish, nuts and cattails for six months. In public libraries, he studied the natural history, geography and geology of the California desert, a place that he considered to be one of the last uncharted wildernesses in America. He took jobs as a warehouseman and factory hand and, in between, took solo treks through the deserts, carrying up to 95 pounds on his back.

These days, Tabor, who is single, works as a customer-service representative for an arts supply company. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the land--”This part of the rock is 4 million years old; this part is 1.7 billion”--he has the air of an amiable professor. On the trail, he uses a walking stick and wears boots half a size bigger than usual because his feet swell in the heat.

Tabor is not paid for his work on the Desert Trail. It’s enough for him to be able to walk the trail, he says, and watch people fall in love with long-ignored places like Mecca Hills Wilderness.

Mecca Hills is 15 miles southeast of Indio, a place of narrow, steep-walled canyons and famous badlands--twisted, eroded hills so barren that only the hardiest plants and animals can survive. “The problem with the desert,” Tabor says, “is that people have a bad impression of it. They think it’s desolate, and it’s full of rattlesnakes and hoodlums. What we’re trying to say is, ‘Hey, this is like any other [land]’. . . . People to this day don’t believe us when we say we go on desert backpacks.” They ask: “Well, did anybody die?”

Nobody has died on a Desert Survivors trip, but a few people have suffered sprained ankles or heat exhaustion. On one trip, in Sheephole Valley near Twentynine Palms, a woman refused to carry her backpack, so other members took turns hauling it for her. That was not a difficult hike, by Desert Survivors’ standards, but since then, Tabor has stopped listing any trips as “easy.”

It’s hard to describe the romance of the desert, says Newbegin, the relay-team member from Berkeley. “I don’t know what the appeal is,” he says. “Some things just click with you. It’s something about the openness of it, and the way it feels.” Life becomes simple, living off a backpack pared to the basics--no change of clothes, just rain gear and a fleece sweater, a compass and maps, smoked tofu and dried salami.

After the Mecca Hills hike, Newbegin had a 10-hour drive home and then went right to work, running a small business. “This trip was fantastic,” says Newbegin, who, for a living makes soap, tea and incense from wild herbs and native Western plant trimmings. “It completely recharged me and calmed my mind down.”

In fact, on the day he got home, he rooted around for his Desert Survivors newsletter. He wanted to see what trip he could take next.

For more information: https://www.desert-survivors.org.