HORNADAY AND HIS CREW NAMED A CRATER after one of their own, Godfrey Sykes, who dutifully measured the height of each mountain climbed, the depth of each crater descended, and the diameter of each volcano hiked. “You seem to stand at the gateway to the hereafter,” Hornaday wrote of Sykes Crater. “The hole in the earth is so vast”—almost 750 feet deep—“and its bottom is so far away, it looks as if it might go down to the center of the earth.” Another volcano, Hornaday wrote, “was like Dante’s Inferno on the half shell.”
Zoologist Hornaday’s specific mission was to gather data about animal life in the Pinacate, a task he carried out with increasing bloodthirstiness. He and the others started off with solemn vows to kill sheep only for meat, but as their time in the dry-heat wilderness passed, the author—also a taxidermist—rationalized killing after killing, insisting that each was intended for a museum. Then he’d retreat into righteousness: “The sheep of the Pinacate could easily be exterminated in three years or less by the Mexicans of the Sonoyta Valley for meat or by the scores of American sportsmen who are willing to go to the farthest corner of Hades itself for mountain sheep.”
Campos de fuego, the extravagant Mexican science fiction, leads the reader from ground level, where the troops spy a lion, into a mile-long underground cave, a virtual city with bronze images of Christ and skulls, “which appeared to belong to a race of giants.” By attaching their tents to cactus ribs, the group parachute to the bottom of a crater, where they discover a crevice, behind which a passageway leads them into a labyrinth of underground tunnels and an abyss, “which it seemed would take us to the center of the earth.”
Both Hornaday and Esquer alluded to an underground life, and no wonder—the most volatile activity takes place below the earth’s surface, not above it. The peaks are not tall by any standards—the highest stands only 4,235 feet above sea level—and the surface, for the most part, lacks shade and water. The mountains were formed when the earth retched up ash and rock and flame. And that is the secret source of the Pinacate’s power: its tremendous energy comes from underground rather than from all that later metamorphosed on its surface.
FEW PEOPLE HAVE MADE PRACTICAL USE of the Pinacate region—legal, anyway—because it offers so little other than primitive camping and mental cleansing. It resembles the moon and it leads to hell. With the former in mind, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and four other NASA astronauts came here in early 1970 to train for the Apollo 14 lunar flight. They could not have picked a more appropriate spot. They brought their Module Equipment Transporter—a hand-pulled cart nicknamed Rickshaw—and studied the remarkable geologic features the Pinacate offers. The astronauts’ trip to the region has never been a secret, but it has never been publicized, either.
Using word of mouth as our guide, Tucson astronomer Bill Hartmann and I set out one blistering hot day to find NASA’s needle in the Pinacate haystack. We were searching for a rock, rumored to be on the lip of a particular crater, where the moon-walkers literally left their mark. We each picked an area to search. I took a westward strip within 50 feet of the lip itself; Hartmann looked on the next hundred-foot outer ring. The rock we sought was said to be virtually flat, distinguished from a thousand other similar rocks only by scratches etched upon it decades earlier. The futility of the search was matched only by the lack of anything else to do. This was the only pinball machine in town. After a while my enthusiasm waned, and the foolish optimism I had brought to the task decreased with it. Bill backtracked over my section while I wandered aimlessly looking elsewhere.
“Here it is!” Hartmann shouted. “Here’s the rock!”
I ran over. There it rested—a table-top rock of weathered basalt with a dark brown desert varnish. It read:
NASA 2/16/70
APOLLO 14
and the name Hilda. Hilda’s identity should be left to the imagination; likewise the location of the rock, for NASA’s rock symbolizes the unity of the core of the earth, the surface itself, and the sky beyond. It links the Pleistocene epoch of a million years ago with space travel. At that spot deep in the Sonoran Desert, nature and technology are married.
I won’t tell you where it is. If the site of the NASA rock were revealed, someone would roar through the Pinacate from the south in an ATV, which is strictly prohibited, and dig it out to smuggle back into the United States. I will tease you with this, however: The crater nearest the rock is named for the secretary of Mexico’s Departamento de Fomento at the time of William Hornaday’s trip.
I WAS UNPREPARED FOR HOW PROTECTIVE the handful of Pinacate buffs would be when they learned I’d be writing about their land. They all spoke of the region’s nakedness, its vulnerability, its virginity. The Pirates of the Pinacate, as I came to call the regulars, reminded me of a warning made by Daniel MacDougal, the botanist on Hornaday’s journey: “If you enter the deserts to study them, go in a receptive and tolerant frame of mind or do not go at all.”
“I’d hate to turn the public on to the Pinacate,” one of the pirates said. “It’s already so fragile.” Another guardedly showed me a large pot she had found, intact, on her annual camping trip. “The sand had been blowing over it for centuries. A little bit of it was sticking up, and we kept on digging. Very carefully. I knew in an instant what we had found.” An archaeologist has dated the pot from the 1300s, the days of the Sand Papago. A photographer no longer exhibits his pictures of the Pinacate, so fearful is he of enlarging the handful of Pinacate buffs: “The people who go there care.” Another desert rat simply clammed up when I asked his favorite campground. You’d think I had demanded the number of his Swiss bank account.
In a way, I had. After a few trips into the Sierra del Pinacate, I sensed the source of their fears and the treasure they hoarded. On the floor of one sandy and rocky crater, I was surrounded by bunches of saguaro and ocotillo cactus and clusters of mesquite and creosote. Looking out from the rim of another crater, it seemed a holocaust had struck Earth and this was all that remained. From a rugged hillside, I turned to find the source of distant thunder cutting through a land awash in silence: a dozen bighorn sheep were galloping eastward across the desert floor. From my elevation I was able to follow their graceful strides for miles. Never have I seen air so extravagantly clear, so brutally still.
Most of the Pinacate’s rattlers, vultures, and javelinas have never confronted shotguns, Nikons, or Jeeps. It reminded me of the volcanic Galápagos Islands, whose animals are likewise innocent of our imperial tendencies. Slabs of shimmering lava lie about the sides of some Pinacate volcanoes; barrel cactus, which the sheep break up with their hooves for moisture, spring from cracks in the rocky soil. Above ground, it is the Great Stinking Desert at its greatest and most stinking. New Mexico artist P. A. Nisbet speaks of “atmospheric clarity” and “a magical sense of deep space” when describing the Pinacate. The range, he says, “has the character of mystery and the quality of darkness about it. It’s primeval, terrifying, and reassuring at the same time. You feel as if you’re walking through the Pleistocene age.”
The pirates’ protectiveness was understandable; elitist antagonism was something else. Soon after returning from one of my trips, a call came in from out of state, quite unsolicited, from a man I didn’t know. He had heard through the grapevine that I hoped to write about his Pinacate for a weekly newspaper. “It’s a sacred place, and it shouldn’t be revealed to common street people,” his tirade began. “I don’t see any reason to draw attention to that area. It has a pristine quality, but you can sense the deterioration with each additional visitor. Last time I went I didn’t see another human for an entire week. I had 360-degree open vistas the whole time. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—they’re just amusement parks compared with the Pinacate. I’ve made 50 trips there over the past ten years. Most people who go there now are true explorers or geologists or anthropologists—scientists who have a love for the desert. If not another person were to find out about the Pinacate, except by his own personal exploration, well, that’d be fine. It’s one of the last strongholds of the Sonoran Desert.”
The pirates, of course, are further bothered by the more recent and better-organized Pinacate administration. “It’s hard to get around now,” one told me. “I’ve seen