My first run after moving to California’s Eastern Sierra was up a steep trail in the Pine Creek Canyon. Over the years, I would return to it again and again. It was my heartbreak trail; it was my good news trail; it was the trail I went to when I wasn’t sure how I was doing and wanted so badly to know. Without thinking, I’d hop in my car, and suddenly there I’d be, standing in the shadow of the trail’s three thousand vertical feet of switchbacks.

I had probably ran it fifty times before the rains came that washed away more than a quarter-mile of trail. It was a summer of relentless, monsoonal storms—unusual for that liminal space where the Great Basin rises to meet the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

That summer, the first landslide ripped down from a gully in Lundy Canyon. Not even a week had passed since a trail crew rebuilt the rock walls that held the trail in place before another storm came to rebury those hours of labor under ten feet of muddy rubble.

It’s no wonder that I run when the world feels uncertain, as the body in motion can indeed change the physical expression of thinking. 

Big Pine Pass slid, mud running hundreds of feet down its slope. Parker bench was buried in car-sized glacial erratics. The road to North Lake was covered in a hundred-foot-wide debris flow that trapped fifty cars at the trailhead. And then Pine Creek slid—not with mud, but with talus, as sediment beneath the boulders became so saturated from the weeks of rain that its slope crumbled, slowly moving tons of boulders downhill, burying eighty-year-old sections of rock retaining walls.

RELATED: The Future Is Wilder

Of course, trail runners—and indeed, all people—re witness to these relics of a changing climate. Who remains unaffected by the ways that, what was once familiar can become, in an instant, a stranger? As frequent visitors to these landscapes, we need to find ways to work through the coupling of a deep sense of place with the fear of it changing irreversibly, and the ways that coupling might harm us.

The first time I returned to Pine Creek Pass, the sky had a Cimmerian gloom. Only a few days had passed since the trail was buried in the slide and already, another monsoon grumbled overhead. I poked my way up the sharp granite boulders, wary of unsettled rock. It had not been long since a hiker on a similar slope had stepped on a two-ton boulder that shifted, trapping his body beneath the rock for sixteen hours before he was, miraculously, pulled out alive.

The scattered lodgepole pines thinned as I climbed. Above treeline, I could see more than a dozen gullies carved out of the high slopes, possible slide paths outlined in shadow, each one liable to dislodge above me. The sky ruddied and groaned. It started to hail. I was hesitant to continue higher, where my body might act as a lightning rod to the electrical storm I could feel building around me.

Retracing my steps to the sheltering woods, I watched as one gully after another started to release small debris flows, thin fingers of mud reaching down the mountain in stuttering creeps.

Running is my mind’s well-worn sieve; I rely on the familiar trail to beat order into unstructured anxieties. In college, a professor told me once that the neural pathways our brains use as we chart familiar thoughts—directions, a recipe we know by heart, the lyrics to a favorite song—change depending on whether our bodies are in motion.

With each mile, whatever uncertainty I’ve been stuck on shapeshifts and stills. Thoughts begin to congregate like starlings, murmurating into dramatic, dark shapes as they do. It’s no wonder that I run when the world feels uncertain, as the body in motion can indeed change the physical expression of thinking. 

What does one make of a trail that has become unrecognizable? How might we relearn to love when the object of our attention has been so altered? 

I am searching for ways for running to transform me—where I once looked for quiet, now I hunger for ways that my affection for landscape can extend beyond what environmental writer Elizabeth Rush calls endsickness in her book about witnessing America’s disappearing coasts. Endsickness is “its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon.”

But what care, I wonder, can endure beyond that point of no return? What tenderness exists in the space between hope and fear? Maybe running—which has always acted as scaffolding for my disorientation—could be a way for me to see it.

What does one make of a trail that has become unrecognizable? How might we relearn to love when the object of our attention has been so altered? 

None of the Eastern Sierra’s trails that buried that summer were rebuilt the same, whether from a lack of resources or a lack of will. The endless storms gave summer a sharp edge which, by August, was replaced by the more familiar ache of wildfire smoke, remnants from the lightning that accompanied each storm. I wondered how long it would be until this rising awe would itself function as a familiar benchmark, the ledger against which I measure the turn of years to come. 

The smoke chased me off the trails for the rest of the summer, and in the fall, snow came early and kept me out of high places through the rest of that year. But when the days rewarmed, I found myself once again driving up the 12 percent grade through aspen groves unfurling their first green leaves of the season. Beneath Pine Creek Pass, the shade still bit with winter’s chill. Unsure of what the trail might hold, I started to run.

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Driving east along U.S. Highway 20, barren hills intersect the horizon even as they seem to stay a certain distance away, no matter how long you keep driving. This far northwestern corner of the Great Basin is a naturally arid region, sheltered from Pacific storms by the Cascade Mountains that run along Oregon’s center. Still, for the last century, the area has been home to intense, industrial agriculture.

Compared to Oregon’s edenic Willamette Valley to the west, or hundred-thousand–head cattle operations in the state’s eastern flank, central Oregon has relatively small agricultural outputs — and yet the region’s farms have an outsized impact on local water budgets. After decades of single-crop farming —mostly feed crops like alfalfa that are exported—the landscape has been rendered a gray-beige smudge by dust carried in the stale wind.

Because of these crops’ high water needs, groundwater is being extracted faster than it can be replenished. Recently, state agencies carbon-dated agricultural well water and found that it was 8,000 years old. The water being used to grow crops in the desert is glacial melt from the end of the Ice Age. Tapping those aquifers would mark an irreversible point of departure. It would take another Ice Age for those underground basins to be replenished.

Some 10,000 years ago, the ice began to retreat. People came. The Wasco, Warm Springs, and Paiute communities flourished here for millennia, following elk, gathering berries. It wasn’t until colonial settlement that the land began to feel squeezed for resources. Now, some Indigenous farmers are asking whether there’s a future for food-growing agriculturists in a watershed on the brink of running dry.

“It was like that everywhere here when we started,” Spring Alaska Schreiner says, gesturing to a lone patch of crisped invasive grass near her property line. “A white man’s problem,” she sighs as she points at the last of the fallow earth, “and now a Native woman’s here to fix it.”

Four years ago, Schreiner, who is Inupiaq from the Kingukmuit Clan, bought a few acres in Deschutes County, Oregon, twenty minutes outside of Bend, with the intention of using Indigenous stewardship techniques to regenerate the land. She called it Sakari Farm.

In its short tenure, Sakari has become a stronghold of the community. Schreiner brings youth out from the neighboring Warm Springs Tribe, on whose ancestral territory the farm is located. Kids from the tribe pick their own plant medicines and prepare them as teas to sell. Beyond what is used to make the hot sauces and other products sold for profit in the farm store, almost all of the food that they grow is sent to the tribe through grant-funded food security programs. It has been such a successful venture that the Oregon Food Bank purchased a walk-in cooler for the farm to store their produce on the reservation.

Nevertheless, when I ask Schreiner about her future plans for the burgeoning farm, she doesn’t miss a beat.

“I think it’s going to end.”

I traveled to Sakari this August expecting to write about the resilience of the Hopi-style dryland farming I knew the farm had implemented earlier that summer. Schreiner laughs when she tells me nothing took. For her, it’s still research: “You might fail. Then you stop and you move on.”

Schreiner thinks the farm will have five years left, if they’re lucky. When the water runs out, she’ll accept that the vision has ended. She’ll move on.

Healthy soil has an intoxicating, musty smell. It comes from geosmin, a compound produced by microbes in nutrient-rich topsoil. If you took a deep breath upon plunging your hands into the dark earth, the geosmin-rich M. vaccae microbes you would inhale would ramp up the production of serotonin and norepinephrine in your brain, and grounding your calm. , these microbes have been shown to successfully treat anxiety disorders and PTSD. The soil beneath us, when we tend it, tends us back.

But 75 billion tons of soil are lost every year, on biodiversity. Without the deep roots of diverse, functioning ecosystems, monocropped plots are vulnerable to erosion from strong rain and the plodding feet of livestock—even a light wind on a dry summer day can cause earth to turn airborne.

“It’s hard to comprehend,” Brooke Hayes, a PhD student researching soil health at the University of Victoria says. “It works out to ten tons [of soil lost] per person per year. That’s 20 pounds a meal.” A week’s worth of meals costs several bathtubs’ worth of soil.

Additionally, industrial agriculture’s reliance on chemicals reduces soil’s organic matter and can limit the absorptive capacity of farmlands, .  Like the crust of a shriveled kitchen sponge that should have been tossed out months ago, intensively-farmed soil loses the ability to capture water from irrigation and storms. The tremendous pace of this attrition means that, under business-as-usual practices, some soil scientists have predicted . Then, there will be no arable soil left to plant into.

This dusty, hungry vision of the future is, of course, not an inevitability. Regenerative agricultural practices like those that Indigenous peoples have been practicing for millennia could prevent the worst outcomes for food and water scarcity. in organic matter in soil can result in 20,000 more gallons of soil-water-content per acre. Extrapolated out to a national scale, a one-percent increase in organic matter in all of America’s croplands would let those lands “store the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in 150 days,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

And practices like companion planting, stewarding the same seed stock from one generation to the next, and working alongside the seasons—practices that Sakari, and many other small and Indigenous farmers have employed for generations— in the soil and lead to more resilient and productive crops.

“When we keep the soil intact, we allow diverse habitats to form underground. Every time we disturb the soil, we destroy those habitats and kill those organisms that can cycle nutrients and provide a protective layer against disease-carrying organisms,” says Hayes.

Indigenous farming practices can be so low-impact that settler cultures often don’t even recognize them as farming, although the intentional cultivation of plant communities has likely occurred across most of North America (research indicates that  areas now read as wilderness were, in fact, food forests stewarded by Indigenous groups before they were dispossessed from their lands). Intercropping, agroforestry, and controlled burning are all practices that have been used continuously for millennia in some regions of the Americas.

Today, such low-intensity practices wouldn’t meet the land-use thresholds necessary for farmers in Deschutes County to keep their rights to agricultural water use. Like much of the aridifying west, Deschutes County is in a drought. A few days before I had arrived at the farm, the water had been shut off. For the rest of the summer, Sakari’s water will be shut off biweekly. If they’re lucky, this means they’ll receive half of the water they were allocated by the Tumalo Irrigation District. The basin’s water is still managed using a century-old, first-come-first-serve allocation system that was set up to incentivize early colonial settlement in the early 1900s. Today, that means that newer water users like Sakari Farms are the first to have their water rights cut during drought years.

“What do you think,” Schreiner asks her husband Sam as he walks out of the storeroom, “do we maybe have five years left?”

He looks at her with a smile and says, “Oh, all it would take is one bad year.”

The impacts of colonial land management and global warming have changed this landscape. It is now a drier, harder place. The policies that determine whether farms flourish or fail do not adequately cushion farmers working within the desert’s natural limits. “The drought is just the beginning of whatever is in the next cycle for this place,” Schreiner says. It’s not a conventional climate “solution,” nor is it the one I pitched to write about, but there it is: In the face of insurmountable change, what more can anyone do but cultivate a disposition of gratitude and abundance for all that is still going to fruit and flower?

For peoples whose land has already been the site of life-altering settlement and extraction and collapse for generations, what farmers like Schreiner are faced with now is not new. As the sixth IPCC report released in early 2022 stated, these scales of environmental collapse are the direct result of centuries of colonialism. But, much like the ancient seeds that Indigenous peoples have cultivated across generations, so too have they sustained themselves through networks of care, resistance and strength over many, many struggles. The desertification of America’s farmland is not the first.

In these contexts, Schreiner’s acceptance that this abundance might be fleeting reads as faintly revolutionary. It is possible to thrive here, for the time being. When she imagines her future beyond the inevitable  last growing season, Spring says she could see herself switching tracks and working on film projects or continuing her Native women’s gatherings.

“For food security to really be possible here, there needs to be some form of collapse first. Things need to fall apart—the agricultural system or the economic system—in order to make space for these good, natural systems,” Spring told me.

Until then, the solution to the crisping desert and food scarcity challenges likely coming for this landscape is, it seems, to stay grounded in the scope of what remains possible—and to then harvest all the sweetness left in that space, even as the opportunity to do so comes to a close.

For now, Sakari Farms is an oasis. Here, the high desert’s classic juniper-sage musk is honeyed by the scent of sweetgrass—and the geosmin scent of fertile earth is there, too, in the low notes. Again and again, over the course of our interview, I am derailed from the track of my questions by Schreiner’s description of increasingly lavish meals: Hopi blue corn crackers with smoked black bean hummus and fire-roasted poblanos, sprinkled with herb-infused smoked salts made onsite. She shows me blueberry sweetgrass hot sauce in a slender glass jar.

“Indian spinach,” Schreiner says, lifting her chin to a bushy plant by the door, beyond which she will show me drying racks full of curved squash blossoms and fiery azafran petals, with waist-high bags of dried lavender stems and yarrow heads under the windows. Shelves are full teetering jars of dried maize, freeze-dried blueberries, and canned salmon from Schreiner’s native Alaska, all products gifted from, or traded with, other Indigeous farmers connected with Sakari through the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.

When she points to the wily spinach plant, I hear the edge of an offer in her voice. I pinch off a sword-shaped leaf with my fingernails. In the hesitant moment between lifting my hand and opening my mouth, our eyes lock and Schreiner’s face erupts into one of her quick grins. Between my teeth, the leaf’s bite is sharp and immediate.

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11:36 p.m. 2015. So far south that the night sky hummed orange for hours after the sunset. For the first time that season, the desert cold had teeth. It was Thanksgiving. It was my first time rappelling at night, my second time ever on a rope. The beam of my headlamp quivered around my feet. Sword-tipped leaves of desert succulents trembled in the wind.

“Let’s go!” Ben shouted from beneath me in the gully. My hands were trembling, holding my ATC, still clipped into the rope. “What are you waiting for?”

I held my breath until I couldn’t. When I finally whispered his name, I was too hoarse to be heard. I coughed.

“Ben, we’re not alone.”

“Of course we are, Astra. No one else is out here.”

“You didn’t see her?”

“What are you talking about?”

Ben’s voice rose whenever he was angry. We were having an epic. It was my fault—I was new to the sport, and fumbling. The storm we’d spent two days racing had blown in too soon. It was booming around us. Isolated raindrops fell like sharp pellets. Ben was a towering man: bearded, broad-shouldered, with dinner-plate hands, now balled in fists.

“Ben,” I whispered again. “There was a girl in the gully. We rappelled right over her.”

I finally met Ben’s eyes. A long moment passed before either of us spoke again. The only noise was the groan of the wind.

For years, I have averted my inner gaze from this memory. Still, stories from the Sonoran Desert keep returning to me in heartaching dispatches. It is nearly always bad news.

In 2019, a few years after I had left the Southwest, I learned from şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online that Trump’s border wall would impact 111 endangered species of plants and 108 migratory birds. I learned that the amount of water needed to make the cement to construct the border wall had dewatered spring sites, likely permanently, that the Hia-Ced O’odham people have considered alive and sacred for more than 10,000 years. I learned that O’odham land defenders delayed the construction of the wall, despite being tear-gassed by police. Despite their efforts they did not succeed in protecting Quitobaquito Spring, which has by now been mostly drained dry.

In the stretch of desert where there was still no wall, migrants continued to cross. Immigration from Mexico has been largely driven by economic hardship that began in 1994, when NAFTA tanked the value of the peso. Increasingly, migrants are now coming north after landslides, hurricanes, and other disasters hastened by the changing climate. It had become illegal in Arizona to leave water in the desert where these migrants were known to travel. I learned of at least five volunteers being arrested after leaving gallon-sized jugs.

These news blips transport me back to my months spent in that liminal stretch of the Sonoran Desert, where Ben and I lived for a season. The years 2015 and 2016 were nervous pre-election times in which nearly every action in the U.S. borderlands felt underlined, melodramatic. My days felt ripe with the present-tense nostalgia that comes from knowing that in the future, one might be tasked with describing what it felt like to live through those years.

I had never seen a true desert before moving to Tucson: cactus blooms and milk-white sand that ran for days. People dumped their trash in the empty lots on the outskirts of our subdivision, but peeking out from behind the piles were saguaros tall enough to triumph over the refuse. As indicated by their four, or five, or eight cartoony arms, the saguaros at the street’s end might have been 70 or 80 years old, limbs reaching skyward as though in prayer.

I learned to climb in that desert. A boy taught me. I barely knew him. We had moved across the continent together from the Pacific Northwest after our second date. I was 1,000 miles farther south than I’d ever been, my heart as wide-open as the southern sky. The thing that swept me off my feet wasn’t the boy, but climbing’s endless balletics—what Dr. Amrita Dhar called in a 2021 essay for Alpinist the absurd poiesis, or bringing into being, of the body’s possibility.

“Why put one’s heart into one’s fingertips and heave with all one’s strength?” she wrote.

Ben had chosen Tucson for its accessible winter climbing. For the first weeks we lived there, we spent long mornings on the roof, facing Mount Lemmon’s craggy spine, visible on the horizon. I listened, rapt, as Ben described fantastical summits, heroic falls, and the subsequent efforts to start again, to climb higher. He recited the exotic names of spires from the list he had been carrying for years.

“They say this one is the navel of the universe,” Ben told me one Sunday morning, blowing steam off his burnt coffee.

Baboquivari.

“Ben,” I said, chirpy and nervous from my propulsive desire to see the mountaintop, even as his description mostly consisted of words I couldn’t yet understand—chatter about arêtes and dynos, whippers and sends. “Take me with you. I want to climb it.”

What I yearned for, more than the athleticism of the sport—more than the mystery that might be waiting on that summit—was to be part of Ben’s fantasy of the desert. He was haunted by visions of sand, sun, and strength. Ben had a way of turning everything he wanted into a reverie. I wanted to live in it, too, even without knowing what it would entail.

A long moment passed before Ben nodded.

Baboquivari.

Its name became a mantra for the next four days while we prepared. I bought a pair of discounted climbing shoes, learned how to read a topo, studied trip reports. One instructed the correct pronunciation for the peak’s name: rhymes with Den-o’-Thievery, not Bottla-Bacardi.

Ben showed me the website Mountain Project. At the top of the page for the 5.6 route we planned to climb, it read:

“Access Issue. Caution: Human and drug trafficking. Traffic from drug smuggling and illegal immigration is high in this area. Exercise caution. US Border Patrol recommends avoiding this area completely after dark.” I read the passage aloud to Ben. We laughed at it.

The evening before we planned to leave, Ben drove us too quickly up the winding highway to Mount Lemmon. He taught me to lead-belay as the sun set. I followed him up Hitchcock Pinnacle’s 40-foot face, a can of Banquet Beer in each pocket of my stiff work pants. The column rose like a clenched fist from the side of the highway, its spindly wrist of rock interrupted by a single bolt.

“Don’t fall here,” Ben said, laughing, when I unclipped the draw. “You’ll swing too far and the rope could cut.”

I swallowed the swell of my fear. In no time, he was pulling me onto the top of the pinnacle with his warm, rough hand. The day died around us. We clinked cans to the lipstick-red dusk. Ben rappelled first so I could watch him, then he shouted up instructions from the ground when I fumbled.

On that first climb, and at each of the subsequent hundred-some raps I would make in Ben’s presence, he yelled up at the exact moment I trusted the rope with my weight: “Don’t forget that you could die right now.” My first rappel was by the light of the nearly full moon and the tangerine urban haze.

The Sonoran Desert spans what is today California, Arizona, and northwest Mexico. It is a desert of visual and material abundance. The Sonoran is home to more plant species than any other desert in the world. Most of the 2,000 unique species were borne by the rivers, but they learned to persist in the desert’s dry, harsh heat. The 350 different birds, 100 reptiles, 20 amphibians, 30 freshwater fish, and 1,000 native bees have adapted. Today, this desert is the only continuous habitat for America’s last jaguars.

For millennia, the Sonoran has been a transitory space. The land here was once cool and wet. But over millennia, plants’ habitats shifted from the Sierra Madre Occidental in the south to the Rocky Mountains in the north as the weather warmed. Lowlands became less hospitable. As the desert dried and crisped, peaks like Baboquivari became climate refugia for vegetation that could no longer survive in the harsh basins. These standalone peaks are migratory stopovers for plants like silverleaf oak, wild peppers, and tropical lobelias: plants with musical names.

The first national borders were drawn through these mountains in 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain. According to www.tonation-nsn.gov, Jesuit settlers occupying the land now known as Mexico arrived at every water source and worked to remove Indigenous village sites nearby, sequestering O’odham people in reservations. Even then, the new nation’s boundaries shifted fluidly. There were no static borders until the land was purchased by, and then named as, America. When the first lines distinguishing the two countries of Mexico and the United States were traced on paper maps in 1853, they cut between Indigenous Tohono O’odham settlements on either side.

And yet, for more than a century, the border was more abstraction than physical presence. In cross-border cities like El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, more than 10,000 people used to cross the border each day as part of their work commutes. “This mythical division between these two cities, it just doesn’t exist for most of us,” Juan Sybert-Coronado of El Paso said for the podcast Radiolab’s episode “Border Trilogy No. 1.” “I mean, I go to the dentist over there [in Juárez]. I buy cigarettes over there. OK, I smoke, yes. OK, OK?”

Ni de aquí, ni de allá, say those who have come of age in this transitory space: “Not from here, not from there.” Where the border was designed to cleave apart, instead it has cultivated a community of duality. People find belonging on both sides.

Humans have long been a migratory species. Some of us still thrive in an overture of movement that takes on a wider arc than daily migration. Take, for example, my own arrival in the Sonoran Desert, by way of Oregon and California before that, via the tiny hatchback whose trunk I’d made into my home. Take the more than 84 million (according to un.org) estimated environmental refugees: As of this decade, climate change has ignited the largest-ever global-scale mass migration—unless you count the millenia that all humans were migrants. There was a time at our species’ inception before we stayed in places, before we built towns and homes and gardens. For 8,000 years, archeologists estimate, we lived in temporary shelters, tracking seasonal hunts or harvests. We crossed valleys and mountains and seas, chasing each other from place to place, following hunger or love or both.

Before it was a landscape that could disappear people, the Sonoran was a place where one might roam. Stay a while. Walk the riverbed, as the O’odham have always done.

In the O’odham language, Baboquivari Peak is called Waw Kiwulik. Traditional iconography represents the peak with a labyrinth. According to the O’odham, I’itoi the Creator still lives in a cave on Baboquivari’s northwest side. He comes and goes through an underground network of tunnels that are woven together like the gnarled, skeletal limbs of the cholla cacti that grow on the mountain’s slopes. According to other myths, I’itoi arrived at Waw Kiwulik from “the other side,” emerging from the cave after a great flood. He created people to live among the receding waters, to wander the drying sand. In petroglyphs, I’itoi is positioned at the labyrinth’s entry. The maze, some say, represents an individual’s life: the choices you make, the dreams you hang onto, the encounters that impact you.

Today, Baboquivari has been split in two. Legally, the managerial jurisdiction of the peak is split between the Bureau of Land Management and the Tohono O’odham Nation along the arc of the summit. The boundary of a designated wilderness under BLM purview is less than five miles from the Mexico border. Until mid-2021, in the canyons south of the mountain, 60-ton machines barrelled down slopes and carved roads out of rock to provide construction access for the site of the now-paused border wall. The silverleaf oaks sheltered the understory, their curved leaves protecting delicate flowers from the debris that fell from the sky after nearby outcrops were detonated to make way for the wall. Sun-bleached backpacks, lone shoes, and fragments of human bone still litter those sacred valleys in the shadow of the border.

Before this stretch of the border became a tangle of barbed wire and steel, policymakers had assumed that the land itself could exert sufficient hardship to keep would-be migrants away. In 1994, when the Clinton Administration began to increase border security via its so-called Operation Gatekeeper policy, they strategized that building walls would only be necessary in urban spaces. In the harshness of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, a wall felt superfluous. Who would ever willingly subject themselves to such a place?

“We did believe geography would be an ally to us,” the former commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Services, Doris Meissner, said on C-SPAN 16 years later. Until the mid-1990s, maybe five migrants would be reported dead while crossing the border each year. After 1994, that number jumped to several hundred annually. According to US Customs and Border Protection, the number then doubled again between 1995 and 2005—and that’s before you account for the people whose bodies are never found.

The text of Operation Gatekeeper renders wilderness an American ally: “Mountains, deserts, lakes, rivers and valleys form natural barriers to passage,” it reads. The legal text cited “prevention through deterrence.” Who would ever choose to come to this land, to subject themselves to its volatility?

On our way to the trailhead for Baboquivari, Ben and I drove through two border checkpoints. Men in baseball hats and army fatigues held long-necked automatic rifles across their shoulders. When they saw us—when they saw that we were two white kids—they waved us through, silent and smiling.

For six hours that first day, we hiked through a dry riverbed until it contoured up to Lion’s Ledge, the standard bivy for Baboquivari, near the base of the descent route off the summit. Ben told me that in the desert, dry riverbeds are called arroyos. Monsoonal storms rip through them, stripping everything away except the stubborn life that stays. Ben recited the names of the unfamiliar flora as if they were lines from poems: Velvet mesquite. Palo verde. Fairy duster. Prickly pear. They were needly things, plants that bit and stung. When we made it to Lion’s Ledge, I counted 68 thorns in my legs, despite the Carhartt pants Ben had insisted I wear. I picked out the thorns using tweezers. Blood bloomed after every thorn came out.

While writing this essay, I called my friend Prudence Katze, a researcher and filmmaker, so she could tell me what she knows about the desert. I haven’t been back to Tucson in years, but Prudence had spent most of the past year there. She’s working on a documentary about how nature has become “an American weapon.”

Prudence told me about a migrant man who had spent a lot of his passage traveling in arroyos. They’re frequently more than five or six feet deep, and impossible to see until you’re standing on the brink. Prudence said that he was walking up one when rain began to fall. Desert monsoons are urgent. They arrive with an electric thrill. Water rushes down the mountains and funnels into arroyos. What arrives is not a gentle trickle. Blink, and suddenly you’re standing in a river.

“He almost drowned,” Prudence told me. “Before he could crawl out of the arroyo, it was up to his armpits.”

She told story after story like this. Living in Tucson, I had frequently heard similar reports from advocacy groups like No Más Muertes, who left gallons of water out on hot days, even after the state legislature made doing so illegal. Volunteers from No Más Muertes would count abandoned pairs of underwear. The fabric would last longer than the bodies of the people who didn’t make it.

Still, the desert doesn’t deter successfully enough. It just kills more subtly than other border policies the United States has experimented with. If anything, what it deters best is our capacity to witness.

On the second pitch of Baboquivari, I got stuck. A hundred feet up I had, for the first time, encountered a dihedral. In the crease in the back, Ben had placed a nut. It wasn’t deep, and he hadn’t yanked on its wire to set it. Around the nut, tiny cacti grew out of the crack. Their thorns leered at me, daring me to take shelter in the corner, to rest my body against its walls. I didn’t want to see that I was on the side of a cliff, a hundred feet above where we had started. I wasted an hour with my ragged breathing, my catastrophizing imagination, the worry that I might slowly starve to death here in this place. When I finally tried to remove the nut using the unfamiliar hooked nut tool, it came out easily.

The next handholds lined up like rungs on a ladder. I quickly made it to Ben’s anchor. He tousled my hair, held my chin in his hand. “We’re really fucking behind now,” he sighed, but he touched his nose to my nose.

The next four pitches came easily, but Ben was right: Despite our pre-dawn departure from Lion’s Ledge, the day was over. From the forecast we had read before leaving Tucson, we knew that the first cold storm of winter was due to blow in that night. By the time we reached the summit, the sky was merlot red. The peak cast a sapphire shadow that cut through the glow.

For the first time since arriving in Arizona, I was cold. The winds felt as if they were living up to the 40 miles per hour predicted by the forecast. From the summit, the knotted green ridges that bunched around the peak gave way to a lightless, flat expanse. There was BLM wilderness to the east, the Tohono O’odham Nation to the west, and Mexico to the south. The moon, which would be full that night, wouldn’t rise for hours.

“Ben, what are we going to leave?” I had read that it was customary for anyone visiting I’itoi’s home to leave an offering. It was a way of ensuring safe passage through the labyrinth. According to the Mountain Project page, “If you are planning to take a gift for I’itoi, you might choose a gift that I’itoi can hand back out to stranded climbers. This might include lighters, waterproof matches, rain panchos [sic], space blankets, flashlights, etc.”

Higher on the web page had been warnings of human trafficking, but no suggestions of leaving blankets, food, billfolds of American cash, or any other goods that might help the people trafficking or being trafficked. We had brought so much: a switchblade knife to cut the rope, should it become stuck; a comically slim first-aid kit; an entire pumpkin pie, because it was Thanksgiving.

“We can’t leave any of this,” Ben said. So we left, leaving nothing.

The descent had five rappels, separated by rotten gullies, wandering trails, steep slabs, and little cliffs, all stacked like the teetering tiers of a cake. We pushed through cacti. By the last rappel, descending after Ben, I felt the itch of new scabs congealing on my ankles. The gully was low-angle enough that I was mostly jumping down the rope, kicking up flurries of little rocks each time I leapt and landed.

The girl was in the fetal position. My feet had landed inches from her hip. When I saw her, my spine straightened as if pulled by the moon.

As quickly as I could, I lowered myself below her. Then I waited, I don’t know for what. For her to speak, maybe. For the shock of discovery to leave my body. For some spark of wisdom about what I could possibly do in that moment to help her. Such insight never came. I sank into my harness.

It’s been six years and I am still speechless. I don’t know how to end this essay. In fact, I regret pitching it.

I was expecting to write sentences that would absolve me. I wanted a story that could exhume my ghosts. Not that I believe that she is one. I have to believe that the girl I left in the gully is alive and well today.

But she haunts me. In the attic of my brain, she is the gold-trimmed box, locked with a long-lost key. Mostly, I avoid thinking about her. I have tried so hard to avoid thinking about her. Her startlingly white T-shirt, parachuting away from her body despite the tight hug she held herself in, hands clasped over her turned-away face. The anachronistic early-2000s fade of her jeans, the sharpness of that contrast in my headlamp’s bright beam. I looked at her long enough to see the holes in her canvas sneakers, the rubber pulling away from the heel.

And then I looked away.

I hung, for a while, on the rope, still close enough to reach up and touch her. I imagined Ben below me, surrounded by dangerous men. I wondered if the girl was being trafficked, whether there might be someone armed above me, holding a knife to the rope.

I descended the remainder of the gully to join Ben among the waist-high wild aloes.

I didn’t lift my light to shine on her again.

I had known from the moment I opened the Mountain Project page that Baboquivari’s flanks were traveled by migrants. When I recently called Prudence, doubting my memory after six years, she confirmed that it’s common for people, the sick and the slow, to be left behind by the coyotes who smuggle them north.

The winds that night were tremendous—back at our bivy, Ben and I stayed up all night, listening to our tent walls rattle. The loose gully we had rappelled was, perhaps, the best place the girl could find shelter. When you are stranded, ill-prepared in a winter storm, there are no good options.

Some people are drawn to climbing because of the rush of rubbing elbows with one’s mortality. This feels especially true of remote wilderness climbs, multi-pitch routes, the sort of high-angle mountain travel I was drawn to after learning how to climb that winter, and to which I have returned every year since.

I cannot think of anything more absurd than arriving at a precipice with real danger and delighting in it. We can only travel to the cliffside if our lives have afforded us that luxury. I climb because I am seeking exposure. I want to feel the air beneath my feet. I can climb because in my life, risk is a punctuation mark. It is not every letter in every word.

I came to Baboquivari desiring the risk that it represented, even as I knew others traveling through that antagonistic space were there only because it represented the lowest-risk option available to them.

This is true of all of us who travel to recreate. It is as true in Arizona as it is in any colonial country, at any North American crag. We are playing, all of us, in contested space.

Before we left plastic water jugs in the desert to blanch in the sun, before the rush of a monsoonal flood might carry away some lonely traveler hiding in a wash, this landscape used to have standing water. For time immemorial, Indigenous people would walk the rivers. The perennial flows had, for thousands of years, persisted. The O’odham origin story says that the world was born from the rubbing up of darkness against water. There were prickly pears and crimson evenings, the story says, before there were people.

Ben and I fought for months about what we did. It was my idea to leave the girl the last of our water, to yell into the wind that we had done so. He thought we should do more. I never figured out what he meant.

I took our water bottle, with its blue screw-on top and its little built-in handle, and put it on a boulder. The jug stood above the yucca and the barrel cacti. I turned her way and looked into the darkness.

Hay agua aquĂ­.

Astra Lincoln, an essayist and climate researcher, is currently completing an MSc with the Mountain Legacy Project at the University of Victoria.

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