North America > United States > Arizona > Mount Baldy > Disaster Travel > Articles > How Baldy tried to kill me

On a tattered nineteenth-century military map of Arizona’s White Mountains, the state’s second-highest summit bears a name that, so far as I know, appears on no other chart: “Home of the Winds.” This is probably the cartographer’s poetic invention, for modern Apaches call the 11,403-foot-tall peak Dzil Ligai, “mountain of white rock,” an accurate enough description of the exposed granite summit that Anglos call Mount Baldy, a name less pretty but just as prosaic as the Apache.

It is bald, to be sure. It is also windy, the abode of howling gales. For all that, I’ve given other names to Mount Baldy over the years, names more suited to a pro wrestler than a stately snow-capped rise: The Berserker. The Unforgiver of Black River. Geronimo’s Revenge. Mount Psycho.

They are hard names, I know, but fair ones. Fair because almost every time I have tried to climb it, Mount Baldy has tried to terminate my tenure on this green and lovely earth.

I first came to the mountain in 1975. I found it breathtakingly beautiful, a standout in a state full of picturesque places but, at first glance, strangely unimpressive. For one thing, it doesn’t look like much of a mountain: beautiful though it is, Baldy rises gently above an 8,000-foot plateau, with no eye-popping precipices or fearsome crags to arrest the viewer. For another, it sports a well-maintained trail that winds pleasantly over eight and a half miles through pine forests and alpine meadows gushing with springs. There’s no need for ropes or pitons on this scenic and seemingly unscary mountain, scarcely even need to take along a topo map, and hundreds of people of all ages climb Baldy every year without incident.

But only a few of them ever make it to the very top. Just within the borders of the White Mountain Apache Reservation, the summit is closed to non-Apaches; access to it is blocked by a cattle fence. In Apache belief, mountaintops are the dwelling of spirits called gan, who protect wild animals and bedevil most other mortals. Few Apaches go to the top of Dzil Ligai, except for religious purposes. Few, at least of my acquaintance, speak openly of the gan, who are dangerous and volatile, and who visit disease and madness on anyone who angers them.

The ascent of Baldy is easy, but the gan work hard to keep nosy foreigners away, hard enough to change my opinion of the mountain. It definitely impresses me now.

That first trek up Baldy began pleasantly enough. The trail was easy, the sky deep blue, the air warm. The closer I got to the summit, however, the faster omens came. At a narrow pass where the trees end, at about ten thousand feet, I had to throw myself to the ground to avoid a collision with a golden eagle, nearly earthbound by the weight of a fat jackrabbit it clutched in its talons. An ancient Greek would have erected an impromptu shrine to the gods on the spot and turned tail, but I blithely proceeded. A mile up the trail I met with another visitation from the heavens: a literal bolt from the blue that sent a fifty-foot-tall ponderosa pine flying apart in countless toothpicks. (I plucked one from my hair and still keep it as a souvenir.) The explosion was immediately followed by a phenomenon unique, I believe, to the desert: drenching rain falling without a cloud in sight.

I kept right on going for another half mile, soaked but not broken, as the mountain began to deliver views extending a hundred miles in every direction. Rounding a bend, I came within sniffing distance of an adult black bear- which is to say, I smelled it, and I’m sure it smelled me. Whether male or female I did not ascertain, and I call it an adult only because of what then seemed to me to be its monumental size. We stood there, bear and I, perhaps seventy feet apart (distances are hard to measure in such circumstances) for perhaps five minutes (ditto units of time) until the bear, evidently bored with the proceedings, turned and lumbered off down a nearby draw.

And at that, the cloudless rain pouring off my shoulders, I turned and ran eight miles down Baldy without stopping, thankful that I had had the chance to see lightning up close and a black bear in the wild, thankful that the lightning and the black bear had had the chance to kill me and did not. It was quite enough for one day.

A few years later I returned to Baldy for another try. As before, the day began beautifully. As before, a thousand feet below the summit a fierce rain began to fall. Inasmuch as it was October, a dry season in Arizona, I had not packed rain gear, a datum the gan did not overlook. The rain and hail came crashing down so hard on stones in the narrow draw that little bits of mica blew off and filled the air with a brilliant shrapnel- not enough to kill a person, but perhaps enough to put an eye out. It was impossible to proceed under the circumstances, and all too easy to die of exposure.

I took shelter under a chaotic mound of boulders that shielded a cave entrance. The overhang seemed a fine place to wait out the storm, and I sat there eating bread and salami as lightning crashed down until I heard snuffles coming from somewhere within the cave- noises that seemed to grow louder with each passing moment. I weighed my options and called out to unknown beast and gan alike, “Hey, damn it, you’ve got the wrong guy!”

This was craven and abject behavior, I know. But I had a legitimate point: while the Apaches- and Arizona’s wildlife, for that matter- were suffering the greatest injustices done to them, my ancestors were in Ireland fighting desperate battles of their own. Whatever evils had happened in Baldy’s shadow were not my fault.

Still, the snuffling did not stop. Neither did the cold rain, and once again I found myself running down the mountain, this time so quickly and furiously that my battered ankles swelled up for weeks afterward to remind me of my misadventure.

For the next several years I confined myself to Baldy’s lower slopes, following the tracery of the Little Colorado River’s sources, content to collect rivers instead of summits. Every now and again, in all seasons, I ventured closer to the top, and each time the story was the same: rain, snow, hail, and always those great bolts of lightning.

I had begun, as you might expect, to take the mountain’s behavior personally. But I still kept at it, mindful of Neville Shulman’s remark, in his book ‘Zen in the Art of Climbing Mountains’, that “nothing is possible without three essential elements: a great root of faith, a great ball of doubt, and fierce tenacity of purpose.” I had little faith that I would ever make it to Baldy’s summit- as far, that is, as I was permitted to go. I had much doubt, but also a deep well of tenacity, mulishness that the gan rewarded by finally allowing me to ascend Baldy twenty-two years after my first attempt, in March 1997. When I climbed past the stump of that lightning-shattered ponderosa, no eagles or bears or bolts from heaven challenged me. I even came within sight of the turnstile leading through the fence into the Apache nation and the abode of the gan, the home of the winds. A few drops of rain fell, but softly.

Not wanting to push my luck, I left a hawk feather on a rock beside the trail, promised the mountain to speak of it by more kindly names, and turned back, walking along under a clear blue sky.

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