I am my own kind of desert animal. I prefer to be alone. If I visit the desert with someone, I do so because I know they won't talk a lot. The other day I took a walk in the Jacumba Mountain foothills with three other people. I assumed they would like to listen to the silence like I do, but I was wrong. For me, it was like being in the middle of a crowd. I had to adjust.
Fortunately, they were not ordinary people but bona fide desert rats who knew the place, loved the place and had good things to say about it. They were a DesertUSA Message Board regular who signs himself Space Cowboy, his wife Robin and Chris, the Message Board regular who organized the walk.
Part of the time, I dropped several yards behind them so I could enjoy being on my own. But much of the time I wanted to be with them to hear what they had to say. I found us to be much like a quartet in a bel canto opera where everyone sings something different, albeit in harmony. Chris focused on the roads. Space Cowboy and his wife were into the signs of people. I would have settled quietly for an unusual insect to photograph with my macro lens.
We met at the Mountain Spring off-ramp to Interstate 8. After the undulating 60-mile drive across the mountains from the eastern outskirts of San Diego, Mountain Spring is the last off-ramp before the freeway hits the desert floor.
The first thing I noticed was a palm oasis on the west end of the valley. To me, a student of natural signs, that meant the presence of water. This was further confirmed when I noticed Catclaw in the washes. Looking around, I saw not only low desert plants, but also plants of the higher elevations such as yucca and nolina. I also noticed buckwheat, which is a plant of the chaparral, so to me this was a place where the plants of three different zones come together at an elevation of 2,292 feet.
So much for my view of things. As soon as my companions arrived, Chris, an admitted 
old roads freak, showed us an aerial photograph of the area. I unfolded my In-Ko-Pah Gorge topo map. We could see how Interstate 8, an east-west freeway, actually runs more or less north and south through this area. East of Mountain Spring, it splits into two roads with westbound traffic coming through Devils Canyon and eastbound through In-Ko-Pah Gorge.
Our simple plan for the morning was to walk north across In-Ko-Pah Gorge and then follow a wash down to Devils Canyon, returning before lunch. It wasn't much of a walk but, as Chris pointed out, it touched on several major roadways of the past and present.
It didn't take much walking next to Chris and listening to him talk about various roadways before I felt as if I had switched on my television set and found a travel narrative, albeit a very good travel narrative. Chris chose a place that was blissfully free of freeway noise. We could all hear each other.
"The wash between In-Ko-Pah Gorge and Devils Canyon was part of a wagon road built about 1865," he said. "It was a portion of the main road from San Diego to Fort Yuma by way of El Cajon and Descanso. Over the years, floods destroyed the parts of the road built in the wash. It was replaced in 1913 when the first automobile road was built down the hill at Mountain Spring."
Then he pointed to the side of a mountain where I could see evidence of a road which was, he said, part of the same road. "We can see the roadway up there because it is high and out of the way of floods." It was of course built as a horse and wagon road, served by a station at Mountain Spring which had stone corrals for teams of horses. Ruins of the corrals still exist.
The route up the grade was one of only a few toll roads in San Diego County, for only for a few years. The county eventually bought the road from its private operators and improved it. The first big rebuild was done about 1878.
After we set out, it quickly became clear that Space Cowboy and Robin were taken with the cultural anthropology of the area, particularly the real estate aspects. On looking at the few broken and rusted remains of what had evidently once been a shining filling station, Space Cowboy launched into an ecstatic torrent of words about someone's hopes and dreams and how they had died and were buried out here on this hillside.
Down the trail, we spotted a rock on which someone had painted the words "Higman's Watering Hole" with an arrow pointing up the hill behind it. Space Cowboy refused to rest until he had scrambled over the hill to have a look for this watering hole. There was, he reported, another road on the other side of the hill.
Other findings of modern culture sparked Space Cowboy's imagination as we walked in a ravine 50 yards or so beneath the freeway. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for the driver of a pickup truck when the camper shell was blown off, tumbling into the ravine were we found it. He fingered the sunroof frame of a sports car, and we joked about what future anthropologists would say when they discovered it. He picked up a discarded plastic mug, and gasped when the brittle thing collapsed in his hand.
When we got to Devils Canyon, Chris went into another of his travelogues. "Devils Canyon was a favorite place to photograph wagons on trips between San Diego and the east. This area marked the change from mountain conditions to desert."
Chris, Space Cowboy and I all carried cameras. Robin brought apples. On the way down the ravine, I used a wide-angle lens to photograph the freeway bridges
and the hillsides. On the way back, I switched to my 100-mm macro lens and did close-ups of a few plants -- tamarisks, mostly -- and also of a boulder which had been engraved with the initials W.J.B.C. and the date Oct. 5th, 1911. I assume this was the mark of a construction company involved in building the auto road that opened in 1913. We saw several granite boulders with holes drilled in them, possibly to insert dynamite charges when the construction company was creating the roadway.
The tamarisks in the wash were a concern to me. These plants, which are not native to the area, send roots deep into the ground, taking water away from native plants. Without native plants in the ground, the soil will, over time, turn to barren sand. Not a good thing.
Almost before I knew it, we were back in the little valley where Mountain Spring sits. Space Cowboy and Robin brought the conversation back to their favorite topic, local real estate for sale. They talked about the 90-acre Desert View Tower property in the mountains overhead. They knew the original asking price, and also about the reductions in price, and also how much of the property was for sale. Space Cowboy and Robin also knew about a large lot in Mountain Spring with at least 4 house trailers on it.
"Whoever buys that property," Space Cowboy said, "will have to find a way to evict the people who are living there."
I asked Space Cowboy what he thought of our walk. He thought a minute and then replied: "Man's presence is everywhere, in layers. Pick what layer you choose to explore; huddled immigrant, freeway builders, Roaring Twenties, wagon drivers, pioneers, Spanish missionaries, ancient Indians."
Then he paused to think some more and added: "Come to think of it, that hike was kinda crowded!"
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