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Outside Magazine July 2002

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The Hard Way
The Stone Mirage (Cont.)

THE DAY BEFORE THE CLIMB:

I'm driving while Todd hangs out of the jeep, scanning the desert with binoculars.

"Well, I'll be gawddang!" he yells. "Pull over."

Off in the distance, poking miraculously above the red haze, is a white pyramid. We find a dirt road beelining for it and go.

An hour later we're scrutinizing the maps at a fork in the road when two vaqueros appear. They trail their cattle past us, stop, lean on their saddle horns, point when we ask a question, then ride off.

Passing through a one-street adobe village just before sunset, we are stymied by a wide arroyo. A villager strolls up to our jeep. We point to our glowing peak, pink in the evening light.

"Ese es bonito Cerro Blanco," he says regally. He tells us a better place to cross the arroyo, then passes a clear Pepsi bottle into the cab. We each take a swig. It is the smoothest, smokiest tequila on earth. The man winks and takes a slug himself.

"Buena suerte, amigos."

"That's as close as you can come to communion," Todd says.

By noon the next day we're there. We've forded half a dozen bone-dry streambeds and three streams, passed through numerous barbed-wire gates, parked in a cottonwood ravine, hiked for an hour up through a rock-walled col hirsute with giant yuccas, and now stand at the base, looking up at Beckey's white mountain.

Most myths are best enjoyed around a campfire and not actually pursued. But some people can't help themselves. Todd has spent half his life being a myth destroyer—and, consequently, the other half being a mythmaker.

I examine the cone of white granite through binoculars, gradually moving up the south face. It is perhaps 1,000 feet high. Although there are several fissures—I can identify the chimerical Beckey chimney—only one crack cleaves the face bottom to top.

"Todd," I say fervidly, "the central line will go."

"I'm going to check out the boulders," Todd says.

When he returns, he's carrying a pottery shard, a broken spearhead, and a stone scraper. We spend the rest of the afternoon reconning the area, discovering pictographs underneath three different boulders.

Walking back to the jeep in the dark, Todd says, "It's the search itself I love, not what I'm searching for."

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