The Martians

1. Wrong Way

Dawn patrol up the west inner wall of Crommelin Crater. Tram at the Bubbles, climb one of the steepest trails in the crater, take the rim trail around to the pond at Featherbed, drop down a new trail, and walk the ring road back to the tram, just a couple of kilometers.

But that morning it was raining hard, and misty too, not much wind, and within a hundred meters of leaving the tram turnabout I was lost. I followed what I thought was the path and it petered out almost immediately, so it wasn’t the trail; but rather than go back down I figured the trail was over to my right, and I angled up that way to run into it, but I never found it. But every route goes into Crommelin, you know, except for parts of Precipice Arc, so I decided to bushwhack on up with the hope of running into the trail eventually. I kept seeing what looked like an older version of the trail anyway—three or four stacked steps up a break in a wall; a long depression; some broken branches; and, most of all, rectangular gray paint marks on trees. They looked like the trail blazes you see on trees in the Cimmerian Forest. I was surprised anyone had chosen gray for the paint, and suspected it might be some kind of lichen, but it looked like paint no matter how close I got to it, even when I scraped it with my fingernail. Paint, I swear, and splashed on about chest or head high on trees, in a rough makable line up the slope. It was a broken ledgy crater wall, lots of trees, and then some worn old ramparts, and a few walls of bare rock that you had to get around or find cracks up. I figured anywhere trees grew I could scramble up, so I followed ramps of trees winding up through brecciated battlements, ducking under the branches. It was pouring down rain, so the showers I brought down on myself by moving the branches meant nothing to me. My real concern was my footing, because the leaf mats made lots of wet trapdoors in the basalt jumble of the ramps.

I kept slogging uphill, hoping of course that none of the battlements to left and right would extend unbroken across my path. And still wondering if I was on an old trail, drowned in leaves. Every time the gap between battlements became tight I would see rough stacks of stones helping me up, barely visible under the years of clutter. Then just as I was sure it was a trail it would all go away and I would be thrashing up through forest again. The question became the salient feature of the climb, absorbing all my thinking, all my rain-blurred inspection of the wall dripping around me, squishing and slipping underfoot—there, were those rocks stacked by hand to aid my way? Was that a gray trail blaze, on the tree right there in the middle of that tight little copse? But why put it there?

Up I fought, ducking to guard my face from scratchers, shouldering through larger branches. Always there was a way up and on, but no matter how hard I studied the landscape, I couldn’t decide the question of the trail one way or another. It often looked like untraveled wild hillside. But then another little stair section would appear and help me up and through a tight spot.

The climb went on so long I began to wonder about it. The ascent was only four hundred meters—surely I had done that already? The rain cloud thinned and I had more light. Rain continued, however, and it got windy, in downgusts. The slope lay back and I came across a flat strip filled with trees, floored by an old rusty tram track. A little shock to see it. I recalled reading of an old cog tram to the peak, but that had been on the south wall of the crater. A little farther I came on West Apron Road, which takes the rim for its last up, and jogged along it for a few minutes before I came to the shop and cable-car facility on the rim. It was nice to have topped out and to know exactly where on the rim I was, but I had taken twice as long as expected, and used up three times the energy, and when I continued north on the rim trail, I lost it again! It was both raining and foggy, and the west rim is very broad, all open rock in broken terraces, with stone stacks marking the trail, and small head-high or waist-high forests here and there, all very tight and gnarly. A lot of trails ran into these trees and worked for a while and then petered off into a bramble. I got frustrated; also worried that I would be really late getting back to the house. On dawn patrols I try to get back while people are still getting up, or getting breakfast.

So I stopped and thought it over. My glasses were misted with rain, and the air was whipping by in a pure fog. I couldn’t see more than twenty yards in any direction, and up here it wasn’t enough.

I turned back and whacked along the rim to the road, deciding I would run down the wall road to the crater floor, then over to the Bubbles and the tram. All the distances in the crater are so small, I figured at most it would be 10 k, and downhill most of the way. Not so much fun as a rain scramble, but faster.

Before I took off I went into the shop and bought a soda. They had just opened up. I took it to the counter and two young women stared at me as I took my wallet out of my pocket, from under my rain pants you know. But the wallet was wet, and even my card inside the wallet was wet. I might as well have just dived into the lake. I decided to pass on explaining and drink the soda outside.

Running down the road was spacey. It switched back and forth, always in heavy mist and rain. I had no idea how high on the wall I was. I passed a bluff cut by the road, now a waterfall, very pretty. Got into the trees, then under them, a long green canopy tunnel floored by the road, and the rain still bombing down on us. Got back to the station and trammed home, but I missed breakfast that day.

And all the rest of the day—and ever since, really, but that day it really possessed me—I wondered whether I had been on an old trail or not.

2. Mistakes Can Be Good

I took my parents up Precipice Trail when they were in their mid-sixties, and to tell you the truth I had always run that trail before, pretty much, trying to do it quick and get back into town and do the family thing, so my memory of it was deficient. I realized that when I took them up it going slow. There’s a hell of a lot of ladders on that trail. After the fairly acrobatic boulder traverse across the huge talus slide, it’s nothing but ladder after ladder, with some exposed ledge traverses to get from the top of one ladder to the bottom of the next. On one of these ledges my mom said my name in that intonation of hers which means “you’ve got to be kidding,” and my dad brought up the rear saying nothing—he maybe wasn’t in as good a shape as my mom, and was wearing tight jeans. Later he said he thought I was getting back at them for all the things they might have ever done that I didn’t like. But he was strong, and Mom too. We topped out and immediately descended, which was easier aerobically, but still pretty white-knuckle—worse, really. The ladders are just rungs of iron, drilled into sheer cliff as high as fifty feet. Looking down as you descend can be daunting. When we got back to the bottom I pointed up where we had gone—it looks like a pure cliff from below, and some climbers were there gearing up to do the face just to the left of the trail, so it was impressive. We got back to camp and they were high, they were high as kites. They couldn’t believe they had done it. So even though it was a mistake I had done a good thing.

3. You Can’t Lose the Trail

I had been hiking Crommelin Crater for years when a man published a history of the crater’s trails and made it all new to me. I had seen but I hadn’t understood. The trails had not been built by the co-op currently administering the crater, as I had assumed, but instead by a succession of inspired crazies, who had gotten into a kind of contest with each other to see who could build the most beautiful trails. The steep brecciated granite walls of the crater had become the canvases for their new art form, which they had pursued for some twenty or thirty years, back before the turn of the century. One had gotten his entire co-op into building trails, putting in several on the wall just above and behind the co-op’s diskhouse.

But when the current administration took over, they closed down half the trails in the crater as being highly redundant, which they were. But they were works of art too, and being well built out of huge blocks of stone, a lot of them were still out there, but not on the maps anymore. And this man had published the old maps in his book and given directions for finding the old trailheads, which the current agency had allowed to become obscure. Finding the old trails—“trail phantoming” he called it—was a new art form, making use of and preserving the older one. I started doing it myself and loved it. It added route-finding, archaeology, and huge amounts of bushwhacking to the already beautiful experience of hiking the crater.

One day we took the kids and hunted for one of the old co-op’s lost trails. First we found what must once have been a wide esplanade running along the foot of the wall, now all filled with birch. We crossed the northernmost trail still on the map and continued north on the overgrown esplanade, looking at the great wall for signs of a trail. There were a lot of possibilities, I thought—as usual. But then in all the leaves I spotted a big dressed stone, like someone’s trunk, and we all ran over and there it was—a stone staircase, buried deep in dead leaves, leading up the wall. It was thrilling.

Off we went, kids first. We couldn’t keep up with them. It was easy as could be to follow the trail, which was mostly a full staircase, set into the wall for flight after flight. But it was also obvious that it hadn’t been walked on much in many years. One traverse section had lost its underpinnings and ten or twelve blocks had slid downslope, forming a loop of stone we had to negotiate. In another place a thick-trunked birch had fallen across the trail and we had to work around the roots. These digressions made us realize how hard the slope would have been without a trail. But with it: sidewalks and staircases.

And then, looking ahead, we saw the trail cutting up and across a big shadowed talus slope, under a curved section of the wall. All the great shatter of rock was light pink granite, and all the lichen growing on it was a pale green. Pale green circles mottling pale pink shatter—pale green carpet on pale pink stairs—it looked like something the Incas had built, or visitors from Atlantis. Even the kids stopped to look.

4. The Natural Genius

Dorr obviously explored the eastern crater wall thoroughly, and then designed his trails to take advantage of features already there, leading travelers under overhangs, behind drop blocks, up cracks, and through tunnels. One section of the wall has a big steep concave bulge of granite, an exposed pluton, kind of unusual, with a vertical fissure running all the way up it, waist or chest deep all the way. Naturally Dorr put a trail right up that crack, filling its bottom with a steep narrow staircase, each granite block stacked on the back part of the one below it, in a flight that was hundreds of stones long.

I was hiking up this beautiful trail one dawn patrol in the rain, everything gray and misty so that I only saw a bit above and below me, and by the time I got to this section of the trail, the fissure had become a streambed. White water dropped down it step by step, as in fish ladders you see by dams. White water clattering stepwise down a granite slope, out of the mist—it was surreal.

To continue upward meant soaking my boots, as each step would submerge me in water to the ankle, if not the knee. Out in the backcountry that would be a problem. But I knew I would be at the house twenty minutes after the end of my hike, and there take a shower, and put my boots by the fire. It wouldn’t be that good for the boots, but so what. Worth it for the joy of hiking up that staircase waterfall. Step after step, splash, splash, white water, the noise of it, the rain and the wind. Every step placed securely, hands using the granite walls to both sides as railings. A beautiful ascent; something I never expect to see again.

Then at the top of the staircase, the trail stopped. For some reason Dorr never connected this trail to his others, and it ends on the top of that granite bulge, still only halfway up the crater wall. To get over to the nearest of Dorr’s other staircase trails you have to traverse a broad tilted bench, thick with birch and dead logs. And currently soaked and obscured by mist.

I whacked on, enjoying the new nature of the problem. Here all the trail phantoms together make the trail, I thought, and looked for sign. I was not overly concerned when I didn’t see any. Trail comes and goes depending on how much you need it. Where many ways will go, people disperse and take them all, and so the trail fades and disappears. You don’t need it. When the way gets hard the trail becomes clear again—there are only a few ways to go, and people find those over and over. This happens everywhere, wherever people walk the land. Most trails were never planned, you see, but were made by a collective of people spread through time, all evaluating the slope on their own, and very often coming to the same conclusions. So when I lose the trail and then come back on it again I am always pleased to see that I have made the same judgment as others before me. I say, Hey, the natural genius here once again, inside all of us. How nice.

So I crashed across this wet bench, content to wander; it was fun. I would hit Dorr’s next trail eventually.

Then I saw on a tree trunk ahead of me one of the rectangular gray paint spots I had seen on a previous rainy dawn patrol. Hey! I said, thinking I had confirmation. But then I noticed that there were more gray spots on the tree trunks around the first one, and in fact there were gray spots on every tree trunk I could see at that moment, in every direction. I realized that the rainy trail I had found on the other side of the crater must have been only a figment of my imagination, seeing something in the landscape that hadn’t been there.

Only it had been there, I swear. There is something out there. This is why I don’t think we can so easily dismiss some sort of teleology in history. The landscape itself seems to call forth the trail. It imposes on us the best way forward. And it could be that the human landscape, or even the continuum in which time unfolds, has invisible ramps and battlements that shape our course. Of course we still have choices, but there is a certain terrain to be crossed. So I suspect that seeing trails that are not there is actually an everyday activity of the human mind. When the going is hard people come together. And the trails appear out of nowhere.

Later I heard that there is indeed an engineered lichen called “gray paint patch lichen.” I’m sure the designer thinks it’s very funny.

That day in the rain it didn’t matter. Soon enough I stumbled on Dorr’s next masterpiece in stone, this one still on the maps, and so well used it was gleaming under its coat of water, which there, where the trail traversed the slope, was not deep.

But then it turned downhill again, back down toward town, and once again became a bounding waterfall. And I came to a section where the crater wall steepened and curved to a convex bowl, overhanging a deep downward cut in the wall, next to a knob. There the trail dropped in big deep stairs, down a ravine between knob and wall. But now this ravine was a big violent waterfall, or rather several waterfalls, curtaining off the wall and then funneling down into a steep rapids, roaring between rocks that were ordinarily waist-or chest-high when you passed between them. To proceed I would have to descend this torrent.

I placed each boot carefully, holding on to rocks or branches on both sides of me. The water went knee deep, then thigh deep. I could feel it pushing at the backs of my legs.

Then a hard rain squall hit, and the crater wall became one great big waterfall. Then the rain turned to hail. Sheets of hail careened down on the rushing white water at me. I grabbed a rock beside the trail with both hands and ducked my head, watching the froth of floating hail rise up on my body, until I was chest deep in it as it poured by. For a second I feared the water would rise even farther and tear me away, or drown me right in place. Then the level of the flood dropped a bit, and I succeeded in fording the rapids and clambering down the opposite side of the ravine step by step, the water roaring everywhere around me. I got a good grip on a wet birch and laughed out loud. It was one of the most civilized moments of my life.