Michael Seeger

Special to The Desert Sun

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.” — Edward Abbey

I found myself alive to the natural world a few mornings ago on a loop hike through the deep heart of Painted Hills’ heliotropic shades of lavender and Ladder Canyons during civil twilight in the Mecca Hills Wilderness Area.

Always in search of new and impelling hikes, the allure of laddered slot canyons and Death Valley-esque landscape set among a backdrop of the half-billion-year-old rock surfaces of Mecca Hills was inducement enough. Besides, these hills present one of the most extraordinary topographic displays of its kind found anywhere!

“Climb the mountains,” John Muir wrote, “and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you … while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

Prairie falcons rode desert thermals, as cobalt skies and soothing birdsong in the desert mountain breeze bore aloft my spirit far beyond retrieval — and I haven’t been the same since.

Here vast areas of eroded rock and twisted strata exposed uniquely in layers manifests its natural wonder in a myriad of 600 million-year-old geological formations.

Mecca, so named by a group of locals returning from the Middle East after studying the date trade near the holiest of Muslim cities, borders on its eastern edges one of California’s most notable and active geologic features — the San Andreas Fault, the southern end of which resides directly beneath Mecca Hills.

An area of protected land, Mecca Hills Wilderness encompasses some 26,243 acres just north of the Salton Sea — its sandy arroyos wet with Palo Verde and ironwood, diverting like deltas the ocotillo crested mesas, scorpions, and rattlesnakes endemic to the region’s flora and fauna.

The scenic, sparsely traveled Box Canyon Road (State Highway 195) twists through the colorful ravines stretching for miles along the eastern edges of the Coachella Valley following the San Andrea Fault and connecting Highway 111 to Interstate 10 and Joshua Tree National Park beyond.

Box Canyon, Painted Canyon, Ladder Canyon and Mecca Hills all refer to the same general area accessible off of Avenue 66 heading east through Mecca.

Traversing a natural labyrinthine maze of slot-chasmed badlands, the steep and narrow Ladder Canyons run a northerly-southerly route through the heart of the wild where one’s trek is aided by wooden and aluminum ladders placed among the colorful canyons by volunteers to ease one’s passage.

Much like a Dürer, or Turner watercolor, Painted Canyon derives its name from the purple, pink and golden-hued rock wall’s mineral deposits, that deepen their intensity depending on the sun’s light.

Scanning the blue ridged Orocopia range, desert bighorn sheep stood sentinel-like among the rocky slopes, as swooping spotted bats haunted the hills at first light.

Hoping to spy a desert tortoise, I searched among foxtail cacti, creosote, and sagebrush along the stony slopes, sandy washes, and rocky soiled bajada —finding instead, to my delight, a rarified Mecca aster.

Hiking out that morning along the canyon’s rim high above the badland’s restless fault line, far from the stench of dead fish and politics, a shimmering Salton Sea sparkled on the southern horizon — scintillating dreamlike in the sunrise as the brilliant daylight kissed its greeting to the Colorado Desert.

Email Michael Seeger of Cathedral City at Hemingwayhero@dc.rr.com.