COCHISE WHISPERS

Inner and outer worlds collide in an Arizona granite hideaway

Well lubricated with Pinot Gris, “Pig” careened around the campfire like a gyroscope. “Cochise Stronghold is a promised land,” he said, nodding preacherly. Shadows capered on the rock behind him, here in Joshua Tree’s overcrowded Hidden Valley Campground.

“It’s like Josh 25 years ago,” he crooned. Eyes feral and body lean, Pig had slept beneath a J-Tree boulder season after season to avoid the rangers. To his congregation of rock rats and weekending cubicle refugees, this bearded, jobless climbing bum was living the dream. His words carried weight.

“I’m done with it here!” Pig exclaimed. “I’m headed to the Stronghold.”

Pig continued: tucked away in Arizona’s southeast corner, he said, you find myriad golden domes punctuating the Dragoon Mountains’ ridges. It’s a granite Eden ripe with unique features like chickenheads and “alligator-skin” plates…if you could stomach 50-foot slab runouts above slung horns. Death-march approaches through boulder-strewn and brush-choked arroyos kept the masses at bay.

In the 1860s, 100 years before climbers came along, the rough domes served as a natural fortress from which the Apache launched raids on white settlers and Mexican villages, 50 miles south. If you listened closely, Pig promised, you could hear the wind-borne whisper of the warrior chief Cochise, whose body rests among the domes.

“The Stronghold” — even the name intrigued me. As the years passed, the area and its Chiricahua Apache namesake, Cochise, remained a fascination, but I never put foot to gas pedal until now, November 2007, six years after Pig’s sermon. A few days into our Stronghold pilgrimage, my wife, Becca, and I drive the pockmarked dirt road to the Stronghold’s western edge, navigating off a tattered bit of yellow legal paper — scrawled directions and a friend’s suggested ticklist. Rabbits crisscross the headlights’ beams. I expect to see a small campfire or a cluster of dented vehicles — maybe even Pig holding court. But the road ends in darkness. The car-door’s report echoes like gunshot.