COCHISE WHISPERS

The vast majority of the domes here require long, rough approaches. Many climbers lost in the Stronghold’s dense brush have likely ended up beneath a Des Champs route without knowing it. Des Champs started putting up Stronghold routes in the mid-1980s, on many of the lesser-known 50-to-250-foot domes. Such efforts imply a lot of bushwhacking and a penchant for solitude.

“I like not to see other people,” says Des Champs. “I don’t climb for the social aspect. I go where there is no chalk, no trail, no topo, no guide. If everything is known, there’s no adventure…the Stronghold is all about adventure.” Then, like a desert stream disappearing into sand, our conversation dries up.

The Stronghold is a perfect place for Des Champs and other outlanders. Save the Beanfest and occasional weekend campground surge, I find no real scene — just climbers, wind, stars, and the ghosts of history.

It was nearly 140 years ago (1872) that Cochise used cunning and brutality to forge the short-lived Broken Arrow Peace Treaty with the Federal Government. This created a reservation extending from the Dragoons east toward Las Cruces, New Mexico. However, while many Chiricahua descended into the valleys, Cochise remained in his fortress until he died in 1874, from what scholars believe was stomach cancer.

Congress, believing the threat to the settlers had died with Cochise, refused to ratify the treaty that would have made the reservation official. The military rounded up the Chiricahua, no longer among the Stronghold’s domes, and placed them with other tribes on a reservation outside Tucson. Peace was brief — free Chiricahua, led by Geronimo, continued to fight until their numbers dwindled; the remaining 38 were surrounded in 1886. Seeking to end the region’s chronic conflict, the US Government relocated the Apache to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In 1913, the tribe returned to western New Mexico, to join with the Mescalero Apache. Some of the 3,300 tribe members still make visits to Cochise’s sublime natural fortress, but climbers are now the main visitors. Through our forefather’s penchant for violence, it seems, we have become the area’s caretakers.