Public Land

One day, my husband decided we should go check out some of the cliffs by our house to see if there were chukar in them. A chukar is a bird that sorta, kinda looks like a quail, without a top knot, but is a bit bigger. It's a game bird. Originally they were from the Middle East. They were introduced to the United States.

The first time I ever saw chukar was on Maui at Haleakala, where they were renowned for eating the vomit of hung over tourists who went up to see the sunrise after they'd gotten married and then flown across the Pacific for their honeymoon. Turns out, people need to drink water and sleep.

So, I always thought chukar were a bit of a trash bird, but turns out the population on Haleakala is probably fairly unique. Usually, chukar live in wind blasted cliffs in the middle of the desert. To hunt them you have to walk up hill for about a million years while being windblown therefore causing you to freeze and sweet while you are simultaneously getting sunburned because... it's the desert.

"There are totally chukar up there," my husband told me, looking at a particularly dry and desolate band of desert cliffs.

I doubted it, but I agreed to go, and we began our uphill march on a trail, weirdly enough, before cutting off the trail to go toward a bowl where I was promised, there were billions of chukar.

We saw no one, which is totally standard for a chukar hunting adventure, and after cutting off the trail and walking up a loose slope with our shotguns, we finally hit a ridge. I peered out into the basin that we'd been aiming for and let my heart rate come down while I took in the view.

Turns out the view looked like a dry, harsh, desert. Craggy, steep slopes varying shades of brown with some olive green pinyon and juniper trees. This looked like the kind of place that could light on fire and burn forever.

Then I saw it.

Smoke.

I peered closer. It was certainly smoke. Coming up from the ground a few hundred yards before us, on our ridge.

"Fire," I said.

My husband, always a skeptic, wasn't onboard with my assessment at first, but soon he agreed. We were seeming smoke.

"Maybe a hunter's fire they didn't put out," he said.

I found it hard to believe anyone was out here hunting other than us because we were idiots with a high cardio tolerance and my husband is more than willing to hike around for hours in terrible conditions without any guarantee of success. And I, for some reason, am willing to do this with him.

"We need to put it out, if we can," I said, envisioning these desert hills getting a wind whipped fire that was a total disaster to deal with, and on the edge of several towns.

So we made our way toward it. Picking across the loose slope. It was the first hunt I'd taken my new shotgun on, and I was imagining a scenario where I would have to use the beautiful stock to dig line.

The closer we got, the more ominous it became. It smelled like... burning tires, not a wildfire.

My husband reached it first. The smoke was coming out of the ground.

"Is it burning roots under there?" I asked.

The chemical smell was overwhelming.

"This is a fumarole," he finally said. He did have a degree in geology. "This whole area is oil and gas. This is just, that."

A fumarole is a vent in the earth where gases and vapors are released. You see them by active volcanoes and areas of geologic activity.

"Uh, I think we should move away from it," I said, realizing the ground we stood on might not be solid.

But, there was no need to use my brand new shotgun as a shovel.

We kept walking, cresting the hill and dropping into a little hollow, which was full of smells that seemed poisonous, so we hopped back up on the ridge, and continued our way around the lip of the basin, toward the area where I was promised there were billions of chukars.

We encountered no more surface level geothermal activity, but after hours of stalking a covey and them disappearing like the desert ninjas they are, we turned around.

And then, I saw one. A single chukar (not billions). Standing on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the valley below.

But I was only willing to shoot a bird in flight. A lot of hunters will shoot them on the ground, but my internal compass doesn't let me do that.

It saw me, started to run and jumped off the cliff, beak down, falling like a little football-shaped cannonball before opening its wings and soaring over the steep mountain side.

It was super cool. And there was no way I was shooting it. I couldn't recover it. So I watched it soar over the cracked desert slope until it disappeared, a speck of brown against a sea of brown.

"Well," my husband said, appearing beside me. "You want to head home? We're running out of daylight."

So we backtracked, circling the edge of the basin until we reached the ominously smelling face with vapors rolling out of the Earth, and then cutting back to the trail, where we descended, the sun behind the mountains, so we were cold and in shadow.

"It's cool up here," my husband said. "Super weird."

We rounded a switch back, on a trail which theoretically could have been a road, at some point when cars were smaller, and saw, the headlights of an old truck, pointing at the sky. The rusted vehicle was in a crevasse, it's taillights pointed at the Earth, it's time-eaten windshield pointing at the darkening sky.

"It's certainly weird," I agreed.

"I just love public land," he said.

And I couldn't help but agree with him.