No chillin’ in the morning today,
no letting my brain wander off on tangents about crossword clues or cards
games. This morning I woke up at 6am, got up at 6am and was dressed and out the
door by 6:45am.
Today started out, how I hope
none of your days ever start out, with a call to the Ajo Sherriff to report the
discovery of two people we found this past weekend who had died in the desert.
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| L'Aguja aka Sheep's Peak |
Last Friday, we set out from
Charlie Bell Well on an exploratory through hike, going North of a mountain
named L’Aguja, the needle. Well, we and our allies in the South, call it L’Aguja,
on the maps it is called Sheep’s Peak. L’Aguja is a spire just to the west of
Growler Ridge. It is about 43 miles north of the US/Mexico border and is so
distinctive that you can see it from almost everywhere. Its distinctiveness
makes L’Aguja a navigation point for people travelling through the desert. Its
distance from the border has made it a graveyard. Well, that’s not quite true,
Prevention through Deterrence and the militarization of the desert between the
border and L’Aguja is what has made it a graveyard.
Our weekend through hike took us
on a 21 mile circuit going up the west side of L’Aguja and coming back on the
east side of Growler Ridge. We found the first person about 2 miles north of
the peak on a rocky lava flow, and the second person a further 8 miles north in
a big canyon at the boundary of the Bombing Range. Both people had been dead
for some time, their remains skeletalized by their final resting place in the
desert. We carefully marked each bone with GPS coordinates, photos and flagging
tape and then paused for a moment of quiet reflection and holding space for the
people we found and their families.
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| Map of Recovered Human Remains around L'Aguja, 2001 to 2020 |
Back in Ajo this morning, we
called the Sherriff. The Sherriff is supposed to coordinate with the Land Manager, in this case US Fish and Wildlife, to recover the remains and send them to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (OME). OME will send the information to Humane Borders, who will add them to the Arizona Open GIS forDeceased Migrants, and to Colibri Center for Human Rights who keep a DNA
database from people whose loved ones have been disappeared in the desert. OME
and Colibri will try and match the DNA from the people we found with those in
the database. This can take months or even years. Sometimes there is no match
to be found and the person remains “Desconcido” (unknown).
On our weekend exploratory hike,
we also found that all our drops had been CTFO, that is “cleared the &%$#
out.” Meaning that people travelling through the desert had found and used the
supplies.
Having completed our call with
the Sherriff, we loaded up the Mossy and headed back to Charlie Bell Well to
replenish those supplies.
It is getting hotter in Ajo,
today’s projected high was 80. Still Lia and I got our “bro” on each carrying 4
gallons of water (each gallon weighs 8lbs), cans of beans, trail snacks and our
personal drinking water for 2.5 miles down to the drop. It sucked, my
shoulders, hips, legs, feet and brain agree that it sucked, but it was worth
every wince and every ache….hopefully the supplies we left today will keep
someone alive tomorrow.
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