Pinches & The Pictographs

There are people who have lived all their lives in Mendocino County who don’t know where Island Mountain is and have never been to Covelo. This County is a big place with secrets and mysteries and whole worlds of hidden attractions and wild beauty in every part of its vastness. Consider yourself lucky if you’ve got a reliable guide who knows this place. 

It was a warm summer day some years ago when five of us got lucky. We'd responded to an invitation from former supervisor John Pinches to visit his ranch an hour and a half north and east off Highway 101’s comforting pavement, up and into the deep Mendo outback. Not that Mendocino County’s northeastern corner is uninhabited. There are people back there, but they aren’t what you would call “joiners.” There are outlaws and cowboys and combat vets who never got all the way back from Vietnam — four wheel-drive country in which it is wise to stick to the well-worn paths. If you go busting off the trail like the young dudes do in those off road Toyota ads you could run into intersecting fields of fire, or off a precipice never to be found. 

On a previous visit to the Pinches ranch, the Supervisor had mentioned that there were some interesting Indian “artifacts,” or “pre-historic rock drawings” on a huge stone on the middle fork of the Eel not far from his ranch house. 

Pinches’ place is far up on a ridge overlooking the river in a setting so splendidly isolated, so ruggedly beautiful that if I lived there I would spend most of my daylight hours looking out the windows, east to Yolly Bollys, north to Mount Shasta, south to Hull Mountain. 

But the purpose of the visit was the mystery stone, not the views. The site we’d come to see wasn’t what you’d call easily accessed; it was a long way down from Pinches’ ridgetop ranch, and then a good hike north along the collapsing rail line of the totally collapsed Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which runs alongside the mainstem Eel, deep in the Eel River Canyon. 

The former supervisor is not only a generous and gracious host, he’s a walking encyclopedia on the history of a fascinating region of the county — its wildest region. He's also an astute evaluator of local events and personalities, making him about as lively a companion and tour guide as one could possibly hope for. As a supervisor, Pinches was a rare combination of candor and commitment to the wider interests of the people who live with the consequences of what seemed like an endless succession of bad local decisions. He quickly got into trouble with the Ukiah-based bureaucracies. 

Elected officials come and go. The bureaucrats stay. They don’t like the occasional maverick who gets elected but won’t sit around with them in endless meetings talking about “robust interfaces” and “new paradigms.” An elected person who asks for a look at the books and asks where the money goes? Cordon that person off, and keep them cordoned off. Pinches was the best supervisor we had in many a new moon, but made a run for the state senate where he got buried in an avalanche of special interest money. 

“I’ve driven cattle by horseback over every inch of this country,” he says, seeming to toss off an anecdote about every topographical oddity his sharp eye lights upon. 

We’d rendezvoused at the foot of Bell Springs Road early that morning: Joe and Karen Pfaff, Don Morris, Alexander Cockburn, and me. Morris, who spends a lot of time backpacking in the Yolly Bollys himself is a distant second to Pinches in knowledge of the area. The rest of us might be said to be eager students. 

Pinches led the long trek up to his ranch. By the time we got all the way up the hill, it was lunch time. We broke out our provisions and spread them out on his kitchen table. After lunch, Pinches led us down into the canyon on a long and precipitously harrowing old skid trail. Half way down John stopped at an otherwise forgettable jumble of cliff-dwelling trees and volcanic rock. “Right here is where Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt counties meet,” declared. “They all come together right here.” 

At the foot of the ridge, and now on the west bank of the Eel, we regrouped on the railroad tracks. We were some 14 miles into the Eel River Canyon from Dos Rios on Highway 162, the road that links 101 to Covelo. 

There were once certain professional officeholders we will call Mike Thompson, Wes Chesbro and Virginia Strom-Martin who were telling the public that the rail line we were standing on was vital to the ongoing commercial viability of Mendocino and Humboldt counties; that products off-loaded at Eureka’s deep-water port would reach markets to the south by ecologically sound rail rather than by the polluting fossil fuel trucks on Highway 101; that America's bounty would be hauled north by this very rail from the Bay Area to Eureka and on out to the burgeoning markets of Asia; that Asia would return-ship vast loads of products into Eureka’s deep water port for distribution south by rail; and that all this magnificent enterprise depended on three-quarters of a billion dollars Tom Strom-Boro would get from Al Gore to invest in 60 miles of troublesome track in the Eel River Canyon. 

The problem was that the track was collapsed in many area between Dos Rios and Alderpoint, and where it wasn't collapsed it was covered with landslides that just keep on sliding as they have for many previous thousands of years. Three-quarters of a trillion dollars wouldn’t make the line permanently passable for the demands these cynical fantasists would make on it. 

Another problem was conceptual: Even if there were a deep water port in Eureka capable of processing Asia’s bounty, why would entrepreneurs ship stuff in and out of Eureka when they’ve got Frisco (more or less), Oakland (fer sure) and San Pedro (for a fact)? Anybody who says trains can run regularly through the Eel River Canyon hasn’t taken a walk along its tracks. 

Pinches shook his head at the folly of spending another dime on the line that bordered his property. “They talk about how it will cost more money to close it than get it going again? It’s not costing anybody anything as it is. Look at it. Think a train’s coming through here any time soon?” 

Cowboy John was for letting nature reclaim its own and said he thought the focus of the ongoing state and federal bailout ought to be on getting the train running between Willits and Marin County, “which is doable.” He said if the government did anything at all in the Eel River Canyon it should convert the track to a trail for the enjoyment of hikers, bikers and recreational vehicles. And what a magnificent trail it would be. A trail from, say, Dos Rios to Alderpoint, or all the way up to Eureka, would draw thousands of people to enjoy the splendors few now ever see. 

We stood looking north along the undulating and occasionally disappeared track. Pinches pointed north where he said we would find the archeological site we had come to see. “You go on up the tracks two or three miles till you come to a big open meadow-like space. Across the river you’ll see two big rocks. Three or four years ago we put a winter stock fence in there and some of it should still be there. That’s where it is.” 

John leapfrogged us two at a time up the track a ways on his four-wheeler, informing us that Dean Witter himself owned “everything on the other side of the river.” John said Witter had his own excursion car on the old Northwestern Pacific, “and naturally he was all for keeping the train going up here.” Witter would halt the train not far from where we stood, be ferried across the river by a ranch hand, and then driven on up to his ranch house not far off the Mina Road east of the Eel. 

“I’m going back up to the ranch,” Pinches said. “The keys are in my truck. If you don’t show up by nightfall, I’ll come lookin’ for ya.” 

It then occurred to me that Cowboy John might have spent the day setting us up for a kind of liberal snipe hunt. I imagined him at Boomer’s down in Laytonville regaling the bar crowd with an account of the day’s outing. “Ol’ Anderson’s been after me for years to show him the Indian rocks. ‘When ya gonna take me to see the rock, John?’ he asks every time I see him. So I take him and four other of these liberal types up to the ranch and down to the river. I tell ‘em, ‘Just keep walking until you see the big rock and the little rock. Far as I know they’re still walkin’ north. Must be up around Fort Seward ’bout now.” 

Apologies to our host. I was the only one to whom this totally unwarranted suspicion occurred. 

The five of us hiked on up the track, alert to topography featuring open spaces and the Mutt and Jeff rocks. It was hot, but not oppressively hot. Much of the footing was by railroad tie and, as anyone who’s done it, walking for any distance on railroad ties is awfully tedious because one has got to carefully watch each step instead of the scenery. 

I'd seen what people call “spirit rocks” at two other places — one not far from the Russian River in Sonoma County and one deep in the hills between Yorkville and Hopland. They sit in areas astride what are said to be ancient Indian trails from east to west. To borrow a word from Dude-Bro Land, these spirit rocks are “awesome,” thousands of years of messages engraved in the stone by people who lived out their Edenic lives in absolute harmony with the land that sustained them. 

I wasn’t quite sure we were looking for a spirit rock or cave drawings or ancient pottery shards; Pinches had referred to the site variously as a cave, hieroglyphics and artifacts. After a couple hours of serious track-trudging, Don Morris yelled that he’d spotted what we were looking for on the other side of the Eel. 

Cockburn was first down the bank and out of his clothes, fording the river waist high with his belongings held over his head. Morris and I were next across. The water was warm, and near the banks stringy mosses had begun to coagulate in the flow. The middle branch of the Eel is pretty but it also seems sickly — it’s too warm, too lifeless, its flow too lethargic. It reminded me of a sort of aquatic version of one of those doomed tubercular patients in Russian novels. 

The rock formation containing its two lines of markings — mostly sequences of circles with horizontal lines through them — was above the water line. The pictograms, if that’s what they were, had been chiseled into the stone outcropping above a recess that might serve as a cave but ran back into the rock only ten feet or so. The markings numbered less than 20. Pinches said archeologists who have visited the site have also been mystified by the signs. They apparently pre-date the earliest Indian pictographs found on the spirit rocks. Pinches said that these mysterious symbols were once the subject of a Chronicle story. 

I pulled myself up above the clump of volcanic stone displaying the engravings hoping to find more, but despite what seemed to me much more likely slates on which our ancient ancestors might have carved out whatever message they’d carved out than the unlikely stone I’d just seen below, there were no more drawings. Looking around, none of it seemed a likely spot for a village or an ancient transit stop, but then I’m hardly an expert in these matters and the goddess only knows how many times the terrain has been shuffled in the great geologic upheavals since time began. 

We all re-forded the river, trudged back down the track and climbed into our host’s pick-up truck. I didn’t look forward to piloting my comrades back up the precarious hill, and made the mistake of telling them, “There’s a blind area in my bifocals of about 20 feet. Let me know if I get too close to the cliff.” I also mentioned that I’d never driven a four-wheel-drive vehicle before. There was perfect silence in the truck as my passengers prepared themselves for catastrophe. With Karen Pfaff in the passenger seat emitting terrified yelps, and the three boys in the back seat mutely reconciled to catastrophe, I steered Pinches’ modern marvel of traction upwards. 

Karen suddenly screamed and punched my arm. “Sorry,” she said, “but you were real close to the edge.” I looked to my right. “No!” she gasped, as I understood she much preferred I keep my eyes on the rutted upward path ahead. “You’re fine now,” she said in the voice of a person who knows in her bones the peril is extreme. The silence of the crypt reigned in the rear passenger seat. Cockburn still had six stitches in his forehead he'd sustained when the brakes on his old car went out on a steep Petrolia grade, forcing him to steer into the bank or take a premature step into the abyss. Here the poor guy was in his second near-death drama in a month. 

But we made it, and from the ranch we even made it back out onto 101 just about dusk, even though I’d destroyed the oil pan of my decrepit vehicle on the road in, and the impressive late-afternoon attempts to patch the thing failed. Cockburn had slid beneath my van as if he did it for a living, laboring for a half hour to patch the leak with an impromptu gasket fashioned by Pinches. On the long drive out to the highway, Morris and I poured oil into the crankcase, and continued to pour oil into the crankcase all the way to Willits where the kid who came to tow the van to the shop complimented Cockburn’s repair attempt. “Whoever tried to fix this did a pretty good job, but it musta broke open again when you hit another rock.” 

My wife retrieved me at the Willits Safeway. “Was it worth it?” she asked. “Yup, and then some,” I said.