The desert is haunted.

"It's easier to stay warm than get warm, that's the awful truth."

"Would'ya stop saying that?" Mason said. "I heard you the first dozen times."

"Easy for you to say, you're not cold."

"And ya' know why I'm not all that cold? It's not all that cold!"

It was barely the second day of a week-long expedition.

We'd camped in the Valley of the Moon, planning to hike down to Pinto Canyon to the water there, although from the map, we had as yet not figured out how we were going to descend the three thousand foot drop between us and the desert floor.

In Pinto Canyon there are two springs, two reliable sources of year-round water. The upper spring was our goal. Get there, then spend the rest of our time exploring the immediate area, take pictures, experience the place that had mesmerized me.

This strip of desert drops from the In-Ko-Pah Range down to the Yuha Desert. It's flat against the border of Mexico. And though no part of it is ever more than three miles away from the freeway, the only reason I know it exists is that my wife had spotted an apparently new road climbing up the mountain south of In-Ko-Pah offramp, and we'd driven up it to a pass that then descends into a valley that in fact sits above Valley of the Moon. I think I could spend the rest of my life exploring this area. Towering hills and wide open valleys, boulders tumbling from far above down into washes with white sand. Every turn has new sets of morteros, every wash has petroglyphs I've not seen before, petroglyphs unlike anything I've ever witnessed. The drawings in Pinto Canyon are crude and mean, disturbing, haunting. They challenge my cosmology.

I'd picked the campsite, and hadn't studied the thirty foot tall stone pillar that dominated the spot, until I looked out of the camp. Like so much in this place, it had the eerie look of something insane, with a gaping cave yawning back at us, startling in its evil obviousness, a hole dug out of the solid rock at ground level. It defied reason that a cave would be created there, one single rock with a cavity in it, the cave all one wretched rock, its surface twisted and gnarled, while the rest of the stone was solid. I named it the Cave From Hell. It dominated the campsite, you couldn't escape it.

That night had been long, fitful, cold and exhausting. Between brutal cold, glacier-oriented mosquitoes sucking blood from my eyelids, and rioting wild horses battling each other all night, I was ready to jump off the nearest monolith and fall to Pinto Canyon.

I have never been so cold, before or since.

Gone were the ghostly pale sentinels of the rock walls around us, with rough haunted shadows looming over us, replaced now by aged stone three hundred feet tall jaggedly piercing the earth and sky. Gnarled wind-whipped scrub oak and pinyon pines hung tenaciously in crags on the sides of the monoliths, feeding off water that gathers there.

I hoisted my pack with a grunt onto a rock, turned around and started working my arms through the straps. Mason waited his turn, since there wasn't another appropriately sized rock nearby to do this in tandem. I staggered away from the rock, shifting the seventy pound pack around as I tried to adjust to the sudden transfer of my center of gravity. Mason hoisted his pack up and slipped it on. By the time I'd gathered up all the things I'd forgotten, loaded them into the spare BDU pants pockets, and arranged all my gear to my liking, Mason was leaning on his walking stick, waiting for me.

"Once we get started, you'll warm up."

The creosote-scented dew that hung on everything had the crystal tinge of ice.

I kept thinking about when I was a kid and the walk-in freezer in one of my Dad's restaurants, except I never was in one of them for more than five minutes. This freezer I'd been in for six, seven hours . The only thing missing was that ice-cold smell.

We trudged down the path away from Hell's Cave, and at the road, turned east. No one but us was there, Moon Valley was ghostly quiet. Before us, the naked rocks and staggering-tall monoliths shot into the gleaming blue sky. I either missed the morning wind or it had never shown. I hoped the seventy pounds on my back would feel lighter once I adjusted to it's nature.

"Pete said go due east ‘til you get to a wash," I said.

"We're not headed due east," Mason answered, "More like south-east." We trudged further. "Well, we'll see what happens. Maybe the road turns."

The road dropped into a shallow trough, then rose gently back up again toward a pass through some of the monoliths. Three feet down, three feet up.

I didn't consciously notice the change coming out of the trough until I breathed in the powdery smell of buckwheat and dry sumac. I stopped. I looked back and could see our campsite. It couldn't have been more than a hundred yards away.

"What's up?" Mason asked at my shoulder. I raised a finger.

"It's warm."

Warm like memories, dry as powder, windless, no birds speaking, silent, deathly quiet.

Mason sighed and leaned on his stick. He said nothing. I pointed toward the Cave.

"Hold on just a sec."

I walked back, and when I came to the trough, started down, I could feel frigid air rising up my legs, torso, chest, across my face, so cold it hurt. The glacial air didn't go away as I rose up from the trough on the other side. There was an unearthly feeling, turning back toward Mason, him leaning on his stick maybe twenty yards away as I started in, then out of the trough, the atmosphere around me changing, the cold dropping away, as I watched Mason watch me.

I shared my findings with Mason, who frowned and grunted, then turned and started down the road again.

"Well, for pity's sake, Mason, have you ever heard of such a thing?"
"Yeah, Whaley House in Old Town, San Diego ... and haunted houses in general, I guess."

I made some Donald Duck noises as I ran after my backpacking partner. Mason calmly raised a hand and an eyebrow.

"Hey, you picked the campsite.