Curious Places: Part One.

The USA is a really big country. Fourth largest on Earth by land area. (Behind only Russia, Canada, and China in case you want to know). As such, it has a ridiculously varied topography with just crazy amounts of beautiful and unique landscapes.

Since my life has been a kind of race to see as much of this gorgeous nation as possible on the salary of a working class laborer, I have not seen as much of it as I want, but more of it than most people I know. However, there are strange little corners and out of the way geographical eddies that I want to see but have so far not been able. I figured I'd write about a few of these locations as my wife and I make currently vague, but increasingly more detailed plans to see them.

For some reason one of the spots I want to visit is foremost in my mind. The reason for this involves just reading about this geologically interesting spot, but also an image I saw that weirdly corresponded to a recurring dream I used to have as a young man. The dream was simple. I was at the foot of a huge granite dome of a mountain and just beginning a hike to the summit. The weather in the dream was always sunny and the mountain was always rather bare and imposing. My suspicion is that the dream was inspired by childhood visits to see Stone Mountain just outside Atlanta, but the real Stone Mountain never corresponded to the images in my dreams. However, one day in researching the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma I saw a photo of Quartz Mountain/Baldy Point...and damned if it did not look exactly like the mountain that had featured so prominently in my old recurring dream! (I haven't had a repeat of that dream in decades, in case you're wondering.)

Baldy Point (aka Quartz Mountain) the carbon copy of a mountain I used to see in my dreams. (Photo by Allen Ellis, from Summitpost.)

When Carole retires in two years we are likely going to sell our Casita travel trailer. We love that trailer, but we have discovered that on trips that exceed two weeks in length we begin to get a bit stir-crazy using it. A wonderful trailer, and I am not knocking it, but we realized that we will need a slightly bigger travel trailer when we do hit the roads for trips of one to two months, which we are going to take when Carole retires. So, one of our first trips west we are going to try to fit in a stay in at least a couple of locations at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. The place has some great camping and hiking opportunities, and I will definitely scramble to the summit of Baldy Point, aka Quartz Mountain.

If you're curious, just do an Internet search on the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. It's a series of funky little granite summits, the highest of which break 2,000 feet above sea level. To me, they present a fascinating and impressively rugged terrain of peaks and canyons. It doesn't hurt that there is quite a variety of animals roaming the area, including elk, bison, longhorn cattle, prairie dogs, ringtails, coyotes, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and other critters. (They even tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce the pronghorn.)

At any rate, even if I'd never had those weirdly pleasant recurring dreams featuring what I figured was a mountain merely a product of my youthful imagination, I would still very much want to see these strange, out of place mountains. They remain very high on my bag-list of interesting locations.

Mountain of Dreams

I've written about this place before, but I figured I'd touch base on it again.

For many years--decades, in fact--I kept having this recurring dream of walking up a very steep mountain composed almost entirely of solid rock. It may have been that I was having dreams influenced by my childhood trips to see Stone Mountain near Decatur GA where we lived when I was in grade school.

But in my dreams it wasn't exactly Stone Mountain. The color of the rock was always darker--more toward the yellow/orange spectrum than the pale granite of the Georgia plutons. Finally, a few years ago (after I'd stopped having this recurring dream), I saw a photo of this place:

It's called Quartz Mountain and it's part of a chain of strange granitic peaks in Oklahoma called the Wichita Mountains. The color and profile was perfect, but in my dream you could drive right up to the base of the peak and begin walking up the very steep slopes. And then I found this photo:

Apparently, Quartz Mountain (aka Baldy Point) is a popular rock climbing spot in Oklahoma. But you can also hike up the mountain without resorting to a technical climb.

It moved high on my list of places to see. Hopefully we'll stop there on our way out to Kings Canyon/Sequoyah and Yosemite National Parks in two years.

In Dreams

I was born and spent the first seven years of my life in the coastal plains of extreme southeast Georgia. Any father east and you're standing in the Atlantic Ocean. Any farther south and you're at the Florida border.

That land is very flat and featureless, except for the rivers and lakes and swamps that slice through or inundate the piney-scrubby monotony. The only vertical relief I ever saw in the earth before the age of seven were the odd bits of dirt thrown up at various construction sites. My dad's best friend had a house built on a berm left over from the construction of a canal known locally as "the Arco Ditch" (the canal had been built by the Atlantic Richfield Company...thus, "Arco"). His house was on a bit of a hill that was, maybe, nine or ten feet high. To my child's eye, it was a vast mountain. That's how flat the land is in southeast Georgia.

When I was seven, though, we packed up and my dad moved us to Atlanta. Or, rather, Decatur to be exact. We took up residence in that city that lies cheek by jowl with Georgia's largest city. One of the first "mountains" I would have seen was the vast granite monolith just outside Decatur known as Stone Mountain. Technically, it's not a true mountain, but it rises almost nine hundred feet above the surrounding plateau and has sheer faces of many hundreds of feet soaring skyward. If an eight-foot pile of sand had seemed huge to me, my initial sighting of this thing was truly an astounding event.

No, this is not in Yosemite National Park. This is Stone Mountain, in Georgia.

I do recall seeing Stone Mountain for the first time. I remember standing at the base looking up at the men working on the Confederate monument that was then being carved into the otherwise beautiful granite face of the peak. I remember seeing those men moving around on scaffolding, watching sparks fly, granite dust blowing, rubble cascading down. I looked on in wonder then, and recall it now as a travesty on the body of this natural wonder. If there really was a God, he'd reach down and scour that horror off the mountain and put things back the way they were.

Alas.

We even climbed Stone Mountain when I was a kid. I don't recall who walked me up the mile-long trail to the top, but someone did. It may have been my dad, or an older brother. I just don't remember that detail. But what I do remember is the dreams that climb touched off.

Soon after going up there, I began to have dreams of walking up the face of a mountain. In my dream there were others walking up there, too. I wasn't alone. I've had that dream periodically over the past forty-five years. It's a pretty vivid dream. I always start off standing beside a car or a truck. And then I start walking toward this towering wall of granite that's very, very steep. I follow other people climbing up. The sun is shining low in the sky and the granite is almost golden. And it's warm, and the sky is clear and blue. The mountain is beautiful and I just want to climb it.

And that's the dream. That's all there is to it. It's a very nice and pleasant dream and whenever I have it I always awaken with a feeling of well being. When I got older, I started to wonder if there really was such a place. The summit is of granite, but it's not Stone Mountain. The peak in my dream isn't as vast as Georgia's Stone Mountain. It's impressive, but not 900 feet from base to summit.

Finally, I stumbled across some photos of a mountain that's in Oklahoma. Until I saw the photos, I'd never heard of this particular mountain range. The only mountains I'd ever heard of in Oklahoma are the Ozarks, which it shares with Arkansas and Missouri. I'd never heard of this other range called the Wichita Mountains. Once I saw this photo, I read up on them.

They're composed of granite and the highest of them rise to a bit over 2,000 feet above sea level. They're not big mountains by any measure. But some of them have impressive vertical faces, and many of them are devoid of much in the way of tree cover, rising impressively over the surrounding flatlands.

And there, in the form of Quartz Mountain, was the peak that I always see in my dreams. I swear it is. I always knew that I'd find a mountain that resembled the one I've dreamed since I was seven years old. One of these days I plan to drive out to Oklahoma and visit Quartz Mountain. I hope to hike up one of the easier slopes and see what things are like on the summit.

After all, it's the mountain of my dreams.

Quartz Mountain. Photo by Alan Ellis.