Coat Hanger Valley

On the south of our property, in front of the house and across the driveway, there is a gully. It has a creosote bushes, a few saguaros, lots of palo verde and scrawny acacia, and the occasional ornamental which suggests prior attempts to make a garden.

Its east slope was used as a cowboy garbage dump. Broken bottles, pottery, broken bricks and concrete, construction bits and pieces, wire, tin cans, chunks of asphalt, and -- oddly enough -- coat hangers. Cowboys hung up their coats?

Coat Hanger Valley, pretty much cleared out.

There was even a fire-pit which accumulated scores and scores of wine bottle corks. Who would have thought that cowboys drank wine by the fireside? The pit was overgrown with bushes and served as a nest for pack rats.

(I'm a romantic. There used to be a San Simeon Ranch in these parts, so I think of cowboys and bunk-houses. Odds are, the debris around the gully originated with uncouth suburbanites.)

Occasionally in the winter (when it's too cold for snakes) I'd walk down the gully with a bucket and pick up pieces of debris. It's an endless job. Disturbing any dirt yields more artifacts.

A previous owner had dumped gravel and at least one truckload of rocks and small boulders (thank God, of the local Catalina granite variety) at the top of the gully, just south of the driveway. The rocks inartfully cover huge pieces asphalt driveway that had been previously dumped there.

A path traverses the top of the gully, below the driveway.

The gully was an area we avoided because of snakes whose sluffed skins we'd often see there. One time I saw a king snake slither into one of numerous broad crevasses in the rock field, homes for squirrels, chipmunks, rats, rabbits and other food.

But the thing is, the gully is a remarkably introspective opportunity to sit with the Sonoran Desert. I am planning my second park bench to better enjoy the landscape.

One mild evening a day or two after Christmas, I was sitting on my first park bench looking down at the gully when the thought crossed my mind: build a path traversing through the rock field. Which I did the next day.

Harvesting rocks and sifting out gravel. Here's where
I'd like my second park bench.

Turns out the rock pile wasn't as bad as I thought. I used a hand-sized pickaxe to pull out the rocks, always cautious about what might jump out, but I found no evidence of any nest and I'm about two-thirds through. The asphalt chunks weighed heavily in the garbage cans, but the weekly truck had no complaints picking them up.  I sifted dirt to separate the gravel (I don't like crushed gravel -- it's not a part of the Sonoran landscaping palette) which I spread over the side driveway.

Boulders and rocks are being strategically distributed to shore up slopes and more paths. Mounds are built up around acacia and palo verde trunks to be better able to water them. (As a local nursery-man told me, there's not a desert plant that doesn't like water once a week).  I take personal credit for nurturing one large acacia back to leaf, and for the discovery and rehabilitation of a mesquite tree. Its huge trunk and misshapen branches were overgrown with creosote bushes.

I dig up blue and green agaves that have overgrown elsewhere in the yard and plant them on the barren slopes. Irrigation plumbing has been extended. Soon the paths will be extended and I will have fairy lights in the gully.

I have to come up with a better, more accurate name than Coat Hanger Valley.