The road to the digging place.
The club arranged a juniper dig with Harry Hirao on Saturday, April 5, 2003, near Mojave, California. Members of Dai Ichi Bonsai Kai gathered at the Denny’s restaurant in the desert town of Mojave to meet with Harry Hirao and drive into the Jawbone Canyon area to dig California Junipers. Members of Dai Ichi who joined the adventure included Bob Lawlor, Milton Louie, Jim Peerson, Doyle Saito, Joel Cervera, and honorary life-time member Frank Goya. A number of Kofu Kai members also joined the hunt.
After leaving Dennys, the eager bunch headed north on highway 14 and turned onto the Jawbone Canyon road, driving as much as 10 miles on back roads to one of Harry Hirao’s secret digging spots. The drive on the dirt roads began to look like a caravan across one of Iraq’s deserts, as the dust kicked up by the vehicles carried across the landscape. The caravan had to stop a couple of times while Harry unlocked the cattle gates to allow us all to pass.
A cold wind greeted us as Harry pulled into a small box canyon as his first stop for digging. At this point, the members were free to go their way in search of the masterpiece trees. Lawlor, Goya, and I decided to stay in the canyon and try our luck on the ridgelines feeding down into the canyon. Saito, Cervera, Louie, and Harry and the Kofu cast decided to drive over the hill and try another area.
I climbed the ridgeline, looking over specimens as I went, stopping about every five minutes to get oxygen as the combination of altitude and steep (and slippery) slopes take their toll on your air supply quickly. After climbing for about 45 minutes, I reached the summit of the ridgeline and surveyed the scenery. I have never before seen the abundance of wildflowers in bloom everywhere in these mountains. Yellow and lavendar floral displays dotted every hillside. I finally spotted Lawlor down canyon digging a tree he found.
Then I spotted something else that made me wonder why I had just spent the better part of an hour climbing. Doyle Saito was walking along the top of the ridgeline with his shovel over his shoulder, waving at me with a smile on his face. His truck was parked about 100 yard behind him. He had driven up to the top of the ridge while us more experienced diggers struggled with twisted ankles and oxygen deprivation to find our little trees. Don’t these new guys understand that the more you suffer during the hunt, the more your will treasure your find? Next time I’m taking the road up the hill!
Many of the junipers in this area were huge, I mean 20-30 feet in height with trunks the size of a man’s waist. Bob and I spotted one magnificent tree that was truly masterpiece material, but we would have had to hire a crane to lower the tree into our trucks and sell our houses to afford a pot to put it in, so we passed.
I finally spotted a suitable tree and hunkered down to dig it out, while fighting the cold wind and steep canyon hillside. After another hour or so, we met back down at the parking area and showed each other our trees. Frank was the last to come down the hill. When Lawlor and I went up the hill to help him bring down his pack and tree, it took both of us to lift it, so we let Frank continue on down with his own tree.
Note to you diggers. Frank digs junipers with a sizeable root ball of mountain soil in place and does not remove the soil when he plants the tree in a pot at home. His success rate over the past 40+ years is quite good, but I do not understand how such a small man, 78 years old, can carry such a heavy load down the mountain, the same mountain that I slid and fell down repeatedly when I descended. As I sat on the tailgate of my truck, enjoying the return of oxygen to my bloodstream, Frank noted sagely, “the mountain makes you feel your age!”
After a snack and some liquids, we decided to drive further up the road to another area in search of future digging areas. After scouting another hillside, I dug and sifted two buckets of DG (decomposed granite) for future use as soil mix, while Frank Goya found some sand in a dry riverbed that he favored for the same purpose. Joel Cervera cruised by about this time in his 4-wheeler. He had been all over those mountains checking out the possibilities, and was headed out for more hilltime.
Then that magic moment arrived when we realized we were more comfortable inside our warm trucks than climbing around this harsh landscape. With one tree apiece, we decided to call it a day in Jawbone canyon, and moseyed on home.
Email Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com
apr03a.html, this hand crafted HTML file was created April 8, 2003.
Last updated August 21, 2014 by
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