Humphreys Peak
Arizona
July 2013
Throughout the day, the only wildlife we see are chickaree squirrels, a couple of woodpeckers and other birds, and herds of hikers. Grandma, back in the Ranger District office on the telephone, warned us to be careful of the ticks and snakes. No need. There are none. What we do see other than the rodents, birds and people however, surprises us.
After a half day of hiking, we approach the summit of Humphreys Peak. We can’t actually see the high point sign, but we can imagine it, just up this last big hump, maybe a couple hundred yards. After hiking four and a half miles and gaining more than 3000 feet, this is the summit — we know this — as we have traversed all the false summits already.
And this is where the surprise begins. Hikers are running down the slope from the summit. Some are turbo-powered, afterburners and everything. Breathlessly they cry out as they pass, “Gnats!” “You won’t believe how many gnats are up there!” “They’re in my eyes and my nose! Millions of them!” I actually hear someone proclaim, “Oh em gee!”
Well, okay then. Gnats. We keep climbing, of course. We are less than five minutes from achieving the highest high point so far in our high point adventures. We can deal with a few gnats.
Okay, we deal with them but not for too long. We stand at the high point and take our photos, enter our names in the register, throw a few high fives. Nothing higher for hundreds of miles; we try to get a good appreciation of the spectacular breadth of landscape.
On a clear day on Humphreys Peak, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, that magnificent rent that stretches for 277 miles, should be visible to the north. In some places, the Grand Canyon is 6000 feet deep. The bottom of that gash, carved out by the Colorado River, is just the opposite of where we are. 6000 feet down and 12 633 feet up: three and a half miles from bottom to top.
Arizona. AZ. The alpha and omega.
A 19th/20th century biologist, zoologist, ornithologist, entomologist and naturalist named Clinton Hart Merriam described six distinct life zones in these 18 633 feet. A life zone, or Altitudinal Vegetation Zone, has to do with phenomena like how it rains at lower elevations while it snows at higher elevations, why it’s windier and colder up high and like that. In this area, it also means that thunderstorms are epic and build up quickly. In 30 minutes the sky can go from cloudless blue to raging rain and lightning. Hikers are cautioned to be off the mountain about thunderstorm time, which as we know, thanks to the warning from our ranger yesterday, is 12:43 p.m.
These thunderstorms come in fast and strong because the wind blows across the plain or the desert, and then smacks up hard against the mountain that rises up dramatically from the flat landscape. Humphreys Peak is the highest of the San Francisco Peaks. Wham!
We climb up the last rise to the top. The sky is reasonably clear, but there are these funny dots in our field of vision. Gnats. A jaw-dropping volume of gnats, although we want to keep our mouths closed.
Do you know that the combined weight of all the mosquitoes in the world is greater than the combined weight of all the cows? Yeah, I’ve heard this. I wonder if the combined weight of all the gnats on this summit is greater than the combined weight of all the swear words we hear from harried hikers…
After our trip, I do my research. I make a call to Coconino National Forest, home of Humphreys Peak. I ask, “What’s with the gnats?”
The woman who answers the telephone says, “I’ve never heard of gnats on the summit. I have no idea.” She connects me with Pat in Recreation & Wilderness to see what he knows.
++click, click++ “Hi Pat. What’s with the gnats?”
Pat says, “I’ve heard of the gnats on the summit but I have no idea.”
Let’s take a different approach. I call the University. I ask for the Department of Annoying Insects, or in their language, the Department of Entomology.
Looking for the appropriate Professor Of Gnats on the website for Northern Arizona University I find these areas of study, comments are mine…
Pathogen evolution, disease ecology
— interesting
Population dynamics
— could be fascinating
Plant reproductive development
— uh…
Department chair
— I know what this is
Microbial fuel cells
— can’t imagine, but sounds promising
Genetic and ultrastructural analysis of development in microbes
— what?
Biology of fishes
— fishes?
Squirrel ecology
— I love it!
Plant-mycorrhizal-herbivore interactions in semi-arid environments
— now you’re just making shit up
People have doctorates in this stuff! They are the experts, which means they know more about Phylogenetic Systematics of Ribes and Cirsium, or whatever, than just about anybody else on Earth.
Years ago, I worked with a guy who, in his academic job, claimed to be the world’s leading expert on penile stimulation in the Rattus norvcegicus. Or in other words, he was trying to figure out why lab rats get hard-ons. I never asked him another question about his work at the University.
In fact, I’ve resigned myself to the idea that, no matter what I do in this lifetime, no matter how much research I do, there will always be mystery. The gnats, unlike the lustful rats at the university, were of interest to me, but from what I was able to find, as you will see, not enough interest to solve the mystery. But wait. Watch what happens next.
From the university department list, I pick one guy whose area of expertise seems closest to gnat knowledge, call him and find myself lucky enough that we have a lively conversation. Dr Stefan Sommer is on the faculty of the University there in Tucson and is director, producer, moderator and advisor of a whole bunch of egghead activities. If anyone knows, it’s gonna be him.
I ask Dr Sommer, “What’s with the gnats?” (I silently promise myself not to bring up the subject of horny rats.)
We go back and forth but this is the gist of his response. “…It may be that the gnats were ‘hill topping.’ Many insect species will fly to the highest point in the landscape as a way of finding mates. I have seen this kind of accumulation of gnats on ridges bordering canyons.
“Did you collect any of these gnats?” he asks me. “Do you have any idea what species they might be?”
Species? Gnats have species? I thought this was one of nature’s tautologies: Gnats is gnats.
“No,” I tell Dr Sommer. “I don’t collect samples. I collect high points.” He is delighted by this idea.
I send him some photographs, including this one of the gnats on a hat. Hmm, sounds like Dr Seuss.
Dr Sommer responds. “Sorry, I can’t really tell who they are at the scale of your pictures…. I would guess from their gestalt that they are probably not gnats, but true bugs instead. That would make more sense in terms of their location too. It would be a long way to go for gnats since their larvae are aquatic.”
Their gestalt?
“The bugs are mostly plant suckers so they might be ‘hill topping” from a more local origin on the slopes or meadows below the peaks…. These are my best guesses.”
He sends more info and this, I suppose, is where Dr Sommer particularly shines: “Here are some images of ‘true bugs.’ True bugs are insects belonging to the orders Hemiptera and Homoptera. The four species of bugs below…” He sends me more photos of these beasties. And now I gotta tell you, he goes on with the Hemiptera and Homoptera, Miridae (part of the order Hemiptera), Mirids and more Homoptera, and he throws in a few Diptera, and oh my!
But heck, I knew all this. You didn’t?
He includes an image of thousands of ladybugs clinging to a tree. Had nothing to do with my gnats but it is an awesome picture. Secures his status as a leading bugologist.
He explained how the ladybugs are hill topping and that “ladybugs are actually a type of beetle and are not bugs at all,” and that “beetles all belong to the order Coleoptera…”
Yes, yes, of course.
To be a true bug, you’ve got to have a certain structure of proboscis and mouth, the type that allows you to pierce and suck. (I dated a girl like that once.) He throws in more information about sucking fluids from plants, feeding on animals, the shape and form of various proboscises working like a juice straw. Also honeybees and butterflies. Uh-huh. I told you we had a lively conversation.
I go to an on-line insect identification site and click on Arizona. There I find 140 similar species, but none look like our gnats. In fact, the more I look over the list and photos of true bugs, and at Dr Sommer’s photos, and the on-line photos of gnats and my own photos of these little winged suckers on our hats, the more convinced I become: aquatic larvae or not, these are gnats. And… They are hill topping. So are we, only we call it Highpointing.
Many people wonder, do gnats bite? Yes, they do, and yes, these gnats bite us. But y’know, we swat them away like flies. Ha!
When we say “bug,” we can mean so many different things: a virus, someone who pesters us, computer glitches, illegal eavesdropping or an enthusiast. We might say “cute as a bug,” you might put a bug in someone’s ear, you might be snug as a bug in a rug, you could be bug eyed. However, when we say “bug” as we might when having a conversation with Dr Sommer, we are then talking about diminutive critters that have an exoskeleton, segmented bodies and six legs, like many other insects. When we say “true bug,” we are talking about all of the above plus they’ve got that girlfriend-like proboscis.
When we say “gnat”, it could possibly be mistaken for a Pittsburgh colloquialism. Some of us here in the Steel City have a habit of appending the word “an’at” to our sentences. My friend Bruce is a champion at this. Bruce is a creative, intelligent man with an astute sense of humor, none of which has to do with his habit of saying, for example, “We’ll go pick up the nieces and take them for pizza, an’at.” Or he might say, “I have two tickets to the Steelers game on Sunday night, so we’ll have dinner first an’at.” You don’t need it, but it kind of rounds out the sentence, gives it some balance, identifies you as a Pittsburgher, a source of pride.
Whatever the deuce our flying creatures are at the summit of Humphreys Peak — flies, bugs, no-see-ums, Hemiptera, Mirids, biting midges, Ceratopogonidae, sand flies, axolotl, punkies or gnats — they are the highest in the state of Arizona and there are at least as many of them as there are cows in the world, an’at.
To support this claim, I offer The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet by Huis, Dicke and van Gurp. They say, “For every human being on Earth, there are between 200 million and two billion insects.”
van Gurp?
Lisa and I commune with the gnats for some time and then begin our descent. This dome has no clear trail; we high-step our way on and among the rocks.
Wait a minute: “We commune with the gnats”? Who said that? That’s close to the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. We did our best to ignore the little pissants as they, in good spirit, feasted on any exposed flesh they could find. You don’t commune with gnats. There was no communing. There was biting is what there was.
Done at the summit. Time to head back down from the hump on Hump. Now that I’ve visited her flanks, we’re on a first name basis.
Once we are thirty feet below the summit, just like on the way up, there are no gnats. More evidence they are hill topping. Congratulations. “How many high points is this for you guys?” I ask the gnats.
