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north and a three-day hike away, I was fearful of a similar confrontation. Bob had asserted that the Chariot Canyon attack had been perpetrated by local “yahoos” rather than illegal immigrants, whom he thought were “much more interested in avoiding hikers than in stealing their stuff.” That didn’t help much. Illegals and yahoos? I didn’t want to try my luck with either of them.
    The United States and Mexico share a two-thousand-mile border, and while estimates vary widely as to the number of illegal immigrants that attempt to cross this border each year, they run as high as
seven and a half million
. By comparison, the number of
legal
Mexican immigrants is currently capped at seventy-five thousand per year. A significant percentage of the illegal U.S–Mexico border-crossers, probably in the range of sixty to eighty percent, attempt to cross into either San Diego or neighboring Imperial Counties. Approximately 400,000 of these are picked up by U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) each year and shuttled back over the border, where many will make plans to try again. Within San Diego County, there are more than two thousand Border Patrol agents for sixty-six miles of border, enough for one per every two hundred feet or so. In addition, the USBP has at its disposal high-tech infrared equipmentthat can pinpoint the location of a jack rabbit down to a centimeter. Despite the large work force and cutting-edge technology, evidence seems to support the claim that, even in San Diego County, the USBP carries a batting average around the Mendoza line (.200 or so), meaning that only one out of every five border-crossers is caught. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), while long acknowledging the difficulty of estimating the flow of illegal immigrants, has generally publicized a higher apprehension rate than this. But information from the U.S. census of 2000 showing higher than expected numbers for total population and particularly for the Hispanic population, seems to refute these claims.
    Compounding the illegal immigrant problem is the illegal cargo some carry. Approximately seventy-five percent of illicit drugs in the U.S. enter via transport across the U.S.–Mexico border. Drug cartels often “mule” their cocaine and other recreational pharmaceuticals across within the stomachs and intestines of those dreaming of a better life. “Mules” are people who smuggle drugs by ingesting securely wrapped containers of extremely pure substances. These poor folks, already risking capture by Border Patrol, assault by anti-alien vigilantes, exposure, dehydration, and starvation, take on the further peril (not to mention discomfort) of passing latex-coated cocaine through the behind. Consider that in the year 2000 alone, there were five hundred documented border-crossing deaths, most of them from environmental exposure. Who knows how many died and weren’t found? Drug “mules” are willing to risk all of this for $1,000 and the chance for a new life in America—quite a gamble to take to enter a country that goes out of its way to punish both illegal drug distribution and illegal immigrants.

    As midday approached, the wind abated and sunshine bore down. We completed a gradual traverse of Hauser Mountain and then a steamy, knee-rocking canyon descent. By one in the afternoon we’d reached the canyon floor and Hauser Creek. It was the first water supply of the day, and a remarkably unimpressive one at that—a stagnating pool swarming with gnats and surroundedby mud pocketed with cattle hoof marks. Our lunch consisted of raisins, energy bars, and dried meat sticks. I’d soon discover that a meat stick is the perfect protein bolus for a ravenous hiker. At first, the contents of the dried meat stick were a mystery to me, but after a summer of these tasty and wholesome treats I think I finally figured out the secret recipe—eight parts beef, four parts pork, two parts