The moment Bill Broyles dug up the plastic water container he had buried under the palo verde tree, he realized he was in serious trouble.
It was midmorning in early August 1980, and daytime temperatures on the Arizona-Mexico border were well over 100 degrees. There was little or no shade in this part of the Sonoran Desert, about 40 miles east of Yuma.
After a day and night of hiking, he was down to a single cupful of water. The five-gallon plastic jug he’d buried a few weeks before—the one he was counting on to keep him alive in the furnace of late summer—was now empty. Puncture marks showed what had happened.
“A coyote had got to it,” Broyles says. “He was probably the happiest coyote in Sonora County.”
Alone, on foot, and almost out of water in one of the hottest deserts in North America, Broyles knew his life was suddenly at risk.
And because of the story that had brought him here—the almost unimaginable ordeal of a Mexican prospector in this very place, 75 years earlier—Broyles also knew just how bad it could get.
“I realized, I’ve become the person I’m looking for,” he says. “I’ve become Pablo Valencia.”
In August 1905, the geologist and anthropologist William McGee was working at a field camp at Tinajas Altas, a series of water-carved pools in the granite mountains on the border between the Arizona Territory and Mexico. With help from his camp manager, a local from the Tohono O’odham tribe named Jose, McGee spent his days gathering data on the weather, studying the area flora and fauna, and sleeping under the stars.
Tinajas Altas was the only dependable source of water for a 100-mile stretch of El Camino del Diablo, a notoriously difficult
