Monday, June 8th, 2026: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Southwest New Mexico.
At 6,000 feet, we’re finally getting typical pre-monsoon weather – highs in the low 90s – so this Sunday I was looking for something higher and cooler. And after last Sunday’s short-and-steep, today I wanted something longer and gentler.
The crest hike in our eastern mountains is the only thing that would fit and still deliver interesting landscape and/or views. And it would be a shorter drive than what I’ve been choosing lately.
The eastern sky was almost completely clear, but I knew cumulus clouds would develop later.
I hadn’t hiked this trail in two years – since June 2024, the month after my knee injury, which turned out to be a mistake. The hike to the 10,020 foot peak is a little over ten miles out-and-back, with 2,000 feet of accumulated elevation gain. When I’m at my target of fitness, the peak is just the beginning of the complete hike, which continues another four miles north along the crest, for a total of 19 miles and 4,550 accumulated vertical feet.
But like most hikes, this one unfolds in a series of segments, and to maintain gradual recovery of my foot and knee, I was planning to turn back after the third segment, for a total of 8 miles and about 1,500 feet of elevation gain.
It’s the most popular mountain trail within an hour of home – seeing mostly urban hikers from the cities east of here – which is one reason I’ve been avoiding it. And today, on the first segment – the climb from the 8,200-foot pass on the highway, to the wilderness area boundary at just over 9,000 feet – I met a young backpacker returning from his ever-popular “night on the peak”.
The climb to the wilderness boundary is about two miles, and as usual, took me an hour. It’s actually the most scenic segment, passing back and forth across the crest, between dramatic rock outcrops, for seemingly endless views to both east and west. Despite a dry winter, we’d had several storms in recent months, and mountain crests typically get the most precip, so the flowers were about what I expected for early June.
The next segment spends about another mile traversing a sort of high cove on the east side of the crest, below a 9,600 peak and across converging drainages of a canyon below. The entire crest burned intensely in 2013 and 2022, and this segment passes through dense thickets of regrowth – primarily New Mexico locust and Gambel oak. But since the trail is the primary access to a famous fire lookout on the peak, it’s regularly cleared.
The third segment switches back to the west side of the crest and climbs to another saddle, a long, narrow, and windy rock outcrop favored by hedgehog cacti. This is where I planned to turn back.
But I was feeling great! Why not go a little farther? The point where the trail switches back to the east side is only another half mile farther and less than 400 vertical feet higher. It was a no brainer.
Of course, once I’d made that fateful decision, I was pretty much committed to climbing to the peak, because that’s where the habitat changes most dramatically, to alpine meadows and fir forest.
I was still feeling great when I finally reached the junction with the peak trail at just below 10,000 feet. I avoid the actual peak because I have no interest in the fire lookout. But normally I continue a quarter mile or so to the first beautiful meadow – and today I felt like I’d pushed my luck already. I hadn’t hiked this far since July 2024, and I knew it was a mistake – neither my foot or knee was ready, and I would pay tomorrow at home.
So reaching that unspectacular junction in the forest was both anti-climactic and regretful.
Returning down the highest segment of the trail should theoretically offer the best views to north and east. But all the standing snags mostly prevent that. Fortunately the naked eye can pick out peaks dozens of miles away that the camera can’t reveal. I always enjoy glimpses of the 10,200 foot summit of the range, twelve miles north, which I’ve also hiked, along with the crest in between.
I’d started the hike on pain meds, after waking with bad shoulder pain. At this point, bending my elbow to take pictures was painful. And by the time I reached that rocky saddle, my right shoulder was burning and I was struggling to protect my left foot.
The next segment, traversing the watershed of the east-side canyon, involves a gentle decline and was easier on my foot. I’d taken a second pain pill before reaching the peak, but it seemed to be wearing off. The peak above blocked the west wind, the dense shrubs maintained humidity without blocking the high-altitude sun, and that traverse felt like a hot day on the streets of New Orleans.
The final segment was hell. My packstraps were killing both shoulders, the right shoulder and arm were on fire, and my whole lower body was aching. You’re not supposed to drive on pain meds, it takes 45 minutes before you feel the effects, and the drive home is an hour. So I finished the hike and started the drive in considerable pain. Have I learned my lesson? Fat chance…
Monday, June 1st, 2026: Hikes, Log, Mineral, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
I was out of pain meds, but my doc was on vacation – so I’d been minimizing my activity level and trying to avoid using the right arm. But it was Sunday – I just had to do a hike.
Even after eight years of hiking the backcountry and wilderness areas within a 2-hour drive, there still remain many, many trails I haven’t hiked – some because they require backpacking in bear habitat, and others because they just haven’t appealed to me. One of the latter is a two-mile “shortcut” between the dirt road that crosses our high mountains, and one of our most spectacular canyons.
We owe Aldo Leopold an immense debt of gratitude for his foresight in obtaining wilderness designation for such a vast area, over a hundred years ago, when environmentalism as such didn’t exist and few Americans were concerned about habitat degradation. The more than 1,200 square miles of designated wilderness in my back yard include dozens of spectacular canyons, waterfalls, and caves – and because of the wilderness designation and lack of road access, most of those features are hidden from tourists and can only be seen via arduous hikes or backpacks.
Most of them are so hard to reach that even today, little or no information is available online, and the only way to discover them is by blundering into them blindly, on foot.
Today’s trail hadn’t seemed an option before – it was too short when I was in good condition, and it involved too much elevation gain when I was in recovery, trying to protect my knee and foot. But now, I felt my joints could handle it. Warm weather was forecast in town, and the trail is higher in elevation and forested, so there might be shade. And it enters that canyon well above the well-known lowest stretch, beyond which no one seems to venture anymore.
Our famous dirt road over the 9,000 foot crest begins at the edge of the ghost town, and today’s trailhead lies not much farther, in the bottom of a narrow canyon just beyond the last house, a ramshackle cabin purchased last year by somebody from far away who, like most city dwellers, apparently always dreamed of a cabin in the woods, oblivious to fire ecology and the flash floods that periodically wipe out roads like this. I heard them hammering away on their property as I set off up the trail, which begins by climbing up the ridge between this and the canyon of my destination, from about 6,800 feet at the trailhead to about 7,300 feet at the saddle.
Despite the elevation, it was open woodland, I was exposed on a clear, sunny day, and I was sweating like a pig, swarmed by even more flies than before.
This is the steeper, western side of our high mountains – hence the spectacular canyons – and the ridges, creeks, and road all climb from west to east here. The road actually tops out at the northern end of the 9,000 foot crest – the canyon I was heading for is the northernmost of our big west-side canyons, and the ridges beyond it are generally a thousand feet lower than the main crest behind me. I glimpsed them from the saddle, but the trail on the opposite side of the big clearing led immediately down into mixed-conifer forest with limited views.
I had a vague sense that it would be steep, but holy shit! – this turned out to be one of the steepest trails I’ve ever encountered. The average grade, descending that narrow side canyon to the bottom of the main canyon, is about 30 percent over a distance of 1.2 miles. The habitat alternated between mature mixed-conifer, shrub-and-grassland, and pinyon-juniper-oak. As a result, much of it was exposed, but little seemed to be recently burnt, so it was pretty as well as hot. I especially enjoyed a continuous stand of tall bigleaf maples when the trail entered the side canyon bottom.
The last 150 yards of the trail were at a minimum 40 percent grade – I have no idea how anyone could even build a trail at that grade, since you wouldn’t have stable footing to wield a tool – and I had to side-step down it. And at the bottom, a little below 6,200 feet, instead of views of spectacular cliffs or rimrock, all I found was a dense riparian jungle.
My trail ended in the jungle. The creek was flowing a short distance away, where I glimpsed some logs that had been sawn, decades ago, indicating a creek crossing on the main canyon trail. But when I crossed the canyon there, no trail awaited. So I headed back to the opposite bank, following a vague opening through the jungle that immediately ended in a dark thicket of seedlings.
These canyon bottoms are narrow, so there seemed no chance of getting lost. I began forcing my way through the vegetation, where I was soon stopped by the contorted trunk of a massive oak that had fallen across most of the floodplain. And with difficulty, trying to protect my injured shoulder and recovering foot and knee, I struggled under it into the jungle on the other side.
From glimpses I’d had across the creek, I believed that this, the south side of canyon bottom, was the correct side for a route up canyon, so I just kept forcing my way through the dense young trees and over the deadfall, and eventually reached a little clearing with the remains of a campfire circle predating our big 2012 wildfire. I was definitely on the right track!
And just beyond that, I reached the old trail, which had survived the post-fire floods and debris by climbing the south slope of the canyon. In fact, it climbed 70-80 feet above the creek for quite a distance – and despite it having good but narrow tread, I was amused to find the 3-inch trunk of a contorted oak that had literally grown across the trail at calf level, extending a dozen feet on the opposite side, since this trail last saw regular use. I might actually be the first person here since the 2012 fire.
Of course, the trail eventually descended back into the riparian jungle and disappeared. And after forcing my way farther through the jungle, I suddenly confronted the 4-foot-diameter trunk of a fallen Douglas-fir, with branches intact, forming an impenetrable barrier.
Fortunately the root cavity was just upslope, so I was able to scramble around the giant, and within a short distance came to an obvious creek crossing, where I saw an opening in the vegetation on the other side. I crossed, climbed the low bank, and followed a clearing, clambering between more deadfall, and entering a forested obstacle course of deadfall that I picked my way over to the next obvious creek crossing. I figured I’d gone a half mile, and the opposite bank offered more dark jungle. Ahead was a broad opening in the canopy where a stand of young ash trees had mostly died off, facing a broad scree fall on the north slope of the canyon. I figured that would be a good spot to log a GPS waypoint, and the gravel bank on the south side would be a good spot to hang out and wait for the satellite connection.
But of course, I was restless, and made my way upstream on the opposite bank for a more than a hundred yards farther, until through the trees I spotted what appeared to be a sizable clearing on the opposite bank. Could it be an old campsite? I fought my way across. It would’ve been nice – except for the usual danger of falling pine limbs – but there was no evidence of fire rings or trail there.
There’s zero evidence online that anyone has been up this canyon since 2012, and it would be pointless asking the Forest Service – they’re all newcomers who rotate out every few years. I found a shoeprint midway up the initial slope from the trailhead, but nothing in the saddle or anywhere on the descent, so I assume I’m the first to hike it since at least last year. The “shortcut” trail is sporadically blocked by oak seedlings, even in the first few yards, so despite its good tread, it remains unpopular – dead-ending as it does in a canyon-bottom jungle.
Since COVID, trail crews have been busy all over our wilderness, clearing trails I’ve never seen or heard of – I wonder why this ten-mile canyon bottom with a perennial stream, climbing from 5,400 feet at its mouth to 8,500 feet at its head, remains untouched? Not that I’m complaining – the wilder the better for me.
Returning to the side canyon trail was tricky – I attempted a detour around that big fallen Douglas-fir, and spent some time lost in the jungle. But I finally stumbled upon a sawn log – clear indication there was a trail there once – and continuing in that direction I eventually emerged at the bottom of my dreaded 40-percent grade.
Climbing steep grades without putting weight on the ball of your foot is a real challenge. But this is where I realized I was actually having fun. Yeah, covering distance on a groomed trail gives me a sense of accomplishment, and can provide faster access to remote, spectacular destinations. But that bushwhack through the jungle, routefinding and stumbling upon random evidence and stretches of abandoned trail, is the kind of hike I enjoy most.
My unexpected happiness made the long slog to the saddle less of an ordeal.
Another reason I’ve avoided this trail is that the out-hike mostly involves descending, and the return hike involves mostly climbing. So I was really looking forward to the final, relatively gentle, descent to the trailhead, after which I planned to grab a burger at the tiny shack in the ghost town.
I reached the vehicle exactly five hours after departure – which for a round-trip hike of five miles is very slow. But stops amounted to at least a half hour, that bushwhack was definitely slower than usual, and steep climbs likewise go slow as I try to protect my foot.
I reached the ghost town, which was mostly deserted, shortly after 4 pm, and realized it already felt like a long day – I would rather get home early, take a leisurely shower, and warm up leftovers.
Friday, May 29th, 2026: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Pine Creek, Southeast Arizona.
Planning to end my birthday trip, check out of the hotel, and start driving home today, I was in a quandary. I was in no rush to get home, where more problems awaited me. Normally, on trips to the city like this, I try to fit in another restaurant meal and maybe a museum visit. But I was leaving on a Thursday, normally a hiking day, and the drive home offered potential hikes. In the end, I simply couldn’t decide between the options. I realized I just needed to hit the road, and let the drive clear my mind.
Back in the hotel room, an enroute hike was clearly a bad idea – it would require a long drive out of my way. I would end up with about six hours of hard driving, for less than three hours of questionable hiking. I might even need another night in a motel, a shabby one at that.
But on the road, my powerful desire to explore new territory overcame reason. I didn’t even stop for lunch – I had snacks left over from yesterday. I turned off the interstate and headed on long back roads toward that hidden canyon.
I’d passed this dead-end forest road once before – and I read about a hiker who’d driven a short distance on it, seven years ago. This is an incredibly obsessive hiker – someone like me who wants to hike every trail on the map. Coming from Phoenix or Tucson, he was in search of an abandoned trail, one of five parallel north-south trails that lead through the most remote part of the wilderness area in the less-visited west-central part of this mountain range.
The big-city hiker had driven less than a third of a mile on the forest road, finding it so rough that he “could walk faster than driving”. The road, with a locked gate eight miles in, was catastrophically washed out by debris flows after the 2011 wildfire, and is now only maintained by rare campers or hunters on UTVs. And apparently, none of the trails has been cleared since the fire – the big city hiker managed to bushwhack the route of the first trail, but found little remaining of it or any of its connecting trails.
I assumed I had a more robust vehicle, and indeed I was able to go much farther on the road – over a mile – but only by stopping frequently to spot lines across debris piles and past foot-high boulders. At first I followed a single recent set of UTV tracks, but eventually I was driving on ground no vehicle or hiker had seen in a long time. It was a fun test of my lifted suspension, but after a while I realized, like my predecessor, it would be easier to walk.
Much of the original forest road had been bypassed since the fire, due to debris flows or deep erosion. So far, I’d driven beneath a canopy of tall ponderosa pines, glimpsing rimrock high above eroded into dozens of hoodoos. When I finally parked, I expected to hike nearly another mile on what was left of the road, before reaching the trail the big-city guy had bushwhacked.
Since I hadn’t planned this hike, I hadn’t printed any detailed maps. And walking off, I forgot to bring any of the area maps I always carry in the vehicle. I remembered the trailhead as being easy to find, with the remains of a signpost, and I simply assumed I would find it along the road, somewhere near the mouth of the canyon.
The road did get worse, but I could’ve probably continued driving it. The creek was still running alongside, which was nice. I came to a closed gate that wasn’t even latched, and I never saw any sign of cattle. Then I came to a fallen snag that blocked the road, which I would’ve had to saw through to get my Sidekick past, and I was glad I’d parked and walked. And then I came to another big creek crossing – the creek was dry at this point – and the canyon widened into a valley.
The canopy stopped here, and I could see a big side canyon opening off to my left – the canyon of the abandoned trail. So from here on I needed to watch for the signpost.
Once I crossed the big dry creek, I was exposed between solid oak thickets – the 2011 wildfire had clearly burned at high intensity through here. I was traversing a floodplain or bank, and the oak on each side was on average a dozen feet tall, but I could often see the rimrock high above on both sides of the roadway. Someone on a UTV had ridden up here, I assumed from the locked gate far down-canyon – and I could occasionally see where they had cleared logs or branches away with a saw.
Lacking a map, I was puzzled about the trailhead. The big creek crossing had been the east end of the mouth of this side canyon, and the main creek was now far to my left, between me and the broad side canyon mouth. Canyon trails normally start where a road crosses the mouth of that canyon, so I wasn’t really expecting the trailhead along this part of the road.
And eventually, I reached another pine forest, and a big dry creek crossing. This had to be the main creek – the mouth of creek from the side canyon had to have entered somewhere that was now upstream of me, meaning the trailhead had to be somewhere upstream of the road. Through the pines, I could clearly see the slope of the downstream wall of the side canyon. I had completely passed the mouth of the side canyon, apparently along with the trail I was looking for. I was totally confused.
The only thing I could do was make my way upstream, hoping to find the confluence where the side creek came down out of the side canyon. But I only made it about a hundred yards before reaching a logjam, where I climbed a steep bank looking for a way up-canyon.
All I found was a truly impenetrable thicket.
So I scrambled back downstream, up the opposite bank of the main creek, into the pine forest, where I likewise found nothing that looked like a trail. I forced my way back to the road and connected my GPS unit to a satellite for a waypoint.
That night, with connectivity, online maps, my GPS waypoint, and the detailed 2019 trip report of the big-city hiker, I discovered to my chagrin that I had stopped and turned back a hundred yards short of the trailhead, which is located in a totally nonintuitive spot. The abandoned trail follows an old roadway which I might’ve noticed when I crossed the main creek after being stymied by that thicket, if I’d been oriented across the slope above instead of along the bank of the creek. I’d passed less than a hundred feet from the old roadway.
The sky had been mostly cloudy all day, but it was a hot trudge back past those oak thickets. In all, it took me 1.75 hours to walk less than three miles down that road and back to the vehicle.
And to add insult to injury, I drove off without logging another waypoint where I had parked. I didn’t think of it until I had crossed the big debris flow where the main canyon turns sharply south. So I parked in a clearing there and walked nearly a half mile back, connected the device, and waited another ten minutes. But unlike earlier, the system never logged a waypoint, so I ended up having to estimate my parking spot using the vehicle’s odometer and a formula based on the difference in tire diameters between stock and the much bigger tires I installed last year.
On the way back to the vehicle for the second time, I spooked a whitetail –moving too fast to tell the gender. And after I resumed driving up-canyon and around the bend into the narrows below the rock spire, I spooked a mature adult black bear, which ran upslope to my right. I stopped when I reached that point and watched it continue across and up the steep slope – this was my second sighting so far this year, and my first in this mountain range.
Dedicated backcountry campers have cleared and maintained six or eight campsites in the easier stretch of road above the big debris flow, even stocking some of them with saw-cut firewood, but the road has partly collapsed into the creek near its beginning at the access road. I can drive past it easily with my little Sidekick’s narrow track, but there’s no way you could safely get one of these new full-size pickups past it. Probably not even a new Jeep. And no vehicle wider or longer than mine could’ve negotiated the detours through the forest, farther down, which zigzagged sharply back and forth between tall pines.
In all, this is an impressively remote and hard-to-access canyon – a wildlife paradise. I was right to make it a priority, but I’m going to need more time and more fitness to explore it the way that guy from the big city did seven years ago. He claims to have made a 13-mile loop out of it, going up the abandoned canyon and down the nearer canyon I hiked partway up last year, in an 8-hour speed-bushwhack that I doubt I could manage even at peak fitness.
The drive out, and over the mountains to the cafe and lodge, was as nerve-wracking as ever. And as expected, I had to stay the night and finish the drive home in the morning. Hopefully I learned my lesson – whatever that means.
Friday, May 29th, 2026: 2026 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
As my birthday approached, I wondered – idly – if anyone would remember and contact me. I used to keep track of dozens of birthdays, but since few friends ever reciprocated, I gradually gave up. Losing my mother last fall, I lost the last person for whom the day had as much significance as it does for me. And of course, our culture trains elders to either ignore or actively resent their birthdays.
But after years of stress and trauma, I’m taking every opportunity to celebrate my existence and treat myself well – even when I have to do it alone.
The birthday was planned to be the last full day of my mini-vacation – the next day I would check out of the hotel and drive back home. The birthday fell on a Wednesday, a day when I normally work out in the late afternoon. So I decided to leave in the morning, drive into the cool mountains above the city, and return in mid-afternoon.
I’d driven up into these mountains only once before, when I’d passed through the city in 2002 on a relocation scouting trip. 24 years later, the road and landscape were totally unfamiliar – apparently back then, it had been late in the day and I was desperate for a place to camp. And for me, that meant someplace informal where I could park near the road and carry my gear a short distance out of sight.
I recall driving a few miles through pine forest on a dirt road, then walking down a ridge to a rock outcrop where I watched the sun set and the city lights begin their sparkling far below. After dark, I set up my stove in a tiny grove of pines, made dinner, and crawled into my sleeping bag. Then I heard the voices of young people – high school or college students – chanting rhythmically, somewhere hundreds of yards away, as if they were playing some kind of primitive game. And later, I was shocked awake by a long line of young people tramping silently past the foot of my sleeping bag, in the dark, on their way to the rock formation. And returning just as silently, an hour later.
Today, midweek in late spring, the sky was clear and the high in the city was forecast in the low 90s. Heading northeast toward the mountain, the four-lane thoroughfares of suburban sprawl funnel decreasing traffic onto a two-lane road with sporadic stop signs, which proceeds into the foothills past expensive view homes.
There was relatively light traffic, but other drivers were either in a big hurry or pretending to be racers. I got tired of being tailgated and pulled off at an otherwise abandoned scenic overlook above a lush desert canyon. And heard the gunshots.
Across the highway is a much steeper canyon, and back at the hotel I found an article about it. It’s a well-known spot where gun nuts simply pull off the scenic highway, set up their folding chairs and coolers full of beer, and start shooting in full view – and hearing – of the passing tourists. It’s technically legal – more than 200 yards from a formal recreation site – and despite constant complaints from residents and responsible gun owners, the Forest Service refuses to do anything about it.
From there, the road winds up through high desert habitat, and this is where the tourists start pulling over for photos.
At an elevation of about 5,000 feet you reach a zone of spectacular hoodoos and dark Arizona cypress. At about 7,000 feet you hit typical Southwestern mixed-conifer forest with Douglas-fir and several species of pine. This is where the crowds begin to disperse on forest roads and hiking trails, to picnic areas and campgrounds.
Even at midday on a Wednesday, trailheads along the highway were packed with dozens of vehicles, reminding me of how lucky I am to live in a remote small town.
At 8,000 feet you begin to see aspens, and the road drops into the tiny alpine tourist village. I hadn’t brought lunch, expecting either to eat at the lone restaurant there, or to pick up snacks for a picnic at the general store. The congestion was such that I gave up on the restaurant and grabbed snacks at the store. I was too distracted by the crowds and traffic to take photos.
In the 90s in the city below, it remained in the 60s up here.
I’d considered doing a short hike down a northern ridge, but gave up when I found the trailhead being dug up by a giant backhoe. So I became the lone picnicker at a beautiful spot at 8,000 feet, overlooking the northeast canyons draining to a basin 5,000 feet below.
I made it back to the hotel in plenty of time for a birthday workout, followed by grilled salmon in the hotel restaurant.
GPS Error + Shoulder Pain = Danger
Monday, May 25th, 2026: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
I was on my way to Tucson for a mini-vacation, and I’d made big gains in my hiking distance and elevation during the past week, so I was temped to skip Sunday’s hike completely. It wouldn’t impact my conditioning and it would give my knee and foot a break – they’re still on the edge of chronic inflammation.
Plus, the high at home – at 6,000 feet – was forecast to be in the low 80s, and the route to Tucson is nearly 2,000 feet lower and ten degrees hotter. I looked hard and couldn’t find a convenient high-elevation hike between here and there.
So I packed, and of course the packing triggered my shoulder pain. And at the last minute, my Calvinist masochism led me to do a partial hike in the mountains south of here. The trail would be exposed, the sky was mostly clear, and it was already warm in town – but it should yield just the right amount of distance and elevation to avoid damaging my joints.
I was drenched in sweat and swarmed by flies within a hundred level yards of the trailhead. Then the trail began climbing, and of course, I’d forgotten how steep it is. Sweat was clogging my head net – I had to keep taking it off, wringing it out, and swabbing my head with one of the bandanas I carry. That all made my shoulder pain worse, but I was running out of pain meds and had to pace myself for the next week.
On the plus side, it’s a rocky landscape – some kind of granite-like igneous boulders and exposed bedrock – and the cactus flowers were gorgeous. And as I climbed higher, little clouds were forming overhead and giving me brief episodes of relief from the heat.
The hike to the peak is a little over 4 miles – I was just aiming for the top of the ridge, the edge of ponderosa pine habitat, for a little over five miles out-and-back. Like everywhere, the small pines here were dying off from drought-induced bark beetle infestation.
On the way down, I stopped for a drink of water – I’d stored my water in the fridge overnight and it was still cool. And a guy in his twenties passed me on his way up. An obvious stranger, he was likely visiting from a distant city for our big event of the year – a music festival – and picked this hike because it’s part of the world-famous national trail. He was dressed very neatly in white t-shirt and crisp REI-style synthetic shorts, and he’d obviously done the climb in this heat without breaking a sweat.
I’ve been plagued by flies during the past month, and have encountered several other hikers like this one who seemed to have no issues – so I have to recognize I produce excessive amounts of sweat. I believe that’s why I’m attracted to warm, arid climates – my body is unusually efficient at cooling itself, even though I do seem to be more heat-sensitive as I get older. Also, I remember vegetarian girlfriends claiming I attract insects because I eat meat – but my younger girlfriends were always looking for an opportunity to make me feel inferior.
On to Tucson – another two and a half hours of mostly interstate highway driving. And the activities of driving an ancient unautomated vehicle – shifting gears, controlling the A/C, managing music on my iPad, and taking photos and notes on my camera, all on the seat beside me, and all using the injured shoulder – escalated my shoulder pain to the point where my stress got out of control and made me drive recklessly when I reached the congested zone an hour from the city.
But again on the plus side, pre-monsoon clouds were spreading until they became continuous and were producing rain in the south. And shortly after I arrived at the hotel it was thundering and pouring down, and because I always have rain gear in my pack I was the only guest prepared to cross the courtyard without getting drenched.
I’d recorded a waypoint up there on the ridgetop with my GPS message unit, in a broad clearing where it immediately found a satellite. But amazingly, when I checked it the next morning, it was off by a third of a mile. What could cause such a huge error? That’s really troubling – what if I was snakebit and needed rescue? Apparently this can happen if the device and your mapping software are calibrated differently – but waypoints have been mostly accurate for years, and I’m not aware of any recent changes.
