Wildfire
Tuesday, May 27th, 2025: Hikes, Horse Ridge, Nature, Southeast Arizona, Whites, Wildfire.
On the eve of my birthday, driving north to some old favorite country I hadn’t seen in almost two years. Alpine habitat that would be cooler now that our weather at home is finally seasonably hot. An escape from problems at home.
Needing a hike, planning another steep descent – this time into the remote, rugged, lonely country around a small river, a region that keeps drawing me. Passed roadside javelinas in their usual spot, a lone yearling doe on the shoulder, then in the high country of tall ponderosa, dark Doug-fir, grassy meadows and bright aspen, two dozen cow elk grazing in a likewise familiar roadside place. When you inhabit a wild landscape for almost a generation, you’re gifted with wisdom in the form of nature’s patterns.
Finding the trailhead unoccupied and the trailhead log unused since last fall, I set out on a trail invisible under a layer of pine needles. Woodpeckers cried and darted through the trees ahead. In openings in the pines the dirt of the trail showed the bootprints of one recent hiker, bigger than me, wearing fairly new boots. The trail climbed in and out of the burn scar of the 2011 megafire, gaining 400 vertical feet to a saddle where I suddenly crossed to the watershed of the remote river.
The sky had been cloudless during the drive north, but here in the mountains scattered clouds were forming. The other hiker’s tracks stopped at the saddle, so my trail was virgin ahead. Birdsong provided my soundtrack as I traversed down from 8,500 feet on a steep, rocky trail, first flushing a swallowtail butterfly out of the brush, then coming upon bigger and bigger patches of wildflowers and more pollinators. In a drought, the higher elevations always host pockets of fertility.
It was windy over here and I had to cinch my hat down – the dropoff was precipitous. At a patch of bare white bedrock, I saw a little saddle below me and realized I was at the head of the ridge the trail would descend. Descending it through forest that began to host pinyon and alligator juniper, I got my first views of the long, narrow ridge below – named for a horse, it did look like a horse’s back, ending in neck and head.
During the descent, I’d had a higher ridge, in shadow, at my right, but suddenly I reached a point where I could see past it, southwestward, to a towering, distinctive rock formation. And trying to get pictures of it with clouds in the background, I rediscovered clouds, which had been missing from my desperately dry region since last summer.
Clouds are the source of rain – not El Nino or the other global meteorological phenomena favored by scientists and TV weather people. Clouds are sacred beings we ignore at our peril. Here, their shade cooled me after stretches of exposure to sunlight.
And reaching the more level lower part of the ridge, I was continuously exposed, crossing big exposures of the fractured bedrock – volcanic comglomerate – I’d seen recently, east of this broad, rumpled valley. Here I found abundant but old sign of cattle, horses, and elk. And hazardous footing on occasional slopes of loose rock.
The bare rock ridge narrowed to just a few yards at a low saddle. Climbing past it, I noticed smaller birds – ravens? – harrying a hawk ahead. I’d stopped a lot and was worried about reaching my lodging for the night before closing time, so I stopped short of where I’d planned to turn back. Just at the base of the rise that formed the top of the horse’s head. I didn’t mind stopping – this had been a spectacular hike in spectacular weather. It’d taken me two hours and fifteen minutes to go just under three miles, downhill.
I spent even more time in the shade on the way back, and the wind was rising, too. I wasn’t looking forward to the ascent, but it turned out to be fine, taking less time than the descent.
I’d reserved a room within the burn area of a large wildfire that had only been controlled within the past week, so I was anxious to see the damage. They’d stopped it precisely at the highway, and from what I could see it appeared to be a low-intensity surface fire.
Both elk and mule deer were out in the riparian meadows that evening. I wondered what had happened to the bighorn sheep whose habitat is totally within the burn area – presumably they’d sheltered in the river canyon, below its walls of sheer basalt.
Sunday, June 15th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Since 2020, when we lost our local restaurants to COVID, I’ve been preparing all my meals at home. Imagine that, you city folks. Imagine being single and actually preparing every damn meal, every day. Yes, I can do it, and do it healthy. But although I now walk with one knee immobilized, and can’t hike, doc says I can still drive. So I try to get away on Sundays to someplace with both wild nature and a decent restaurant. One restaurant meal a week, prepared by somebody other than me, seems like a huge luxury.
This Sunday I learned that a cafe I like over in Arizona would close on Monday for lengthy renovation. It was forecast to be our hottest day yet, the air conditioning in my 30-year-old Japanese vehicle struggles to keep up, and the destination is lower elevation and would be hotter than home. But I was desperate, and driving our lonely highways helps clear my mind.
When I arrived, setting my watch back an hour, I discovered that all the indoor seating was taken – for the first time ever – so I had to sit outside, where it was nearing 100 degrees and a sycamore offered only spotty shade.
But they had a special brunch menu, and I ordered grilled trout with scrambled eggs and a regional IPA, at about half the price you’d pay in the city. The Canadian Grand Prix was just starting – a guilty pleasure – and I followed it on my iPad via the cafe’s sluggish wifi. Still hungry and wanting to hang out till the end of the race, I next ordered pancakes and an espresso.
Expecting the heat, I’d brought my old Yucatan hammock, and after the extended brunch, I drove up the canyon, nearly empty of tourists during summer, to a secret place, tucked away on a dead-end forest road too rocky for cars. I strung up the hammock in the sometime shade of a cloud and spent a couple hours reading, sweating, and drinking ice water I’d prepared at home and carried in my ancient mini-cooler.
Most of the southeast corner of Arizona lacks cell phone coverage, but as I drove away from the mountains, I began to get text messages on my flip phone from our electric utility. An outage had begun at my address at 2 pm and power was initially predicted to be restored after 5, possibly before my return. I wondered if I would lose the precious leftovers I had stored in the freezer. The closer I got to home, the more texts I received, delaying the resumption of service. No problem – I’m always prepared for camping, and I had canned chili and soup I could warm up on the old gas range without opening the fridge.
I was more concerned about the wildfire. It had started Friday in habitat I hike regularly, fifteen miles north of home, and by this morning it had grown over 12,000 acres, with zero containment. Nearing town, I could see the smoke obscuring most of the range just north of town.
Two blocks from my house, I passed the utility crews, blocking a side street with crane trucks and repairmen hard at work atop two power poles. Confirming my power was still out, I walked next door to check on my older neighbor.
In homage to Cormac McCarthy’s epic Western novel Blood Meridian, I call my neighbor The Judge – he retired a few years ago from a popular judicial career in the state of Texas. Similar to McCarthy’s judge, my neighbor is a large, nearly bald man, but the only other shared characteristic is his encyclopedic knowledge and storytelling acumen. In fact, people like my neighbor have shown me where McCarthy got many of the characters in his Western novels. Rural Texas and New Mexico really are full of eccentric, erudite, and interminable storytellers.
The Judge’s house was hotter than mine, and as we sweated and discussed the power outage, he recalled an episode featuring his former El Paso neighbor, a recent immigrant from Mexico. At home one hot summer day, the power had gone out, and with air conditioning disabled, everyone in the neighborhood escaped outdoors with cans of cold beer while crews worked to replace a blown transformer.
As soon as power was restored, the neighbor’s house began to pop and crackle, with lights flashing on and off, and the new transformer was quickly fried. It turned out the neighbor had hired an electrician from across the river in Juarez, and none of his house had been wired in compliance with the North American electrical code.
The El Paso neighbor was partners with his brother in a chain of botanicas north of the border. The brother, profiting from the superstitions of his fellow immigrants, became rich enough to buy a big ranch in Mexico and stock it with exotic wildlife from Africa.
The brother bred horses as food for his African cats, and one day, he drove out on the range, forgetting there was a leg of horsemeat in the back seat of his convertible. A lion smelled it, tore through the car’s soft top, and proceeded to eat the hacendado.
The Judge assured me he initially deemed this a tall tale, but was surprised to confirm it later on Wikipedia. Anyone wondering what inspired the cheetah scene in McCarthy’s movie The Counselor might likewise be surprised to learn that the truth is both stranger and more satisfying than Cormac’s fiction.
I returned next door to shower off the day’s sweat, but before turning on the water, I heard my fridge powering on – electricity had been restored. After my modem completed its lengthy startup procedure, I checked the satellite data on CalTopo, and saw that the fire had reached the eastern highway, with a hot spot on the far side. This would give it access to the vast Black Range, which had already lost most of its forest in two mega-wildfires since I moved here. Old burn scars can provide plenty of fuel for new fires.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2025: 2025 Trips, Gila, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Wildfire.
Yes, I realize that on the national and global scale, the news is terrifying. But in remote southwest New Mexico, we have worries that may never make the national, let alone the global, news – and we hope to keep it that way.
During the nineteen years I’ve lived here, we’ve had three large wildfires in the mountains just north of town, which rise to 9,000 feet in elevation and are covered with mixed conifer forest dominated by ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir. Strangely, the fires have been separated by exactly five years: in 2015, 2020, and now 2025. Each fire has started within fifteen miles of my home, growing to consume habitat I hike regularly, destroying places that are special to me.
But the fire that started just over a week ago has become by far the biggest – and in fact, the most dangerous in the entire country during this period. Firefighters and equipment have been moved in from all over the U.S. Thousands of people have been evacuated from nearby rural communities. In town, we’ve watched the apocalyptic smoke column towering above our skyline, the helicopters and jet tankers shuttling back and forth from the Forest Service fire station at our county airport. Our phones have buzzed with evacuation alerts, and the latest evacuation zone was created only two miles from my mom’s assisted living facility. The fire’s most active front is burning toward town in fire-adapted forest that has never burned within historic times, and is currently the driest vegetation in the U.S.
Calling my mom’s privately-owned facility to ask about their evacuation plan, I was told by the owner that they don’t have one – families are responsible for moving their loved ones to safety. Slowed by my knee-immobilizer brace, I made a rough inventory of valuables in my house, and shifted empty boxes up from the basement to carry irreplaceable documents and artwork.
With the “incident team” growing to over 1,400 people, the fire still showed zero containment after the first week. But on Friday, they finally claimed 11 percent containment, and the incident commander said that they’d bulldozed lines around the entire perimeter and were planning to restore power and begin allowing some of the evacuated back to their homes. They described a huge effort to protect structures throughout the vast area, and continued to claim that no structures had been damaged.
Friday afternoon, I drove my mom to the edge of town to see the smoke column. I figured, and hoped, that she might never have the chance to see something like this again. I wouldn’t have considered showing it to her a few weeks earlier, but her chronic anxiety has subsided, and she appreciated the opportunity to experience this awesome vision of nature’s power.
Throughout the week, I followed the fire’s advance online – hour by hour – via several apps, discussed it with neighbors, and attended community meetings. By the following weekend, the danger was reduced, but the fire was now burning through some of my favorite places, destroying more of our last remaining old-growth alpine habitat. I was a wreck.
There was a place northwest of town where I’d always wanted to picnic or camp, a ledge in ponderosa forest atop a ridge a thousand feet tall, overlooking the north end of our wilderness. I’d just learned that a brew pub had recently opened in the village nearby. Unlike the two existing restaurants, it stayed open Sunday evenings, and I wanted to check it out.
I arrived at noon and was the third customer. The owner, a big bearded guy, latched on to me and told me his story. I was shocked to discover he had ten beers on tap, but only one was an ale. Every other craft beer joint – and I’ve been in hundreds – carries an equal number of ales and lagers. His explanation was that he’s burnt out on ales, implying that what the customers want is irrelevant.
But it got worse. He said his menu consists of Italian dishes – rather than pub favorites or Mexican food (which the village lacks and needs). Not because he’s Italian (he’s not), but because nobody else here serves Italian food. Such is colonial culture on Turtle Island.
I had a salad, it was bland, and with no ales on offer, I won’t be returning.
My destination is a short drive up a dirt forest road from a pass on a remote stretch of highway – there’s no signage, and even after studying the map you’d never know it was there. With a high of 85 in town, up there at 8,300 feet it was in the 70s and breezy.
I unfolded my camp chair in a patch of shade on the rim and drank ice water out of my mini-cooler for a couple of hours. With the aid of field glasses and a BLM topo map, I challenged myself to identify all the peaks on the horizon, while admiring the occasional passing butterfly.
On the drive back, I mentally compared the pub owner with a motel owner in an alpine resort an hour further northwest. She runs scent diffusers in all the rooms, despite visitor complaints, because she likes the smell and doesn’t care what customers want. This is what you get off the beaten path – eccentrically selfish business owners.
I wasn’t looking forward to the return to town, where I would get the day’s first view of the current fire. It’s burning down an outlying finger of the crest of the range, about nine miles from the center of town now and still approaching. The forest ahead of it is what I was describing earlier – unburned in historical memory, and drier than anyplace else in the U.S. It’s also roadless, so it can only be fought with air drops, which are only marginally effective.
We’re expecting monsoon rain this week, but thunderstorms include outflow winds which could push the fire in new directions.
Sunday, July 13th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Gila, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Wildfire.
So far, our monsoon has brought more lightning than rain – starting new fires, including a big one at the north edge of the wilderness.
I wanted to explore the little-known mountain range, a couple hours north, that I’ve become obsessed with. But the smoke from the fire, blowing west, monopolized my attention on the way up.
By the time I’d finished lunch in the village, the northern sky was darkened by a storm cloud.
At the turnoff in the high pass, I checked my tire pressure and found that warm weather had added ten pounds, so I deflated them to 18 psi for the drive up the rocky road to the forested crest. That made the ride much more pleasant.
At the crest, there’s a fork leading west across the mesa. Since it’s forested, I’d never been able to visualize the landscape, which ranges between 8,200 and 8,700 feet elevation. The topo map showed something called “Dave Lee Lake” just off the road, less than a half mile from the junction. But I’d checked the satellite view at home, and the “lake” appeared to be a typically-dry stock pond.
The storm clouds alternating with patches of blue sky turned this forested mesa into a dreamlike landscape. The high was forecast to reach 90 at 6,000 feet, but here, almost 3,000 feet higher, it was in the 70s. And as on previous visits, I had this small mountain range all to myself.
The road began to climb, as I kept watching for the lake to my left. There appeared to be an opening in the trees down there, so I turned back and followed a meandering track through the forest, past several empty campsites, until a broad meadow appeared ahead, blocked by a fallen tree trunk. The lake turned out to be a natural alpine meadow – one of many on the crest of this range – which would’ve originally featured a vernal pool, but had been dammed at some point to create a stock pond.
Despite the low dam and dry pond lined with cracked mud, it was a magical place, especially under those brooding clouds. I couldn’t believe I had it to myself on a weekend afternoon, only a couple miles off the highway.
I could’ve hung out there, but I’d only scratched the surface of this mesa and wanted to follow the road farther west. Many of the trees bore red blazes or ribbons, apparently part of a Forest Service survey, but other than that, I saw no traces of other visitors. The farther I went, the more tracks I found branching off into the forest. The north slope was dark and dense with Douglas fir. I followed what seemed to be the main track for a couple miles, driving down, up, and around, glimpsing what appeared to be a vast canyon off to the west. I still couldn’t get a sense of the landscape, but these branching, meandering forest tracks could become really confusing. The tracks became rougher and rougher, with deep pools of muddy water I preferred to bypass, and eventually I turned back.
On the north slope among the firs, I’d passed a turnoff to what I assumed was more empty campsites. But when I returned and tried it, I found another track, overgrown and seemingly abandoned, leading steeply down through the forest. I drove down it, and eventually came out in a saddle. From there, the road climbed steeply up onto a ridge, but there were big boulders embedded in the slope, so I stopped and got out to lurch up there in my knee brace and scout the way forward. The track clearly continued out the ridge, but my time was running out. I decided to return to the turnoff and hang out there in the shade.
I strung my hammock between a couple of firs and laid there listening to the wind in the trees – the only sound up here on this mesa, 45 minutes from the nearest human settlement, an hour from the nearest town, four hours from the nearest city. The wind pushes into the forest, the trees dance with the wind.
It took me more than fifteen years to discover this place, two hours from my home. Despite the old dam, I’d seen no sign of cattle anywhere on the mesa. Old topo maps show that despite the maze of forest tracks, most of the mesa is roadless, including the entire western half leading down to the river. There are no hiking trails, but in the parklike forest, devoid of undergrowth, you could hike all over without running into any sign of human life.
Along the forest road and backcountry tracks, there are dozens of beautiful, secluded campsites with fire rings, informal and unmarked. But in a half dozen trips over the past few years, I’ve never seen anyone camping here. It’s like a dream come true, but there are dangers – trees often fall across these forest roads and tracks, so it’s possible to get blocked or even trapped.
From the drive back, I could see it was raining over our high mountains, and presumably over the big wildfire. But I only got a few drops along the way.
