Blue Range
Sunday, April 13th, 2025: Blue Range, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
The vast wilderness area north of my hometown encompasses canyons and mountains that rise to a nearly 11,000 foot crest in the west. That’s where most of my all-day wilderness hikes have taken place, accessed via the highway that leads west out of town and then north past the wall of mountains rising on your right.
But I’ve become more and more curious about the lower mountains that rise to the left of that highway, along our border with Arizona. Most of them lack wilderness protection and are grazed by cattle from bottom to top. But they do host an old network of unmaintained trails, and the area is so far from cities that these trails are seldom used by humans.
There’s one small mountain group, at the center of a broad network of intersecting trails, that I’ve been especially curious about because although it’s easy to find on the map, I’ve never been able to identify it from the highway, and it’s really hard to get to. First you have to ford a river, then you need to drive almost 15 miles uphill on increasingly bad ranch roads. The overall distance from town is less than 80 miles, but I figured it would take at least 2-1/2 hours one-way – more than I can justify for an all-day hike.
But now that I’m doing short hikes, it suddenly seemed doable.
In this severe drought, the river was dry, so that was no problem. The main ranch road climbed to a mesa, where immediately to my right appeared a spectacular canyon with sheer volcanic walls.
A little farther upstream, the road crossed the dry wash above the canyon and climbed to a higher mesa, from which I could see the ranch house in the valley to my left. And I could finally see the mountains I was heading for: a higher conical peak at left and a lower rounded peak at right, connected by a low ridge.
The road was graded all the way to the Arizona border, where I found a crude gate. On the other side the road was just a trail over volcanic rocks. I opened the gate and waited for several cows to usher their new calves out of my way.
The road past the gate turned out to be the rockiest I’ve ever driven. No way would I have been able to drive it before my recent suspension lift. Mile after mile, it just kept getting worse: big, sharp, loose volcanic rocks, with chunks of bedrock sticking up a foot high in places. My maximum ground clearance is now a little over 11 inches, so I had to pick my lines carefully. I couldn’t go more than 5 miles per hour in most stretches, and I often had to slow to walking pace.
The suspension upgrade hasn’t improved the ride quality at all, which is kind of what I expected. The farther I crawled over these rocks the less sense it made to drive rather than walk – but the trailhead was still miles away, and I wanted to at least reach the lower of the two peaks, which would be over a mile from the trailhead.
When I figured I was a half mile from the trailhead, I found a place to pull off the road. That turned out to be fortunate, because beyond here, the track got even worse, climbing at a perilous grade on even bigger loose rocks, and there were no more places to turn around before the end.
I’d been expecting a hot day, but it turned out to be very windy. It was hard walking on those loose, sharp rocks, and the track got continuously steeper, until it topped out on a shoulder of the rounded mountain, with the trailhead just ahead.
Almost as soon as I started up the trail, I had one of the worst allergy attacks I’ve ever had. I’d packed Zyrtec that morning, but foolishly left it in the Sidekick, which was now a half hour back down that hill of loose rock. So for the next couple of hours, I used up the bandannas I carry in my pack, sneezing constantly, so violently I had to stop walking to hold my balance, my nasal membranes burning, a mucus factory working overtime.
At the same time, clouds were moving over and the wind was increasing, so I had to pull on my windbreaker and cinch my hat down tightly.
Along the way, I distracted myself by examining the spectacular views north, and as I crested the first peak, northwest. The top had burned patchily in past fires, but still hosted tall ponderosas, and eventually I got a narrow view of the taller, pointed peak a mile south. That’s where I stopped to turn back, figuring I’d gone at least a couple miles.
On the way back, despite my constant, violent sneezing, I managed to clamber off-trail several times to shoot panoramic photos over the low country between here and the higher mountains to the north. All that wild country was beckoning me, and hopefully I’ll be able to hike it someday.
Past the trailhead, I began picking my way back down that steep slope of loose rock, and immediately realized it was too dangerous to ever drive in my vehicle. Regardless of ground clearance, if I lost traction and slipped, I was bound to damage something underneath on either a loose rock or a sharp outcrop of bedrock. I don’t want to think about how long it would take to get a tow out here – I might have to pay Matt’s Off-Road Recovery to drive over from southwest Utah, and I’m not confident that even Matt could make it up this road.
But after reaching the Sidekick and bouncing back down the road at little more than walking pace, I began to get better and better views east toward our high mountains. I’d taken a Zyrtec and a pain pill – usually very effective at drying my membranes.
I kept wondering what was triggering my allergy. Both oaks and pines can bloom in spring, and both were all around, stirred up by the fierce wind. I’d had a bad attack in town the other day, but nothing like this.
At home, I had to take a second Zyrtec – not usually recommended – and a second pain pill, but despite running my air purifier on high and flushing my sinuses with the neti pot, I had yet another bad attack within a couple hours. Can’t remember anything like this before!
Monday, May 12th, 2025: Blue Range, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
Again, I was yearning for a long drive to a hike I’d never done before. The region that regularly draws me is the extremely rugged maze of interlinked mountain ranges about two hours’ drive north of here. It’s mostly unprotected cattle range, mostly unknown to hikers, anchored by the tiny town notorious as headquarters of the right-wing anti-government movement. I’ve done enough hikes there to know that most of them are really hard to drive to, and many are overrun with cattle or defended by rogue bulls. But I love the remoteness, the solitude, and the fact that despite being grazed, this area features native habitat in better condition than much of our big, famous wilderness area.
In the upper part of this area, right below the east-west crest that tops out at 9,000 feet, there’s a T-shaped convergence of abandoned, unmaintained, unpublished trails. Back in 2021, I’d hiked the stem of the T from the south – probably the hardest route-finding challenge I’ve ever faced, since there was literally nothing left in the entire seven miles but occasional cairns, many buried in tall grass.
The top bar of the T is divided into an east half and a west half, traversing the slopes below the crest for a total of seven and a half miles. Last fall when my knee injury prevented me from hiking, I drove to the unmarked trailhead at the east end of that crossbar, hoping I could return later to do the whole traverse. But the backcountry access road was so slow as to make it impractical.
So for this Sunday I had a brainstorm. I’d driven the crest road several times, passing the western trailhead of the T’s crossbar at a high saddle in dense mixed-conifer forest. Despite being shown on maps as abandoned, the trailhead features a maintained kiosk. The hike would start with a major descent into a canyon, which I’m usually not crazy about, but returning with an ascent would be better for my knee. And to the junction and back would be about 5-1/2 miles and 1,800 vertical feet, which should be just right at this stage of my knee recovery.
The day was forecast to be warm, but this trail would lie between 7,000 and 8,000 feet, and I believed most of it would be forested with at least partial shade.
At the kiosk, I noticed that someone had tucked a handwritten message into the bottom of the signboard. I pulled the message off, turned it over, and discovered they’d removed and written on the back of the Spanish-language “WELCOME TO YOUR NATIONAL FORESTS” placard which the United States Forest Service posts on every kiosk.
If I could reply to that message, I would point out that I’m a white person with an English last name, raised to speak English. But most of my ancestors were Gaelic-speaking Scots who were forced by the English to leave their homes and emigrate to this land, which had been conquered and stolen by the English from Native Americans. English is neither my native tongue nor the native language of this “country”. Like me, the kiosk vandal is a colonist, a descendant of either invaders or exiles. None of us has the right to impose one language or another on our neighbors.
So as best I could, I restored the Spanish placard to its place on the kiosk, and cheerfully set out down the trail.
As I said above, this trail starts by descending into a canyon – over 700 vertical feet – and unfortunately for my knee, the grade averaged more than 20 percent and increased in places to over 40 percent on loose rock or scree. Of course, I found none of the elaborate steps built long ago in the national monument I hiked last week – this was a clear trail, but there was no sign of humans on it. I initially assumed it was being maintained by cattle, but saw no tracks during the descent.
After spending the first half of the descent in mixed-conifer forest, I was surprised to suddenly emerge in a long stretch of mostly clear slope: an expanse of fractured bedrock with thin grasses and sporadic shrubs and small trees. This bedrock seemed to be mostly volcanic conglomerate containing colorful pebbles.
I approached the canyon bottom through open ponderosa forest, and could see it was lined with a broad, white debris flow from the 2018 wildfire that burned the crest at the head of the canyon. A very tall and slender narrowleaf cottonwood towered above the debris. And here is where I found the first cattle sign.
On the opposite bank of the canyon, I encountered a recently built stock fence, tight switchbacks that climbed the steep slope this side of the fence, and all the way up, cattle sign weeks and months old. Apart from the fence, I still hadn’t seen bootprints or any other sign of human use, so I began to assume that cattle were keeping brush off this otherwise abandoned trail, which had so far been really easy to follow.
Then, halfway up, I encountered the first of several broad swaths of bare, fractured rock. I was really enjoying the variety of healthy native habitats on this trail. The trail hugged the fence for a while, and I noticed how recent it was – maybe within the past few months. But fencebuilding in roadless country requires horses, and I’d seen no sign of horses, which can persist for up to a year.
The trail finally topped out in a vast area of bare rock, a broad shoulder past which I would enter a new watershed with views toward the area I’d discovered four years ago. I left the cattle sign behind and entered a segment of trail that was clearly being maintained by elk.
This next segment of trail traversed the steep south-facing slope below the crest of this range. On my right was a distinctive peak that I’d rounded on that previous hike, forested but with dark talus slopes on its north side.
The varied terrain continued, with the trail descending a scree slope at a 40 percent grade at one point, into a bare-rock ravine where I was surprised by a trickle of surface water.
This appeared to be an elk highway. But suddenly I came upon tiny fragments of orange rind, dessicated into thin, brittle shards. How quickly would they completely dry out? And how long would they persist on the surface without being scattered or buried by rodents, wind, rain, and erosion? We hadn’t had much precip over the winter but we’d sure had a lot of wind. I guessed they were over a month old, maybe many months – maybe they’d been left by the fencing crew. Maybe the fencing crew had been the only humans on this trail in the past year.
I’d stopped a lot, and climbed slowly on the ascents, and this hike was taking much longer than expected. I remembered the terrain ahead from the previous hike, and the trail junction I was trying to reach didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I’d been hoping to get to town before the market closed at 4 pm, but it wasn’t looking likely.
The trail had been climbing steadily, and I remembered it would descend before the junction. Just as I reached what seemed to be a high point, I stopped in frustration to check the topo map. After puzzling over it for a few minutes, I looked up, and behold! The old, partially collapsed trail sign was in shadow, right off the trail, less than ten feet ahead of me. I was already at my destination and hadn’t realized it! To celebrate, I reassembled the pieces of the sign as best I could.
Wind had been picking up all day, and since the trail was more exposed than I’d expected, I was grateful for cooling breezes. What I love about this trail, in addition to the varied habitats, is that it’s a traverse overlooking endless, rugged, roadless terrain, with views that shift dramatically as you proceed from watershed to watershed.
But it was getting later and later, so I began hiking faster than was probably good for my knee.
When I reached the bald shoulder above the deep canyon, and began descending those seemingly interminable short switchbacks, all I could think of was the tall, steep climb on the other side. After reaching the bottom and starting up, I did have to take it slow in most places, but I’ve been working up to it for months now, gradually increasing the elevation of my hikes, so my wind isn’t bad.
After reaching the vehicle, I raced up, over, and down the crest on that terrible rocky road, and reached the market in town 5 minutes after closing, to find lights out and the door locked…
