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Sapillo

Best Hike Ever!

Monday, January 10th, 2022: Mogollon Mountains, Sapillo, Southwest New Mexico.

Just kidding – not really the best hike ever, but with plenty of redeeming value. I finally realized I need a major attitude adjustment. I’ve been complaining way too much, and I need to start reacting to setbacks, hardship, crisis, and maybe even trauma as exciting opportunities.

This was the hike I’d planned to do last Sunday – top of my short list of lower-elevation winter hikes – but had been prevented by a snow-blocked highway. This time I took the long way around, to avoid the higher elevations, but unnecessarily as it turned out, since the direct route had been fully plowed in the past week.

I’m glad I took the longer route, though, since I’ve been avoiding that area since I moved here, and I’d completely forgotten how interesting it is. It’s a real slice of the Old West that is near my home but otherwise fairly remote, scenic, and off the tourist radar. The highway runs north up the upper floodplain of one of our two local rivers, then over a low divide into the smaller valley of a creek, which has been dammed to create a small lake for fishing and recreation.

Finding the trailhead and actually following this trail was going to be a gamble. According to the maps, it starts near where the highway crosses the creek downstream of the dam, enters the wilderness boundary and climbs high up the north slope above the creek. Once up there, it contours around a series of high shoulders to a point near the mouth of the creek, where it drops back down to the creek and follows it a short distance to where it flows into the wild river. The backcountry horsemen claim to have cleared it of logs and brush last spring.

Some sources said the initial access went through private land, where it could be blocked. The latest crowd-sourced maps showed it starting on the highway, but the latest online trip log, from Thanksgiving, simply said “This trail is not accessible any more.” But I’ve learned to take anonymous online information with a big grain of salt. If I found and could follow the trail, it would be my first venture on trails in the heart of the wilderness, and my first encounter with the river in its wildest stretch.

When I reached the short stretch of highway where the trail was supposed to begin, the only manmade thing I could see from my passing vehicle was a small, ancient, blank, unpainted plywood signboard nearly buried in high weeds 20 feet off the road. Beyond that I found a turnout, parked, and optimistically shouldered my pack. The creek trended west below a high south slope, so it would mostly be shaded from the low winter sun. The temperature now was well below freezing, so I dressed warmly but expected the temperature to reach the 50s in the afternoon.

I walked back the road to where I’d seen the old signboard, and noticed a faint, narrow track through the weeds, leading down onto the floodplain. I’d found the trailhead, but I knew it had to cross the creek in order to climb the north slope – would it really turn out to be “not accessible any more”?

One reason I’ve avoided trails in the heart of the wilderness is that most are canyon hikes involving from 50 to 100 river crossings. Hikers can only use these trails in warm weather, when they wear water shoes, gaiters, and shorts. My foot condition makes this impractical – they don’t make water shoes that are reinforced and accommodate prescription orthotics. My experience of canyon hikes had been limited to creeks which are major tributaries to the rivers, and in every case there had been stepping stones or logs allowing me to cross without too much anxiety around getting my boots wet or my feet frostbit.

I didn’t expect the trail in this creek bottom to be any different, nor did I expect it to be a bigger creek than those I’d dealt with elsewhere. And my reading of the maps had indicated there would only be one or two crossings before the trail left the floodplain. Hence my surprise when the first crossing was wide and deep and with no stones or logs.

It took me 5-10 minutes to find a place downstream with a couple of barely submerged rocks, and a couple of dead willows I could use as walking sticks. It was touch and go, but I made it across. I left the sticks beside the trail so I could use them on my return.

In the end, there were 9 crossings in a mile and a half, and as creeks do, it got wider and wider the farther down I went. I was losing a lot of time at these crossings, so I used the first sticks I found, usually rotten and awkwardly formed, and hoping this would be the last crossing, at each crossing I stopped and found new sticks, and left them on the far side for return use. I began to feel I was trapped down here in the freezing shade with this ever-widening creek – maybe the trail had been changed since the maps were made, and it never climbed out of the canyon?

The only recent prints I found in the snow or frozen mud of the trail were from horses and dogs – I figured that’s why there were no stepping stones or logs at crossings – equestrians don’t need them. So this must be primarily an equestrian trail. Eventually it left the creek and began to climb up an even darker side drainage, getting rockier as it climbed, with the awkward volcanic cobbles.

From my cursory reading of maps and trail descriptions I expected this to be slightly over 6 miles one-way. My destination, the mouth of the creek, was only 650′ lower than the trailhead. In climbing the north slope, the trail never gets higher than 500′ above the creek, but because it has to zigzag back and forth into deep side drainages, dropping and climbing hundreds of feet each time, the accumulated elevation gain is almost 3,500′. That made it a good candidate for me, although I’d always rather get that elevation climbing a peak.

When I reached the first shoulder, I wasn’t rewarded with much of a view. The peaks and ridges around me were all low, rounded, and uniformly forested. I’d passed rock outcrops and low cliffs on the way, but there wasn’t much of that visible from above. The next shoulder was much the same, and I was getting tired of all the up and down with apparently little reward.

While climbing over those shoulders, the trail had been trending away from the creek and its canyon. It wasn’t until the third shoulder that I regained a view over the canyon and into a significantly new landscape. To the northwest, peeking from behind the next shoulder, I glimpsed a much higher peak that I figured had to be Granny Mountain, one of the few higher peaks in the heart of the wilderness (the really high peaks are all at the western edge). Then, as I traversed down and across to yet another shoulder, a dramatic section of canyon opened on my left, to the south. The canyon wall here was composed of black rock cliffs that narrowed to an impressive slot canyon, where I could hear the creek roaring. The walls were so sheer and close together that you couldn’t see into the canyon from above.

Most of these shoulders featured broad grassy meadows, and when I found an abandoned wilderness sign, I reflected on the real vs. official histories of places like this. These meadows may have resulted from indigenous management. Whereas the myth of wilderness teaches environmentalists that white Anglo heroes like John Muir and Aldo Leopold saved these areas from destruction by eliminating human interference.

The reality is that indigenous people used this habitat sustainably for thousands of years, managing for both diversity and productivity. Then whites invaded, killed or otherwise relocated them, and, unaware that this natural abundance had been achieved by prudent native management, began overconsuming it, driving species to extinction. Conservationists like Muir and Leopold failed to recognize the indigenous role in natural habitats, believing the balance of nature could be restored in “parks” and “preserves” if we could remove all human impacts.

Wilderness – the raison d’être of these places where I hike – is a European colonial fiction. So now, instead of a culture in which every member is intimately aware of and dependent on the health of their local natural resources, we have a culture of urban consumers dependent on anonymous products from distant sources, surrounding isolated parks and preserves overseen – but seldom actively managed – by career bureaucrats and urban law courts, in which the natural diversity and resilience carefully achieved by local native users are gradually collapsing. And we congratulate ourselves on the “progress” achieved by our civilization and its white male heroes.

Down and up onto the next shoulder – the fourth so far – and I had yet another view, into a much broader new landscape that led to the high peaks I was familiar with in the far west. I could now see the gray deciduous forest down in the mouth of the creek, still far ahead, but even up here I felt like I’d penetrated deep in the wilderness.

I was getting pretty discouraged, because according to my original estimate of distance, I should’ve reached the creek mouth already. And I hadn’t anticipated so many intervening shoulders – so many ups, downs, and arounds, so many times shedding layers in the sun and pulling my sweater and gloves back on in the chilly shade. Now there was yet another high shoulder to get over before the trail began dropping toward the creek. The last thing I wanted to do was have to make those precarious stream crossings in the dark on the way back, but I was running out of time. Still, now that the mouth of the creek was almost in sight, how could I turn back?

And when I finally got within view of the riparian forest, from the final switchbacks dropping into the canyon, I could see it was largely made up of beautiful, venerable sycamores – one of my favorite trees.

Of course when I reached the floodplain, the first thing I encountered was another crossing point, with a creek that was now 20 feet wide. It took me longer than usual to find two sticks, 40 feet up the bank and 60 feet off the trail, but with quite a bit of anxiety I made it across. It would be no picnic hiking all the way back in wet boots with temperatures dropping to freezing again.

I passed an old junction with another trail coming in from the south, and another difficult creek crossing below cliffs. And eventually I saw the river junction up ahead in brilliant afternoon sunlight. But just before it was the biggest and gnarliest crossing of all – a rapids, with big loose rocks that were just too precarious to use as stepping stones. I’d brought the last pair of sticks with me, and spent a few minutes trying scout a route, but the flow was strong here, and it was just too dangerous. At least I’d seen the river, and that would have to be enough for now. It was time to hurry back.

That was when I realized I’d lost my expensive sunglasses, yet again. Somewhere up on the trail into the canyon, I remembered hanging them from the open neck of my sweater. They could’ve fallen off anywhere in the past mile.

I returned up the mostly shaded trail, scanning the ground carefully. I recrossed the creek at a sunny spot and trudged up the floodplain to the shady crossing before the climb out of the canyon. The banks were littered with limbs, which made it harder to search. I thought maybe the sunglasses had worked loose while I was seeking and breaking limbs on the far side, to use as walking sticks. So I crossed over and searched the bank, working my way back into the forest where I remembered finding sticks. I began scanning a clearing under a big sycamore, and amazingly, there they were, almost perfectly camouflaged in leaf litter dappled with shade.

The return hike was even more grueling, but I kept reminding myself that it’d been a great day, and all the hardship just made it a better adventure. If I had to cross the creek in the dark, so be it – it would make a better story!

I did come to hate those interminable shoulders, and it was pretty dark by the time I finally reached the creek again. And the first thing I discovered was that another hiker had followed me partway, and on their return, had selfishly used nearly all the sticks I’d so carefully saved, discarding them out of my reach on the opposite side. So now I had to find new sticks, and this time I picked ones I could carry with me and re-use. By the time I reached the last crossing, it was headlamp dark, the water level had risen to submerge my former stepping stones, and I could no longer see submerged rocks. So I found a spot where I could use a little midstream shoal and try to jump the far channel. The jump didn’t quite make it, and I did get my boot wet, but I grabbed a branch to haul myself up the bank, and I knew the vehicle was now within reach.

It was full dark when I got there. It’d taken me 8-1/2 hours – I knew it had to be farther than 12 miles round-trip. When I got home and plotted the route, I found it was closer to 15.

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The Rocks, My Teachers

Monday, January 17th, 2022: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Sapillo, Southwest New Mexico.

After last Sunday’s tantalizing views over a hidden canyon, this Sunday’s hike was the second choice in my short list of nearby, lower-elevation winter hikes. From a trailhead only a few miles east of the previous hike, the topo map showed this one climbing north from the valley of the same creek, at a little over 6,000′, to a large branching plateau near 8,000′. According to the map, the trail spent several miles up there meandering across the plateau, then dropped down its north slope into the canyon of another creek. I didn’t expect it to be a spectacular hike – the most I hoped for was some new views, decent mileage and accumulated elevation gain, and maybe an interesting canyon at the far end.

That was a big maybe, because it would be almost 9 miles from end to end, and I would only be able to hike the entire distance if the trail turned out to be in good condition, on a surface that allowed me to maintain my preferred rapid pace. As usual I was being optimistic – in the back of my mind was my previous experience that all uplands in the heart of the wilderness were covered with the dreaded volcanic cobbles.

The day was forecast to be partly cloudy with typical midwinter temperatures at 6,000′ – high twenties in the morning to mid-fifties in the afternoon. But the sky was almost completely clear as I left home. Google Maps claimed the direct route through the mountains is 15 minutes shorter than the roundabout route at lower elevation, so that’s the way I went. Google Maps failed miserably – the direct route was actually 15 minutes longer than the roundabout route, which I used to return in the evening. But it gave me a fine panoramic view over the southern edge of the wilderness.

Despite a total lack of wind, it felt pretty damn cold at the trailhead, which faced a low wall of crenelated cliffs across a meadow lined with frosted chamisa – the floodplain of the upper creek, which was dry in this stretch. By the time the trail led me back into a narrow tributary valley and the wilderness boundary, I’d had to dig a wool scarf out of my pack and wrap it around my face.

But I quickly warmed up, and began shedding outerwear, on the climb to the plateau. The first part of the climb, along the rim of an interior basin to my right, revealed occasional views of sheer cliffs of soft, partly compacted volcanic tuff. But it also revealed the dreaded volcanic cobbles, as bad as I’d encountered anywhere. And the trail, while not really steep, proceeded at a grade that could only be described as relentless, straight up an outlying ridge of the plateau, through open pinyon-juniper-oak forest that allowed only frustratingly partial views of the surrounding landscape. The forest cover meant that I could never see more than 100′ ahead of me, and always hoped I would reach the top of the plateau after another 100′ of climbing, only to face yet another 100′ of climbing.

After about 3 miles of climbing, I reached the top of the plateau, and the first of a series of reasons why this trail even existed – an abandoned corral, followed by an abandoned stock pond. The trail had been accompanied by an abandoned barbed wire fence for the past couple of miles, and I was to see that fence for the rest of the hike. Not my favorite wilderness experience.

From there, the trail proceeded across the gently rolling plateau, in and out of small stands of tall ponderosa pine and through long patches of snow up to 10″ deep, the ground lined with the difficult volcanic cobbles everywhere except for small patches of mud.

I was looking for the junction with a shorter trail that came in from the west. That junction would be 5.3 miles in from my trailhead, leaving less than 4 miles to the far end at the distant creek. But it was such slow walking that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make it to the end. It seemed to take forever just to reach the junction.

What awaited me at the junction was not encouraging. Nobody else had hiked this trail since our snowfall 3 weeks ago, but shortly before reaching the junction I found boot tracks in the snow, and at the junction itself somebody had built a campfire in the trail literally at the foot of the trail sign. Like the on-trail campfire I’d found a few months ago, this one had trash on top of the coals – a sardine can, a melted plastic wrapper, and some crumpled foil.

I remember back in the Dotcom Boom when my idealistic young colleagues proclaimed “information wants to be free!” This is the result of that. People who haven’t been brought up in backpacking culture watch YouTube videos and learn about places and trails on social media, and anyone can buy the gear at Walmart or REI. But information without ethics is inevitably abusive and destructive. Freedom erodes accountability and hence responsibility, and the technologies which my colleagues hoped would liberate people instead became addictive and exploitative, leading to genocide and other societal abuses while turning a tiny minority of white men into billionaires.

Continuing past the junction, I passed the second abandoned corral and stock pond. Until a few decades ago when a citizens’ lawsuit finally forced the Forest Service to end ranching in the wilderness, this had been a rancher’s trail – and visually, it still was.

It’d taken me so long to reach the junction, there was no way I was going to reach trail’s end at the next creek. But I had about 45 minutes left before I had to turn back, so I continued on the main trail. That was when I began to encounter more work by the rogue trailworkers. Whoever is doing this recent trail “maintenance” seems to be in love with their chainsaw. They’re clear-cutting a corridor between 10 and 15 feet wide, and leaving unsightly slash piles along the trail.

Maybe I’m encountering stuff like this because I’m hiking trails that are really better suited to equestrians. They don’t actually have to walk on the volcanic cobbles – they spend the entire day sitting on their horses’ backs, while the animals have to deal with the rocky ground, and with four feet, they probably find it easier than humans.

But the Forest Service doesn’t designate trails for hikers vs. equestrians – all trails are supposed to be mixed-use. And all upland trails in the Gila have this kind of surface – maybe that’s why horse-packing outfits are so popular here.

Lined with hacked-off limbs and sawed-off young trees, the trail continued out a northern branch of the plateau for another mile, before the path of destruction ended. I found myself in a patch of deep snow on the north rim of the plateau, with a view north over the main part of the wilderness, a view I’d never had before. Parts of it were even more rugged than I’d expected.

From there, the tread became almost invisible as I worked my way down a series of short switchbacks through dense pinyon-juniper-oak forest into the canyon of the unfamiliar creek. I soon ran out of time and had to turn back.

Now I had more than 7 miles of that terrible rocky surface to cross on the way back. I’d intentionally given myself enough time so I didn’t feel rushed, but since I’d sworn to approach those volcanic cobbles with a positive attitude, I decided to make a concerted effort to tackle them on their own terms – to figure out a way to walk that incredibly challenging ground with grace.

There was only one way to do it. I had to banish all urgency, and give the task all the time it required. But even more importantly, I had to clear my mind, stop thinking, and focus all my attention, not on the trail ahead, but on the ground directly in front of my feet – the length of my shortest stride, which on ground like this is 2 feet or less. At each step, I had to pinpoint and decide on exactly where to put each foot, before even lifting that foot off the ground.

I thought I’d done that before, but I learned that I actually hadn’t. Goal-oriented, highly motivated, brimming with energy, I’d always been scanning 6 to 10 feet ahead for major obstacles, assuming I could ignore lesser obstacles. That way of walking worked on every other kind of surface, but not on these volcanic rocks. Hence I’d always been twisting my ankles or stumbling on this kind of surface, cursing all the way.

Why had it been so hard for me to focus and concentrate? I recalled losing my sunglasses last week – and only a few days ago, buying a new furnace filter, setting it on the roof of my car while I unlocked the door, driving away and only realizing a half hour later, at home, that the new filter was lying along the roadside somewhere, miles away, battered and broken. This kind of thing has happened to me over and over again during the past few years, and why? Because trauma and frustration have left me in a perpetual state of distraction – always worried about problems I have to solve, always anxious about what will go wrong next – never present, never fully aware of my surroundings. Always distracted and literally absent-minded.

Gurus speak of mindfulness, but what I needed was a state of mindlessness. It was only when faced with these rocks that required me to stop thinking and focus on the ground before my feet, that I was able to banish that distraction and enter a state of mindless grace. And after a while, it began working. I found I no longer resented these rocks. I found I enjoyed the challenge. I felt I was getting good at it, I was mastering the rocks – and since that was a form of thinking, a form of distraction, that’s when I began to stumble again.

I had now learned my second lesson: humility and submission. We don’t master nature – she will always be our master. Wisdom comes when we submit to nature.

These rocks, that for years I believed to be my enemies, had become my teachers.

Of course, this kind of extreme focus and concentration has to be put in context like everything else. While doing it, you lose all consciousness of your broader surroundings. Gurus speak of becoming more present, but when taken to an extreme like this, you’re actually oblivious to your surroundings. You can’t see vegetation or wildlife, and you have no idea where you are in the landscape. To see anything except the ground at your feet, you have to come to a full stop. I wondered how the Apaches could hunt in this kind of habitat. You’d have to pick your vantage points, and the routes between them, and stop frequently along the way. There’d be no running to chase down a deer, like in that expensive, award-winning Hollywood production Last of the Mohicans.

Hiking became quite literally a form of meditation. Walking with more grace and more peacefulness the farther I went, I finally reached the southern end of the plateau and began descending, just as the sun was lowering to the long ridge north of town. It lit up the soft cliffs surrounding the interior basin, and there was just enough last light to briefly gild the rim of the side valley before I emerged into the chamisa.

I hoped I would remember the day’s lessons.

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Day of the Cosmos

Monday, November 28th, 2022: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Sapillo, Southwest New Mexico.

Last Sunday’s knee problem meant that this Sunday’s hike wasn’t guaranteed. I’d had to ice several times a day for three days just to get rid of the pain, and I assumed that the steep, hard-packed downhill stretches of last Sunday’s hike – over 4,000 vertical feet – were to blame. Previous knee problems had taken up to three months to resolve, so I was heartsick thinking I’d have to give up my beloved high-elevation hikes for the near future, and lose even more of the lung capacity I’d tried so hard to regain.

But I’d rested that knee for a solid week, and I wanted to try an all-day hike on fairly level terrain to see how it would hold up. The problem was, around here, whereas most of the mountains are public land, all the level ground is private – fenced cattle range. And the only level trails in the mountains are canyon-bottom trails, which either involve dozens of river crossings or have been severely damaged by monsoon floods.

Well into my second day of poring over maps trying to find a level hike, I remembered the hike I’d done over on the east side last winter, which started up the broad floodplain of a long but fairly shallow canyon. The average grade of the foothills there is only about 6 percent, with the canyon bottoms gaining even less. The Continental Divide Trail goes a couple miles up one of those canyons before climbing into the hills, and I saw a tributary canyon that extended an additional 4 miles without much elevation gain. Based on what I’d seen in that area, I should be able to bushwhack up its floodplain pretty easily, yielding up to 12 miles out-and-back of fairly level hiking. On new ground, inside the wilderness area, with no company and hopefully no livestock!

Another day of clear skies and freezing air. I was aware that the eastbound trails in this valley cross the big creekbed, but near enough to its head that it should be dry by now. What I didn’t expect was to find – within a few yards of the trailhead – a flood 12 feet wide and 6 inches deep, clear water flowing over grass. Probably runoff from irrigation upstream.

I thrashed my way downstream, through shoulder-high brush, looking for a place to cross, finally spotting a fallen log that felt solid. But to cross it I’d need a stick, which I found farther downstream – a dead lower branch of a small juniper.

Once across, I beat my way back to the trail, and could see an earthen dam across the mouth of the big canyon I was headed for, dimly remembering some kind of small reservoir on the map. The CDT led up the forested slope to the right of that dam, emerging behind it for a view of its mostly dry basin, filled with mud, gravel, and rocks from post-wildfire floods – a depressingly post-apocalyptic landscape.

That would be my route for most of the next two miles. The CDT did provide a few detours off the coarse debris flows and the uneven, hard-frozen mud of the brush-choked floodplain, but I used up a lot of time scouting for a path.

I’d brought a map, but it wasn’t detailed enough to clearly identify the side canyon I was targeting for my knee-friendly bushwhack. I passed one tributary, but didn’t think it was big enough so I kept going. After the first mile, the main floodplain narrowed and began winding back and forth between low cliffs of coarse volcanic conglomerate.

I’d used up so much time finding my way up that nasty debris flow, I was now an hour and a half into my hike and I still hadn’t found that side canyon. As the main canyon had narrowed, large cairns had appeared linking surviving segments of the CDT that shortcutted the bends of the canyon, in the shade of the canopy up on the banks above the streambed. The stream itself was intermittant, but flowed vigorously when aboveground.

The problem now was that the intact segments of trail were overgrown by the armpit-high stalks of my old nemesis, Cosmos parviflorus. As a genus, Cosmos is both a wildflower and a popular garden flower, but all species produce burrs – seed capsules – that stick to clothing and animal fur, which is how they’re spread. Cosmos provides a great learning experience about invasive plants! Although a few species are declared invasive by state governments, ornamental cosmos are still widely planted – my new neighbor has them all over her yard – and wild, native cosmos are spread by humans, livestock, and wild animals alike, to dominate large areas of disturbed habitat, such as trails, where they quickly become an irritant to the very animals that spread them.

I knew I’d spend the rest of my day accumulating and laboriously picking them off my clothing, but there was nothing I could do but forge ahead, trying to anticipate stands of cosmos and keep my arms raised.

The canyon bottom had been heavily trafficked by horses, and the frozen mud was deeply postholed, but whenever I crossed a sandy stretch of streambed I found the footprints of a couple of hikers who’d been up here in the past week or so.

Finally, about 2-1/2 miles up the narrowing, winding canyon, with the now-picturesque stream running aboveground and dark cliffs towering above, a cairn beckoned up the left slope and I realized I was at a crucial decision point. This was where the trail left the canyon and climbed to the ridge. If I wanted to protect my knee from a downclimb, I should just turn back and find that side canyon. But I didn’t want to turn back when I had a trail to follow and the hike was just getting interesting. Maybe it wouldn’t turn out to be a long, steep incline, and I could take it easy enough on the descent so as not to trigger my knee.

Unfortunately, the initial trail up the spur of this outlying ridge was the steepest part, with almost a 30 percent grade. But as a spur of the ridge, I knew it would become gradually gentler until it virtually leveled out at the top.

Most of the ground was covered with the hated volcanic cobbles, but these are easier to ascend on, so I continued in denial of how hard the descent would be. The biggest problem was that the farther I climbed, the more the trail was overgrown by armpit-high dead grasses and annuals, which hid the treacherous rocks underfoot and included copious amounts of cosmos. On some stretches, I could see a suggestion of trail ahead where someone or some animal had faintly trampled the dry vegetation, but these stretches were intermittant, and I often had to stop and scout for a route. The few cairns were thoroughly buried in vegetation and only appeared when you were right above them. I eventually concluded that nobody had been up this trail since the peak of the growing season, late in the monsoon. Local hikers largely avoid these famous national trails, so their use tends to be minimal except in spring when through hikers start their journey north.

Although the grade did gradually become gentler and gentler, the uphill trudge through dense overgrowth, over hidden rocks that continually tripped me, through an open woodland of pinyon, juniper, and oak that blocked my view over the surrounding landscape, felt interminable, even Sisyphean. At least I was in sunlight all the way – the ground was uniformly frozen and a dusting of snow remained under the low trees.

Suddenly, through a gap between trees to the east, I glimpsed the peaks of the range, white with snow! We hadn’t had a storm in town since September – how had this one missed us? It had to have been really recent – we’d had some clouds late in the past week – and I realized the peaks, reaching over 10,000′, were showing the snow more because their forest had been cleared by successive wildfires.

On a brief steeper section of trail I looked back for a view west, and glimpsed a big redtail hawk wheeling out of sight behind the forested ridgetop at my left. Then, a half hour farther up the ridge, I stopped and glanced back again, and saw the hawk perched at the top of a low snag, watching me from about 80 feet away, looking huge. By the time I got my camera out it had disappeared.

Finally the ground virtually leveled out, the dry vegetation transitioned to mostly low grasses, and the trail became even harder to follow – but as if in compensation, more cairns appeared, some tall enough to be visible above the grass.

Despite the general lack of views, the occasional stands of cosmos, and the treacherous rocky ground, the endless golden meadows dotted with low trees provided harmonious surroundings, and the sunlight kept me warm, so I was coming to enjoy this unplanned hike anyway. I knew the trail would eventually descend into more canyons and basins, but that was 8 miles in and I didn’t have enough time left in the day to do the whole thing. I figured I’d end with 6 or 7 miles one-way.

I could see a taller ridge looming ahead to my right, and what eventually happened was that I seemed to lose the trail as my ridge approached the base of the higher one. The forest became denser, and my faint trail branched into several even fainter possibilities, one of them leading downhill. I pursued each of them for a few dozen yards, only to reach obstacles where even the faint disturbances in the grass disappeared, and had obviously been created by game. So I tried the downhill option. In short stretches it almost looked like there was an old trail underneath the dry grass, but these traces faded so I finally stopped to call it a day, logging my position with my GPS unit.

These national trails seem to be cleared annually, and next year’s crew have their work cut out for them! But amazingly, when I checked the position at home that night, I found that against all odds I’d still been on the CDT, and had turned back at exactly the right spot, before the trail gets really steep again as it descends into a side canyon.

Returning to an open gate I passed through a half mile back, I noticed a huge bootprint in the frozen mud. Some big guy had been here at the end of the rainy season, probably right after the last storm in late September.

It was here that I became truly lost, and lost my cool for a while. After passing through the gate, the trail seemed really clear for a few dozen feet, then got really sketchy, especially since the woodland was denser here and much of the ground was in shade. I spent nearly a half hour pursuing several alternatives that gradually petered out after a few hundred yards. Each time, I retraced my steps to the gate, finally remembering how a sharp turn had immediately preceeded the gate itself. I finally relocated that sharp turn, and there was my trail – a faintly trodden path no more than 8 inches wide, barely visible in the shade of a juniper.

As expected, the descent over volcanic cobbles was really hard and really slow, but I’d given myself plenty of time and remained in a good mood. In fact, I realized that since returning from the desert, I wasn’t pressuring myself to accomplish marathons of distance and elevation, and hiking had become a pleasure again, instead of a trial.

Plus, the low angle light of late afternoon was highlighting the grasses, which were, if anything, more beautiful dead than alive.

I did get lost once more, and lost another 15 minutes pursuing alternatives, but as usual, eventually found a route that was confirmed by a hidden cairn.

By the time I reached the canyon bottom, it was mostly in shade. I was dreading the final stretch of debris flow where the trail disappeared, but the winding part, where the trail was largely intact, seemed to go on forever, with the canyon getting darker and colder all the way.

Interestingly, I found the bootprint of a hiker who’d come up the canyon today, after me, only going as far as the base of the trail to the ridge. He’d been wearing Merrill Moabs, the favorite lightweight hiking boot around here and the boot that had eventually triggered my chronic foot pain.

Eventually I did reach the debris flow, and lost the trail in the center of the floodplain, so I ended up fighting my way for hundreds of yards through dense, dry riparian brush, on uneven, partly thawed muddy ground. I missed the place where the trail past the earthen dam drops into the debris, and ended up having to climb over an abandoned fence past deep pools of standing flood water before reconnecting with the last of the trail out of the canyon.

At home, after checking alternate views on my online mapping platform, I found that this one is ironically named Rocky Canyon. And it hosted such a big debris flow because it meanders 17 or 18 miles from the northern crest of the range, descending 2,500′ on the way.

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Long Way Down

Monday, October 16th, 2023: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Sapillo, Southwest New Mexico.

The medical scare and trip to Tucson had screwed up this week’s schedule. I probably should’ve skipped my Sunday hike, but it felt like the only thing I could salvage to feel good about the week.

But I got up late, so I would have to find a shorter trail close to town. The one I picked is almost 12 miles out-and-back, starting from a long dirt road and descending over 2,000 feet into the canyon of one of our biggest creeks, just before the mouth where it joins the river. I prefer to start out climbing and finish by descending, but I figured it was “only 2,000 feet” – I’m used to twice that in my Sunday hikes.

The dirt road begins 18 miles north of town, about a 40 minute drive on the highway. I’d never explored it before, and was mildly surprised to find it pretty damn rugged, with a lot of exposed bedrock and steep, winding grades, so that it took me another 40 minutes to go another 7 miles. The long 8,600 foot high ridge that I’ve hiked many times loomed above on my left – this road skirts its steep north slope – and I got a new view of the burn scars from the 2020 wildfire.

Rounding a rocky bend into a side gully, I surprised a small hawk which had just caught a squirrel. Struggling to take off with its heavy prey, it literally dragged the squirrel through the dirt until it reached the dropoff on the other side and could soar across the gully into the lower forest.

I didn’t meet any humans on the road, but there was a pickup with extended ramp, and a detached flatbed trailer, parked at the trailhead. There was also a corral and lots of cowshit, all more than a week old.

The trail starts in ponderosa forest, down a shallow canyon next to a barbed-wire fence. I saw only one human footprint, going down; the other recent visitors had been on horseback, weeks or months ago.

The fence soon veered off, and although the creek was dry, lush vegetation and rocky bluffs made the canyon pretty. I hadn’t studied the map in detail and was surprised when, after a mile and a half, the trail began climbing away on the west slope. And I was really disappointed to meet my nemesis, the dreaded volcanic cobbles. My feet were not looking forward to this.

All I could think of, picking my way carefully over those rocks, was that I was adding to the elevation I’d have to regain on the way back. But as usual, I kept going, and was finally surprised to reach a dirt forest road that didn’t show up on my map. The trail apparently continued on the road.

And the road ran, fairly level, for a mile and a quarter, out a finger of ridge in a stark corridor that had been logged, partly as a firebreak and partly by woodcutters. Near the end, I heard chopping, and encountered a guy swinging an axe, splitting logs that had been cut into short sections by the Feds. “Free wood!” he enthused. His truck was nowhere to be seen so I assumed he was expecting a ride later.

On the positive side, I got occasional glimpses of the big canyons ahead. And finally the road ended at the wilderness boundary, and I faced the descent.

The trail into the big canyon started steep and even rockier than before. I immediately realized I should give up and turn back. But then I saw somebody coming up, in bright colors. It was a young through-hiker, finishing the national trail in reverse.

I’d read somewhere, recently, that the latest fad in the through-hiking subculture is to compete for the most outlandish outfit, but this was the first time I’d seen it in person. Forget the sleek, expensive space-age creations from REI – this kid could’ve just stepped out of a flea-market circus, his broad floppy hat ringed with big rainbow-colored fake flowers, and below that a garish striped shirt and mismatched paisley pants. Imagine tramping alone through thousands of miles of federal wilderness and national forest, camping along remote streams and rivers, just waiting for that moment when you can impress another young hiker – hopefully the opposite sex – with your bizarre costume!

I asked how far he’d come today, and he said about twelve miles – and he’d hated to leave the river, with little or no water between here and town. I realized the mountain biker I’d met cutting logs on the real national trail, earlier this year, had been right. No through hiker uses the official trail anymore, when they can follow the river instead.

We talked awhile, but if I was going to do this I needed to get going. He said “Enjoy the views!” which I did find encouraging. I wondered how much water he was carrying, and how far he would get tonight. We were 17 miles from the highway, on the other side of the high ridge, with another 12 miles from there to town.

The views did get better, but the upper part of the trail was a nightmare of rocks. My masochistic side took over – I’d come this far, I had to get somewhere nice before turning back. Down and down I went into the big canyon, and much of the trail was exposed, on a still day with solar heating.

I knew exactly where I was headed, because I’d hiked to the mouth of this canyon last year, along the opposite slope. That had been a much more spectacular hike because the opposite slope mostly consists of grassy meadows tended prehistorically by Native Americans, yielding views both long and deep, into the narrow, sycamore-lined canyon.

Still, it’s always exciting to hike deep into backcountry and encounter a site you’ve reached before, on an equally long trek through completely different terrain.

This is the driest time I’ve ever experienced in this region, and the creek was much lower, but still running. I was already in a lot of pain from the descent – I tried sitting on a log for a while, but knew I needed to get going. When planning the day, I’d ignored how much longer it would take to ascend than to descend. I would probably end the hike in the dark, starving and barely able to walk.

On the ascent, I discovered that walking too fast on the descent had given me shin splints and a sore knee. But I had to keep going, and I knew the hardest part was waiting near the top. I just shut down my mind and kept trudging, slipping and stubbing and stumbling among the rocks.

I made it up, and the hot sun was getting mercifully low as I paced out that interminable woodcutter road. The outlandish through-hiker’s footprints disappeared – he’d apparently bummed a ride with the woodcutter!

The trail down into the side canyon was even harder than I’d remembered, and the sun was setting by the time I reached the bottom. My entire lower body was on fire, but I knew the climb up this canyon to the trailhead would be easier. Dusk was beginning when I reached the vehicle – and the pickup and trailer were gone, probably belonging to the woodcutter and a partner.

I drove the 40 minutes back out the dirt road in the dusk. About halfway, I suddenly noticed a big bull elk standing on the bank just above the road, like a ghost.

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