Grant
Monday, April 8th, 2019: Grant, Hikes, Pinalenos, Southeast Arizona.
After a ten-day hiking hiatus, I was anxious for a big weekend hike. And I wanted something more special than the boring dirt-floored forests we have near home. I wanted exposed rock!
I’d already checked out everything within an hour’s drive. I’d already pushed that radius out to two hours, exploring a suitable mountain range a couple hours away (see The Perfect Sunset Hike). Now, I continued that radius around in all directions, so that it encompassed a second range to the southwest. I spent hours studying the Forest Service website and various hiking websites that mapped and described trails, and trip logs from previous hikers that included photos. If I was going to drive that far, I wanted some idea of what I would find. I knew that most terrain would be just a copy of what I already had near home: forest and more forest. I wanted some variety!
I’d recently acquired a better exploring vehicle, a cheap little 4WD that could get me places my 2WD truck wouldn’t reach. So eventually I settled on a trail in the “Sunset Hike” mountains that would offer me a big hike, with plenty of distance and elevation, and plenty of rock.
The Forest Service website had a description of the trail. The hiking websites had topo maps showing the trail. It went up an outlying ridge on the west side of the major canyon on the range’s south face, a canyon I’d looked down into from above, when I first visited these mountains last year (see Consuming the Final Frontier). Detailed information was sparse, confusing and contradictory. There were no trip logs or photos, and every web page showed different figures for both distance and elevation. Trail length ranged from 5.3 to 6.5 miles, and elevation gain ranged from 3,700′ to 5,700′. Were any of these figures correct? Careful study of the topo maps showed that the actual elevation gain would be just over 4,000′.
Even if the lower mileage was accurate, the round trip would still be a bigger hike than I’d done in the past decade of joint failure and injury. It would take me up a canyon lined with cliffs and dramatic rock outcrops, from open desert through sparse pinyon-oak-juniper forest into the shady groves of mixed-conifer forest dominated by tall ponderosa pines, a tantalizing variety with endless views at every point. So I packed up and started driving west.
Two hours and change later, I was 45 miles from the nearest town, driving north up a desert plain toward an extremely remote state prison, the dark mountains looming behind with patches of snow near the crest. The prison had been a 19th century fort, established beside the major stream that ran down from the 10,700′ peak and out into the plain. The Forest Service said the trail had been built for, and used by, pack trains traveling back and forth between the fort and the crest of the range, more than a hundred years ago.
The Forest Service website instructed me to drive around the prison and through the staff housing, where I would find a locked gate blocking an old dirt road. I could supposedly get a key for this gate at the guardhouse.
Having driven up the plain to the prison, I was at the northern edge of a truly vast desert basin, between 4,000′ and 5,000′ in elevation, ranging from 20 to 30 miles wide and extending for over a hundred miles from north to south, all the way into Mexico. Bordering it on the east and west were various stark mountain ranges, and ahead of me, rising behind the prison, was the tallest of them, the penultimate sky island. And behind me, far out in the open basin, were a few green patches of isolated farms and ranches, irrigated with groundwater draining from the sky island.
It was a small prison, quiet and inactive on an early Sunday morning, and I followed a paved road right around the fence on the northeast, and immediately entered the staff housing, a tiny suburb of modest, identical suburban homes surrounded by kids’ bikes and toys, right outside the razor wire fence, the whole thing about as isolated as you could get from the rest of society.
A sign directed me through the housing to the Forest Service gate, which turned out to be wide open. The hiking websites had hinted that the Forest Service road might become impassable, and that I might need to walk some distance before reaching the actual trailhead, adding significantly to my overall distance. And in fact, before reaching the foot of the mountains, the dirt road turned out to be blocked by the creek, roaring and raging in flood from the winter’s heavy snows, from one to three feet deep and choked with boulders.
I could see from tracks that somebody in a hardcore Jeep had recently crossed, but my vehicle still had road tires and would’ve ended up shipwrecked, so I parked on the bank above the creek, loaded my pack, and scrambled upstream through the riparian forest looking for a place to cross. A hundred yards up, I found a log that someone had manhandled across a narrow spot between a couple of boulders, and I very carefully shimmied across, whitewater spraying my boots.
I’d started hiking at 9:30am, which is fairly early for these drive-to hikes. It was a beautiful spring day, mostly clear with scattered clouds. From the weather forecast in nearby towns, I’d expected temps in the 50s, but it felt warmer already. From the creek crossing, I walked east up the old road, opening and re-closing a stock gate, and finally turned left, making a dramatic entrance to the mouth of the canyon, with its boulder-choked creek roaring out through a dense, canopied riparian forest of oaks and sycamores. The first thing I saw ahead was the feathery, upraised tail of a whitetail buck, bouncing over a rise in the shaded tunnel of the road.
After hiking another half mile or so through the riparian forest, up the boulder-embedded, sandy roadway, climbing several hundred feet in the process, I eventually reached the trailhead, marked by a Forest Service sign. It’d taken me a half hour to get there from my vehicle, and checking topo maps I’d brought on my iPad, I could see I’d walked 1-1/2 miles from the creek crossing. The Forest Service sign showed the full trail distance as 7 miles, for an overall distance of 8-1/2 miles from where I parked.
I figured it was unlikely that I could hike 17 miles round-trip and get back in time to drive to Silver City before dark, so I needed to plan on how far to hike before turning back. Ideally I’d get back in time to drive to the nearest town, get an early dinner, and drive the two hours back to Silver City by about 7:30pm. So I figured I needed to be back at the vehicle by 4:30, giving me seven hours to hike. Halving that, I’d need to stop and turn back at about 1pm.
But in my eagerness to hike farther and higher, I forgot about the time difference – I was now in a time zone that was one hour behind Silver City – and I conveniently overlooked the fact that I still had a 45-minute drive back to town for dinner. And lastly, unless the hike turned into a major bummer, I was likely to keep going 30 minutes to an hour beyond my planned turn-back point. That would only be human nature.
The trail twisted and turned its way up the foot of the ridge, out in the open between granite boulders and dense shrubs, alternately appearing and disappearing. Sometimes I would find myself climbing through the dry, chest-high bunchgrass without any evidence of a trail, only to emerge on a ledge with a narrow path leading onward, looking more like a game or cattle trail than a hiking trail. But here and there were cairns, often only a single rock perched on a boulder. The old pack trail had seen a lot of use more than a century ago, by men riding horse or mule, but now seemed virtually abandoned by humans, and only used sporadically by game and livestock.
Still, I was grateful for what trail I did find, because the vegetation on this slope was largely chaparral – dense thickets of shrub that would’ve been a nightmare to bushwhack around. As I mentioned earlier, I’d expected temps in the 50s, dropping as I climbed higher. But on this exposed slope it felt close to 70 degrees at mid-morning, and I was sweating profusely from the start of the climb. I’d started at 5,150′ elevation, and once I reached 7,000′, I hoped to find cool, shady pine forest and easier footing for the remainder of the climb.
Whereas many of the trails I’ve hiked have been damaged by erosion and deadfall in the aftermath of wildfire, this trail just seemed abandoned and overgrown. There was lots of evidence of trail work from the distant past – rock berms to divert runoff or mark the turn of a switchback – but they, as well as the trail itself, were often buried deep under thick grass or shrubs. Still, I’ve gotten pretty good at reading the ground, and I managed to stay on the path until the trail crested out on a high shoulder overlooking the main canyon. Here there was lots of evidence of isolated sparking from the last wildfire that had mainly burned the upper slopes, thousands of feet above.
And here I really lost the trail.
When you lose a trail, you need to stop focusing in front of your feet and look around at the landscape holistically, as a tapestry that might hold barely visible clues. If there are shrubs or big trees around, where are the natural openings between them? Can you spot any disturbed or trampled vegetation, cairns or other man-made rock formations, patches of bare ground, saw-cut stumps or branches? Sometimes, off in the distance, you’ll sense just the barest hint of a path.
There on the shoulder of the ridge, there were lots of man-made rock piles scattered around, probably the remains of old campfires. A hill loomed above, but the shoulder I stood on was fairly level and there were big junipers for shade, and a lot of cow shit. Some kind of ancient cowboy campground and recent bovine resting place.
I circled the area and set off in every direction that looked promising, but after a half hour of careful searching, I never found the trail. I could see some challenging terrain ahead, sheer cliffs, and whenever I tried to traverse around the hill to get to the upper ridge, I ran into a wall of boulders. So finally I just scrambled up the hill, and on top, in the least intuitive place, I found the trail again, about a quarter mile from where it had disappeared.
This trail is switchback-crazy. There are switchbacks with sections only a half dozen feet long, following natural fracture zones in the rock. Zigging and zagging, climbing and climbing through sparse oak and juniper forest, I finally reached some thin stands of short ponderosa pine, many of which had burned in the big wildfire a few years ago. It was now my planned turn-around time, so I stopped to have lunch. Another item I hadn’t factored into my schedule for the day.
But this was no kind of a destination. I hadn’t reached the cool, shady mixed-conifer forest that I’d expected at this elevation. There were cliffs towering above me, and I figured I still hadn’t hiked half the trail. I just couldn’t stop here. Chances are I wasn’t going to make it back home tonight, in any event.
So I continued, around and up the next level of the ridge, and around and up the next level after that. Here, after staying on the east side of the ridge for a long time, the trail crossed back over to the west side, where I lost it again. This time, it only took me ten minutes to relocate it.
It kept climbing for a short distance then began going gently down, for the first time on this hike, which was something I wasn’t excited about. I’d saved some detailed topo maps on my iPad, and consulting them, I could see exactly where I was, at slightly less than 8,300′. Again, this was no kind of destination. The trail was getting ready for another major ascent of nearly a thousand feet, to the crest. I still hadn’t found the tall, shady pine forest I’d expected, but I’d climbed more than 3,000′ already, covering at least 6 miles one-way, and I really needed to turn back. I spent a few minutes stretching, in an attempt to ease my hip pain, then shouldered my pack and started down.
It was weird how elsewhere on this south side of the range, you would find dense forests of tall ponderosa pines at this elevation. But on this outlying ridge, it was all open terrain, dominated by scattered oak and juniper, in what the Forest Service calls a “transition zone” amounting to more than 3,000′ in elevational thickness. It may be that the exposed rock cliffs and outcrops I came here for create a microhabitat hostile to the establishment of true forest at these elevations.
Down hiking isn’t necessarily easier than climbing. In this overgrown terrain, the dry grasses concealed loose rocks the size of tennis balls that twisted my ankle and made me stumble repeatedly, so that I really had to concentrate with every step. Apparently my new boots have really good support, because I made it without injury.
I lost the trail twice more on the way down, in different places this time, adding another 20 minutes to my hiking time. I was wearing shorts for the first time this season, and my skin had some kind of allergic reaction to the grasses on the trail, so my shins and the sides of my lower legs were quickly covered with an angry red rash. And I’d failed to apply sunscreen at the beginning, and now my calves were burned pretty badly. But when I reached the trailhead, and worked my way carefully down the old road of water-polished boulders, in the late-afternoon shade of the riparian canopy, I felt better than I had at the end of other, shorter hikes in the past months. It seemed I was actually making progress.
I got to town at sunset, found a cheap motel room, and discovered that since it was Sunday night, almost all the restaurants were closed. So I found myself ordering dinner and a margarita in a cavernous, obviously unpopular new place where only one other table was occupied. But I was really dehydrated – I hadn’t taken enough water on my hike and ran out hours ago – and I started feeling nauseous shortly after my food arrived, so I had to pack it up for the next day.
In my room that night, I checked the maps carefully to verify my distance and elevation. It’s clear from the topo maps that I climbed 3,150′, but considering how many times I lost the trail and had to scout far and wide to find it, and considering how many dozens of short switchbacks there were, distance is hard to estimate. I had to have covered at least 12 miles round trip in 7-1/2 hours of hiking – that’s the minimum, based on the detailed topo map/elevation profiles on hiking websites, and including the cut-off part of the old road that I had to walk back and forth to the trailhead. But I’m used to averaging a mile every 24 minutes, even with frequent stops, on our steep trails at home, which would yield almost 19 miles for the day. Highly unlikely, so I’m just calling it 12 miles and 3,150′.
Physically, in terms of my fitness and conditioning, it was a resounding success. I’ve been doing weekly cardio workouts for almost 30 years, but nothing like what I’m trying to maintain now. When I lived in the city, I did 4-mile runs, with little elevation gain, or mountain bike rides with at most a thousand feet of elevation. Now I’m climbing up to three peaks per week, typically walking fast, totaling up to 20 miles and 4,000′ of elevation gain. It seems crazy. I don’t want to overdo it, but I believe it’s good for me, and at my age, I need to work hard just to maintain my ability to do the things I want to do. Because as you age past a certain point, your body’s natural tendency is to deteriorate, to rapidly lose strength and capacity. You can’t just sit at a desk for months and then go out and do a 20-mile hike, like you could when you were in your 20s. And hiking is much more rewarding than the running or biking ever was, because it connects me better with nature.
But this abandoned, overgrown trail, with little variation from bottom to top, was a hike I won’t be doing again, anytime soon. Just too much work for too little reward!
Monday, August 5th, 2019: Grant, Hikes, Nature, Pinalenos, Southeast Arizona, Wildfire.
I was still bored with the hikes near home, and I kept dreaming about the canyon hike beyond the state line to the west, that climbed 4,000′ from high desert to alpine habitat atop the Sky Island. I’d expected that to be a good warm-weather hike, with its shady canopy in the canyon bottom and cooler temps during the climb to higher elevations.
On my previous visit the road to the canyon had been impassable where it crossed the creek out on the bajada, a mile from the actual mouth of the canyon. But that was in early spring with snow still melting on the peaks, and I assumed the creek would be lower now, and I’d be able to drive to the upper part of the road, where I knew there were some good campsites at the mouth of the canyon. I figured that if I left home in mid-afternoon, I’d be making camp around sundown in cooler temps, and could get an early start the next morning to beat the heat.
I could see a lot of weather ahead during the two-hour drive west across endless arid basins. On the final approach, driving over a spectacular pass between mountain ranges, I surprised two roadrunners crossing the highway. From the top of the pass, you look west across the north end of a vast, virtually flat valley with scattered farms and ranches, to low north-south mountain ranges on the far side. Where the road bottoms out in this valley there is a turnoff that heads north to a state prison on a gentle slope at the foot of the Sky Island.
This is big country; you can see everything from many miles away, and the rocky, forested wall of the Sky Island mountain range looms high above. Finally arriving at the prison, I drove around the fence and through the staff housing like before, but on the west side, the gate to the Forest Service road was padlocked.
I returned to the prison entrance and parked outside the Administration building, where the Forest Service website had said to ask for a key. But it was closed on Saturday, so I tried the Visitation building across the street. Inside, I had to walk through a metal detector before reaching a window. Two uniformed ladies behind it seemed surprised to see me. They had no idea about the creek, the road, or the gate I was talking about, but one of them asked me if I had noticed the newly constructed gate beside the highway just before the prison entrance. She said they had bulldozed a new road there because of problems with vandals along the old road.
I found the new gate and turned onto the new road, which was just a poorly graded gash across the bajada. There were cattle all over the road, and I had to threaten them by revving my engine to get them to move away. I could see this new road would quickly become impassable after a little monsoon erosion, and I wondered if the Forest Service even knew that their trailheads were at risk of becoming inaccessible over here.
Up and down, around and around, over the exposed rocks and through the rough-dried mud of this heavily grazed, mesquite-riddled rangeland, I finally got to the National Forest boundary near the foot of the mountains. A redtail hawk soared overhead. When I reached the creek crossing, I could hear the creek roaring off to my left, but the roadway, which followed an abandoned dry creek bed above the active one, looked okay at first. But as I walked ahead to be sure, I came upon a boulder pile, the remains of heavy flash-flood erosion, that would require more than twice the ground clearance I have in my vehicle. In fact, I didn’t think any vehicle, apart from maybe a military Humvee, would be able to cross here.
Clouds were threatening rain, and there was no place to camp in the mesquite thicket along the lower part of the road. I explored off the road a bit, hoping to find a clearing I could use, but there was nothing doing. I did find some prehistoric bedrock mortars from the Old Ones, which was encouraging, but the ground was thick with ants. I decided on Plan B, a cheap motel in the nearest town, which would enable me to explore the big valley south of the mountain range.
The road down the valley starts out in some very lonely ranching country. But the first thing I encountered was a large elementary school, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and the second thing I encountered was a beautiful pronghorn antelope, grazing on the shoulder of the road. My passing vehicle didn’t bother it at all.
I had mixed feelings about my decision after finding that the last third of the road to town was crossed by sharp seams every dozen feet, which made the drive pretty violent – BAM, BAM, BAM for at least ten miles. The valley there is heavily populated, and I couldn’t understand how people live with a road like this.
But after a steak dinner and a good night’s sleep, I found the road easier to take when returning north the next day. One highlight of this road, if you could call it that, is the NatureSweet tomato complex in the middle of the valley, more than two miles of continuous greenhouse, possibly the largest such facility in the world. I didn’t know there was that much glass on earth!
Back at the creek crossing near the foot of the mountains, I was surprised to find two vehicles already parked. I’d wrongly figured that the heat would keep people away this time of year. I pulled off at the only remaining spot and prepared for my all-day hike. It was only 9am but it was already pretty warm, and I had a mile of open country to cross before reaching the mouth of the canyon with its shady canopy.
Where the road abruptly enters the canyon, suddenly enfolded by the foothills, it’s deeply eroded – basically just a rolling, boulder-strewn gulley – but I could see that someone had driven some kind of 4wd vehicle over it recently, having crossed the creek, where they would’ve needed at least 18″ ground clearance. What the hell had they been driving? Rounding a bend, I surprised a couple of white-tailed deer, the buck wearing a tall, feather-duster tail like one I’d seen last year near home.
I reached the clearing beside the creek where the old road turns away to climb toward the ridge trailhead. I could see the white and green sections of 6″ diameter PVC pipe across the creek, propped up on stands, which used to supply water for the prison. I heard a voice and noticed there was an old guy sitting in a folding chair, reading a book, back in the shade of the clearing. Since I’d never actually taken the canyon trail, I asked him if the road led to the canyon trailhead. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, but he recommended hiking to the waterfall, which I had read about. I knew the waterfall turnoff was only a mile up the canyon, but he claimed it was “a long way” and easy to miss.
What the old guy referred to is a small waterfall in a side drainage, a mile from the trailhead, which has been enhanced by a metal catwalk like the more famous Catwalk near my home. It seems to be the most popular destination in this canyon, but I had little interest in it this time around – my goal was the high country, five miles away and 4,000′ above.
I reached the trailhead for the ridge trail I’d hiked before, and found largely abandoned. That abandoned trail has a nice Forest Service sign, but the creek trail, which has a number and a detailed description on the Forest Service website, has no sign, and no formal trailhead. What, me worry? I was blithely strolling up the old road in the sun-dappled shade of the canopy, looking forward to my canyon morning, when I suddenly spotted a black bear crossing the road about 60 feet ahead of me. I talked to the bear to make sure it knew about me, but it ignored me completely and plodded on into the streamside undergrowth. After a while I continued on up the road, but it soon ended in a deep ravine that had been cut by erosion out of the steep western slope of the canyon.
This is probably a good point to admit that I was poorly informed about this hike in general. I’d read the Forest Service website trail description, I’d studied the trail map available on the Arizona hiking website, and I’d read two or three fairly recent trip logs. It seemed like a very straightforward trail – it just followed the creek a few miles then climbed a section of switchbacks which continued to the crest – so I hadn’t brought the map with me.
What I hadn’t paid enough attention to was the dates of the recent hikes on this trail. It turned out they had all been done prior to the 2017 wildfire on the crest of the range. Because since the fire, as I began to discover a mile or so up the trail, the entire canyon bottom had been filled with flood debris – an unfathomable tonnage of boulders, tree trunks, and smashed, twisted, and broken piping from the prison’s ambitious but long-abandoned water system. Whenever I ventured away from the canyon bottom, I could see floodwaters had reached as high as 50′ above the current streambed, lodging debris high in trees far up the slopes. It was hard to imagine the Biblical scale of those floods. Had they occurred during spring rains on top of snowmelt, or during violent monsoon storms? In any event, there was little left of the old road – which had to be the trail, since there was clearly no other way up the canyon – and I soon got sidetracked and found myself lost, crisscrossing the chaos of giant piles of boulders and logs, with the stream raging somewhere below.
I wasted more than an hour on this, meanwhile crossing and re-crossing the stream on boulder steppingstones. Somewhere in there I noticed a faded pink ribbon on a branch, which sometimes indicates a trail. I followed two or three of these ribbons but they just led me to dead ends deeper in the maze.
Finally from amid my latest pile of debris I spotted what looked like a continuation of the old road, high on the opposite bank above the stream, so I fought my way over there and scrambled up. Sure enough, it was an intact section of the old road. I followed it for a few hundred yards, encountering an abandoned cabin I’d read about in one of those trip logs. And shortly afterwards, the road ended again on the brink of monumental chaos – what appeared to be a giant glacial moraine that had recently engulfed and killed an entire riparian forest in some catastrophic debris flow of unimaginable scale.
I just stood there in awe, shaking my head, wondering what the living hell I’d gotten myself into. I was already battered and drenched with sweat from my morning’s exertions. It was almost noon.
Choked by the chaos of debris, the dead forest still stood, its brown foliage indicating that this catastrophe had occurred recently, during the current growing season. I assumed from the surrounding landscape that this was the junction of Grant and Post Creeks, and I vaguely remembered – in error, as it turned out – that the trail turned east here to ascend Grant Creek, leaving Post Creek to continue due north by itself. But how was I to find any evidence of the trail, which had to be buried somewhere dozens of feet beneath this vast field of boulders and logs, out of which crushed and twisted sections of steel and PVC pipe protruded like veins from a severed limb?
Already on the point of giving up, I managed to climb across the moraine with less trouble than I expected. It was perhaps a hundred yards across at the junction. I searched for evidence of the trail on the other side, but there was none. So I made my way up the moraine until I came to some shade near the outer edge. There I had lunch and glumly studied the shadows in the forest below. I could see more piping over there in the trees – maybe I’d find the trail over there?
Sure enough, no sooner had I entered the forest than I spotted another pink ribbon on a branch. It seemed to indicate some sort of primitive trail that in most places was simply a steep erosion channel through the forest. Alongside it, big clumps of debris had been caught up in the trees during the massive floods. I was surrounded by the ghosts of apocalypse.
More ribbons led me forward, until this “trail” finally rejoined the moraine and Grant Creek beyond it, out in the open again. The last pink ribbon seemed to indicate that I should cross the creek here, to find a trail continuation on the other side. But it meant climbing back over the boulder pile. And midway there, I found another monument to the power of the massive floods: a trio of giant Ponderosa pines, still living, with the trunk of an equally huge pine lodged across them to create an accidental dam.
With no more pink ribbons in view on the opposite bank of the creek – nothing but another forested slope too steep to climb – I clambered back on top of the seemingly endless moraine. And from there, beyond a northward curve of the canyon, I spotted something completely unexpected, that none of the maps, trail descriptions or trip logs had mentioned: a towering, spectacular waterfall.
As impressed as I was by the waterfall, it was also disheartening. It blocked my way even more permanently than the debris pile below, so there was clearly something wrong with my belief that the trail led up this canyon to a set of switchbacks. Unless I could find those switchbacks somewhere at the base of the slopes to either side of the waterfall.
But after another hour or so of exploring and scrambling up the very steep slopes on what always turned out to be dead-end game trails, I realized I was beaten. It wasn’t even that late in the day, but without a map, I had no idea where else to look for the trail. This upper part of the mountainside consists primarily of cliffs, so there wasn’t even an obvious place to start looking.
Clambering perilously back over the moraine, I found the pink-ribboned trail that had brought me there, and decided to follow it back down the canyon as far as possible. It quickly led me back out onto the lower part of the moraine, at the junction of creeks, and from there I crossed and climbed up onto the orphaned segment of the old road.
My way back down the canyon was easier, though, because now I knew that the old road had stuck to the west side in this upper stretch, and when the road itself was eroded away, I carefully traversed the steep, loose dirt of the slope high above the raging creek until the road reappeared ahead.
Halfway down the canyon, I heard thunder behind me, and looked up to see a mass of dark clouds above the ridge to the west. I figured I was okay as long as it stayed over there. But if the storm drifted over the head of my canyon, there could be trouble. A flash flood would block my way back to my vehicle, at least until it had run out. In the worst case, there could be another apocalyptic reshuffling of the canyon, with me in it.
When I finally emerged from the mouth of the canyon, with the big valley stretching below me to the far horizon, I looked back to see that rain had indeed engulfed the head of Grant Creek, several miles up the canyon below the crest of the range. I still had a mile to go to the creek crossing, and the flood waters from that rain would surely beat me there. I was likely to get cut off!
My chronic foot injury doesn’t allow me to run a mile, so I just kept striding down the old road. About halfway to the crossing the road rose above the bajada and I heard a roaring, like a locomotive, off in the direction of the creek. It was in flood! What would I find at the crossing?
But when I got there, the creek looked the same as it had in the morning, 7 hours ago. I crossed easily, and from my vehicle, I looked back to see that the storm over the mountains had already cleared. I realized that although my original plan of climbing to the crest had failed, I had discovered a beautiful, unexpected waterfall, and I’d been lucky to escape a storm. My body was thrashed from all that climbing over logs and boulders, but maybe it had been worth it after all.
In recent years, I’ve hiked many burn scars high up on peaks and ridges. On this trip, I was challenged to experience the damage caused by erosion and flooding down below, after the alpine forests that hold the mountains together are burned off of the heights. I have the feeling that my education is just beginning…
As I’ve said over and over, the monsoon is the best season of the year here in the Southwest, and the sky rewarded me with an endless pageant on the drive home. The icing on the cake was my discovery that we’d had a good storm there while I was gone.
A quick check of the trail map on the Arizona hiking website revealed that despite my delusion, the actual trail doesn’t turn east up the Grant Creek canyon. It continues due north along Post Creek, and the switchbacks start about halfway up, on the east bank about a mile beyond the junction. Since most of the erosional damage seems to have occurred on Grant Creek, I might well have been able to relocate the trail and proceed to the crest if I’d simply brought a map with me. Maybe next time…
Friday, December 23rd, 2022: 2022 Trips, Grant, Hikes, Pinalenos, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Southeast Arizona.
Three and a half years ago, I tried to hike this canyon without a map, and ended up mistakenly scrambling up a three-mile-long pile of giant logs and boulders, enticed by pink ribbons that turned out to have nothing to do with the actual trail, and almost losing my mind.
I did reach a spectacular waterfall, but was left with a powerful yearning to come back some day and find a less maddening route all the way up this canyon to the crest of the range. It would be a route that’s unique in taking you from high desert, through Southwest riparian habitat, to alpine fir forest at 9,000′, with massive rock formations and views across the landscape on your way.
One reason I got in trouble in 2019 was that floods had washed out part of the lower trail, and I could find no information on how or whether I could reconnect with the upper part. Being well-watered this canyon is dense with vegetation as well as boulders – it’s a jungle where it’s easy to go astray – and there was no record of anyone using this trail since 2015, two years before the big wildfire that led to the flood damage. It’s a remote and challenging trail that likely never saw much use anyway.
But when planning this trip I revisited the crowd-sourced page for this trail and found that a group had hiked it in September, claiming it had been rebuilt by a trail crew and was now clear and easy to follow.
I’d driven the access road twice before – it’s a very rocky high-clearance-only path roughly bulldozed up the alluvial fan behind the state prison, to the creek crossing, about a mile below the mouth of the canyon. On both previous visits, the creek crossing had been flooded to over a foot deep and blocked by 18″ tall boulders, so I was assuming I’d again have to park at the crossing, find a log to cross the raging creek on, and walk the rest of the way up the old road on the opposite side.
With a perennial stream, this canyon has always been attractive to miners, ranchers, the military, and prison developers. The map shows the dirt road continuing up two miles past the mouth of the canyon, making two more creek crossings in the process. At least two different water pipelines were laid down the canyon in the past – an old buried iron pipe, and an elevated PVC pipe which formerly supplied the prison. But even before the wildfire, floods damaged both the pipelines and the upper part of the road. Now you find broken 20-foot lengths of 8″ PVC pipe stuck in trees and protruding from boulder piles.
Following the road and trail as shown on the map, from the first creek crossing to the crest road, would be 6-1/2 miles and over 4,000′ of accumulated elevation gain, so I was expecting a long, challenging day, and hit the road over an hour earlier than usual. But when I reached the creek crossing, the water was less than 8″ deep and was clear of boulders. So I drove across and continued to just before the mouth of the canyon, where there’s a turnout. Now the hike I was planning would be two miles shorter, round-trip, and I should have plenty of time!
Since the lower part of the trail follows the old road, it’s always interesting to see how drivable that road is, and how far people have made it up recently. With floods, this canyon has regularly been conveying the top of the mountain down from time immemorial, and the top of the mountain surrounds you all the way up, in the form of white boulders that fill the creekbed and have been bulldozed into rows beside the road.
It was below freezing, and even here at 5,500′, little patches of snow hung on in the shadow of boulders. Entering the mouth of the canyon, I was glad I’d parked where I did – what was left of the old road needed higher clearance than I’m comfortable with. But tracks showed that a bigger truck had recently been up here. And someone had been collecting sections of the old PVC pipe and stacking them alongside the road, presumably to haul out at some point. It would be an even more beautiful canyon without the ruins.
I started making noise as soon as I entered the riparian forest, to alert bears. I’d encountered a black bear here on my last visit, and this range is reported to have the highest density of bears in North America.
Before long I came upon a flock of 7 wild turkeys. And a little farther, a boulder I figured would stop even the biggest truck. But no, some macho dude had made it over that, all the way to the next creek crossing, where there’s a graded turnaround, since no vehicle on earth can cross at that point now.
After a little deliberation and searching for sticks, I crossed the roaring creek on a thin, sinuous fallen tree trunk I expected to flip on me at any time and dump me in the ice-cold water (it’s all snowmelt). A few dozen yards from the bank, the old road reappeared, rockier than ever. And a few hundred yards up canyon, I came to the third creek crossing, which was both easier and more dangerous.
That third crossing was probably where I got lost before. But on the other side, after climbing over a towering tangle of logs and branches, I found a series of faded pink ribbons which actually led me through a thicket and back to a surviving segment of the old road. From there, it was a straightforward “walk in the forest” until I reached the next flood washout.
I’d never found this route on my previous attempt, but at the washout, another pink ribbon beckoned me up the left bank, where a faint trail bypassed the washout, climbing high above the creek, and back down, to rejoin the next surviving segment of the old road.
Rounding the base of a boulder, I came upon a rock alignment – again, something I hadn’t encountered on my previous visit. The rocks showed a branching of the trail, and a marker post with an arrow directing hikers toward the first waterfall, partway up the opposite side of the canyon. Apparently that’s the destination of most visitors here.
Continuing on the left branch, I reached the original end of the road, at the base of the massive boulder pile. There, two tributaries come together to form the lower creek, and that would be my moment of truth, since that’s where the old trail had been completely washed out.
Back in 2019, after wasting over an hour scrambling over flood debris in the lower canyon, I had finally relocated the road and reached this point. I hadn’t seen evidence of a trail continuing on this side of the creek, but I saw a pink ribbon in the trees across the base of the boulder pile, so I clambered across and went that way, which led eventually, with utmost difficulty and increasing desperation, to the waterfall.
Now, however, I spent more time scouting, and finally noticed a pink ribbon hanging from a tree, straight up the left bank from the washout, and some disturbed ground that might have been a faint game trail. I decided to go up there – it was about a 40% grade – and continuing, found what was obviously a new trail bypassing the old one that had been washed out. It was very narrow and very precarious, climbing 50-60 feet above the creek, skirting the vertical bank in places. But eventually it led to the original trail, which followed the left-hand tributary. What a relief to avoid that apocalyptic debris flow!
This tributary canyon was narrow, and on the left side, the trail was forced to wind back and forth between big boulders at the base of a cliff. Rounding one huge boulder, I surprised a small troop of coatis. And I finally came upon a small, very old pile of bear scat – the first I’d seen so far. So much for all my noisemaking to warn away bears!
And at last, I came to the final creek crossing, beyond which I hoped to find my trail to the crest.
Since this tributary was smaller than the lower creek, it was easier to cross. But the old trail had been blocked by debris on the other side, and I found another narrow, precarious bypass that again took me 50-60 feet above the creek and involved climbing over deadfall and boulders. It had become obvious that the September hikers had been exaggerating – this trail had hardly been rebuilt, let alone cleared. The best you could say is that an expert can find a route.
Now I was in deep shade, where snow had collected up to 8 inches. But the trail to the crest consists of nearly 40 switchbacks climbing 2,200 vertical feet, and the slope they climb faces west. I figured every other switchback would have enough southern exposure to melt the snow, and I was right. All the way to the top, I faced only limited patches of snow, at most a hundred yards long.
But I had more immediate obstacles to get past: deadfall and overgrowth. Far from being rebuilt and cleared, the switchbacks were blocked again and again by deadfall logs and small, tough shrubs. And I began to suspect that the September hikers had lied about coming this way, when I kept finding old rotten trunks and branches blocking the trail that you would normally need to snap or toss aside in order to pass. Not just for yourself – removing obstacles is good manners, to improve the trail for the next visitors.
Eventually, I did come to a deadfall log across the trail showing a recently broken branch that someone had snapped in order to step over it. I concluded that the September hikers had been there after all, but generally preferred to go around obstacles rather than removing them. So I did my part by breaking branches and hauling small trees off the trail wherever possible.
The switchbacks seemed interminable, and I came to a few spots where tread disappeared completely and I had to scout a route before relocating the trail. But the reward was the view, which got better with each increase in elevation. Finally, on the last switchback, I got the full view south out of the main canyon, and shortly after that, I crossed the crest into the interior of the range. I’d done it – what I’d been dreaming of for years!
Unfortunately, that seemed to be the end. I’d expected to continue up this ridge about another mile, to the crest road, but the trail ended abruptly at a distinctive cairn, with nothing ahead but a maze of deadfall across a steep, overgrown slope.
I scouted and I scouted, finally returning to the cairn in dismay. I checked my map, which showed a tiny dogleg at this point. What if I just went straight up the slope?
That’s what I did – about a hundred feet, climbing over deadfall logs. And finally spotted the continuation of the trail, on the opposite side of yet another couple of deadfall logs.
In short order, that took me to the fairly level top of the ridge, partly forested, holding deeper snow, where I had glimpses of the high peaks of the range, arrayed to north and east.
I knew I’d only gone about 5 miles so far, and it’d taken me 5 hours. I hoped to go faster on the way down, but I was still surprised at how much slower I was hiking on this trip. In any event, I was now where I wanted to be – on top of the world. I had no need to go any farther – only to reach the crest road – and I didn’t want to rush on my way back.
Going down those switchbacks was so much easier! I’d achieved my goal of reaching the crest, and despite all the obstacles, I decided the condition of this trail is just right for me, as is. Enough ambiguity, deadfall and overgrowth to make it a challenge without making it a bummer. Yes, I benefited from a few pink ribbons, for which I’m grateful – but they could’ve been put up any time in the past couple of decades. Wild animals are now keeping it open and maintaining tread – no human workers needed.
And in the canyon bottom, I encountered what I assume was the same troop of coatis. This time I could see at least one was a juvenile, and while the others hid, the biggest adult perched on a boulder above and chuffed at me for a while.
One thing I noticed on the way up, but puzzled over on the way down – the soil of the trail in the tributary canyon bottom was “turned” as if with a plow – like walking in mashed potatoes – with frequent deep holes like large hoof prints, but at random, without any identifiable pattern. It was another thing that slowed me down, and I still couldn’t figure out what caused it.
It was only later that I realized it must be the coatis that were causing that – they apparently both consume leaf litter and dig in soil for invertebrates, hence their long, flexible snouts.
Returning those 5 miles, with many stops, took 3 hours. But at sunset, what should I find at my vehicle, but a big black bull?
Some may remember my past experiences with bulls in the wild – being followed, chased, and charged. But I was tired, and it was getting dark, and my vehicle was right there. Standing behind a barrier of brush, I yelled and clapped my hands, but the bull ignored me. So I emerged in the clearing, and still yelling, walked past the bull to my vehicle. It moved off a little and stood watching to see what I would do. So far, so good!
This was a first for me. I unloaded my gear and got in the Sidekick, while the bull stood like a statue, never making a threatening move. If only they could all be so placid!
Monday, September 18th, 2023: Grant, Hikes, Pinalenos, Southeast Arizona.
Expecting cooler temperatures even in the lower, hotter mountain ranges across the border in Arizona, I finally enjoyed an abundance of choices for this Sunday’s hike. But when I reviewed the latest trip reports from the range I was missing the most, I was surprised to find that a trail that had stopped me more than four years ago had been cleared last fall, by convicts from the nearby state prison.
This trail climbs a ridge above the spectacular canyon that I finally hiked last December, before our snowpack got too deep. Both hikes lead to the 9,000 foot crest, but the ridge trail is actually longer – my mapping app shows it at six miles one-way, 12 miles out and back, topping out at 9,341 feet, accumulating just over 4,000 feet of elevation gain.
It’s a two-and-a-half hour drive, but I would leave early and gain an hour crossing the state line, so I hoped to start at the same time I usually begin local hikes. Unfortunately, the mountain range is compromised by the prison below and the giant astrophysical observatory that dominates the skyline above. Plus, while most of my favorite hikes end in wilderness, far from any road, this trail’s destination is a campground along the road that follows the crest. But the views, rock formations, habitat, and prolific wildlife more than make up for those deficits.
It’s designated a “Wilderness Study Area”, so the entire range is open to cattle, but they have such lush forage at low elevation that they seldom venture onto the slopes. After our hot, dry summer, the perennial creek was running at an all-time low, so I was able to ford it and drive the deeply eroded forest road, in low range 4wd, all the way to the mouth of the canyon. There, I chased a cow and her calf out from under the only shaded parking spot.
The old road continues over boulders and bedrock about a quarter mile upcanyon to the trailhead. Someone had stolen the trail sign, but as predicted, the trail itself was much easier to follow. I found fresh boot prints in the first hundred yards, but whoever had started out soon turned back. It appeared that I was the first to take on this trail since at least last spring, if not since last fall.
The trail climbs steeply to the ridge top, revealing a view of the big canyon on your right and the crest with its boxlike Large Binocular Telescope. The trail surface alternated between bare gravel, bedrock, and grass, and I was soon sweating and overheating, realizing that almost the entire route is exposed to the sun. Temperatures may have dropped across the region, but I’d picked the hottest trail possible.
Not only was it hot, it was a continuous climb, at a grade that started at 15 percent and got progressively steeper. I was still out of shape relative to previous years, resulting in a lot of stops to catch my breath and mop the sweat off my face. Thankfully the flies mostly left me alone up on that dry ridge.
In one mercifully shady stretch I found a plaque commemorating last year’s convict work party.
This outlying ridge ascends to the crest by means of a series of small peaks, and as the trail reaches the foot of each one, it becomes a seemingly interminable series of switchbacks. These make the climb possible, but they also make it longer!
Past the gate with the convict plaque, the trail got harder to follow – it seems like they focused their work on the lower third of the trail. As usual, I rejoiced when I first encountered ponderosa pines, but the rocky terrain prevented them from establishing enough forest cover to cool me off. The air temperature wasn’t bad – it was the solar heating that was killing me.
As each of the ridge’s intervening peaks loomed in front of me, I was hoping it would be the last one before the crest. But again and again, I was disappointed, and began wondering if I really had it in me to finish the climb.
Finally, I found myself on the last series of switchbacks ascending to the crest. Here I had to climb over or around many deadfall logs and branches – it seemed that the convicts hadn’t made it this far, but someone had stuck little flags in the ground, many years ago, which usually indicates trail work planned but not yet accomplished.
The last switchback summited the crest and entered a burn scar colonized by aspen seedlings and thorny locust. But now, between me and the crest plateau, I faced a long, narrow ridge of rocky ground, like a bridge, broken up into more little peaks. To cross this bridge I would have to ascend and descend each intervening peak. My map showed that after that hot, brutal climb, I still had almost a mile and a half of this to go. I couldn’t believe the entire trail is only six miles long!
The lizard population up here was exploding. It seemed like there were up to three lizards per square yard, including multiple species and sizes, and they were often hanging out together. I’d never seen anything like it.
The hike across the bridge involved even more obstacles and even steeper climbs, but I was determined to finish this damn hike, even if it meant limping back in the dark.
The Forest Service recommends hiking these trails downward from the crest, so I was watching every patch of bare ground for footprints. I still didn’t find any until I reached a fairly level stretch, where intact forest returned, only a quarter mile from the end. Apparently this trail is just too daunting for everyone but me.
A lovely patch of spruce-fir forest awaited me at the end, but that last quarter mile still felt endless. The ascent had taken me more than five hours, and the Forest Service sign at the upper trailhead contradicted the distances shown on my mapping platform. I had my pick of total distances for this hike, ranging from twelve to fifteen miles! My best estimate was thirteen and a half.
Using nothing but my deteriorating body, I’d climbed all the way from arid mesquite scrub at 5,500 feet, to alpine spruce-fir forest at 9,300 feet. Alternatively, you could drive from the highway on the north side of the range to this campground on the crest. It wasn’t wilderness, but it was empty, quiet, and peaceful.
I knew from past experience that the crest of this range is a cool mecca for summer recreationists from Tuscon and Phoenix, but assumed this tiny spot was on a spur road far from the crowds. It was only after I checked the map later that I realized the ranger station had been only a fifteen minute walk away!
It was so pretty, and so cool, up there that I wanted to stay. But the climb had taken so long that I didn’t have much time left to rest. I was dreading the descent – my foot was already hurting and it would only get worse. My knees were complaining too, and I still had an ankle strain left over from a couple weeks ago. Combine a 4,000 foot descent with a steep, rocky trail, and you have a recipe for a lot of pain.
But if you could ignore the telescope above and the prison below, it remained a beautiful landscape, and once the pain pill took effect I was really glad I’d come.
Moving as fast as I could, it took me just over three hours to get back to the vehicle. I’d booked a cheap motel room, but that was well over an hour away. A comedy of errors followed, delaying my dinner until 9 pm, and bedtime until 10.
I’d logged a GPS waypoint at the top of the trail, but when I checked it on the map the next day, the satellite turned out to be off by 200 yards, locating me across a broad drainage on the opposite slope. The error may have been due to forest cover, but could’ve been troubling if I’d been sending an SOS to the wrong location.
