Burro Mountains
Monday, January 6th, 2020: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
Deep snow on the mountains means I can’t hike my usual trails that go higher than 8,000′. I needed to find something at lower elevation. I decided to hike a forest road that starts at 6,000′ and climbs to an 8,000′ peak. I’ve climbed this peak many times from the opposite direction, which is much easier, but I couldn’t reach that end because of snow on the road.
This road quickly climbs several hundred feet to provide a view to the west. Looking up toward the peak I was approaching, I saw two golden eagles. This is the fifth weekend in a row that I’ve seen golden eagles!
Midway up the road reaches the ponderosa pine forest, and traverses the shallow valley of a stream, which is dry most of the year. Then the road starts climbing again, and is very steep the rest of the way.
Unfortunately the peak is covered with towers which provide our local TV, radio, and cell phone service.
A hundred yards below the peak I encountered a big pickup truck with a young couple, coming up the road in the snow. They were the first people to drive up this road since the last snow. It’s barely driveable with 4WD.
We smiled and waved at each other, and hours later, near the bottom, they passed me on their way down. They were probably thinking, what a crazy guy to walk up this road instead of driving. I was thinking, what lazy people to drive up the road instead of walking.
Near the bottom, I turned back and saw the moon rising in the east.
Sunday, December 18th, 2022: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
This will be a short one. I’m planning some hikes over in Arizona in the coming week, so I didn’t want to drive far or use up a lot of energy today. I picked a segment of the Continental Divide Trail just south of town, starting at just under 6,400′ near the highway and climbing a ridge to a series of modest 8,000′ peaks. I’ve done versions of this hike several times in the past, and I expected quite a bit of snow up there from the past week’s little storm. I thought it might be good practice for Arizona, where I expected even more snow.
The day was forecast to be cloudy, starting in the high 20s. I didn’t expect it to snow. Since the drive was short, I got an earlier start than usual. Low clouds made it a dark day, and I was all bundled up, wearing my old insulated ski gloves.
After climbing through a maze of rocky foothills dotted with pinyon, juniper, and oak, the trail reaches the ridgetop and the ponderosa pine forest. Farther up the ridge, approaching the first peak, the trail meets a dirt forest road that services communications towers. In the past, the trail continued up the road to the peak, then dropped to a saddle before climbing to the second peak. But when I reached the road, I discovered that the trail has been re-routed around the west side of the peak to the saddle, so I went that way, and that was where I found the most snow, averaging about 6 inches but with drifts up to a foot deep. Boot tracks showed that another man had climbed up there in the past couple of days, but he’d turned back without reaching the saddle. I continued to the saddle and up to the second peak in virgin powder, and it started snowing pretty good after I reached the second peak.
That’s a windy spot, and the snow was blowing sideways, often in my face. But I generally love being in mountains in snow, and today was no exception. Snow makes everything magical, and I found it really exhilarating, especially after more started falling. I returned to the saddle and found my own route up to the first peak, and from there, continued down the road to the trail junction. It snowed for about an hour, then the sky tried to clear, but it was snowing again by the time I dropped from the ridge back into the foothills. What a wonderful opportunity!
Tuesday, January 24th, 2023: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Problems & Solutions, Society, Southwest New Mexico.
My headache had been so bad on Saturday, I didn’t expect to hike on Sunday, and turned off my alarm before going to bed. But I woke up feeling good for a change and took a leisurely approach to deciding where to go. I couldn’t do any of my usual hikes because of deep snow, flooded creeks, or deep mud, and exertion was making the headaches worse so I wanted something without a lot of elevation gain. And it was getting too late for a long drive so I also needed something close to town.
I decided to check out a segment of the national divide trail, a little farther south, which I believed would be completely unused this time of year. I’d never been there and wasn’t even sure there would be a recognizable trailhead, but I printed a topo map, bundled up, and headed out into sub-freezing temps under a clear blue sky.
This would be a meandering route through open woodland across a rumpled basin, a maze of low hills and shallow drainages between 6,000′ and 6,400′, trending north toward the small mountain range southwest of town that I’ve climbed over a hundred times in my short midweek hikes. I was starting where the national trail crosses the highway south, and at best, if conditions were really good and my headache didn’t intervene, I might make it the entire 8 miles to the popular trailhead at the foot of the mountains. I knew it wouldn’t be a spectacular hike but I expected to make good time and hoped to achieve more mileage than in all the difficult snow hikes of the past two months.
This segment of trail crosses multiple cattle grazing allotments, encountering gate after gate, and several dirt roads used by ranchers and off-road enthusiasts. I began to notice mountain bike tracks during the first couple of miles, which makes sense, because even competitive mountain bikers seem to do most of their riding on gentle trails.
About two miles in, I heard voices behind me, then a whirring sound, and stepped aside to let a biking couple ride past, followed by their dog. They appeared roughly my age, were overdressed for the weather, and were riding slow, hence the dog had no trouble keeping up. I’d never seen adult mountain bikers ride so slow, and while I was friendly as usual, I was sorry they had to haul these expensive, resource-intensive machines out, further distancing themselves from nature, instead of using the feet they were born with.
I encountered them again, returning, shortly before reaching the graded forest road at the midpoint of my hike. They had stopped to chat with a male hiker, also our age, who was heading up the trail with his dog. We all agreed this trail had suddenly become popular because it remained snow-free and less muddy than others near town. Having caught up with the single guy, I knew I was faster than him, so I continued up the trail, observing to myself that no one can seem to do anything anymore without a dog by their side.
When I reached the graded road I saw the male hiker’s car, a new Honda SUV. On this 8-mile segment of trail, he was only walking 2 or 3 miles total, and the mountain bikers were doing about 8 miles out and back, which is nothing for a bike, but is a decent workout for a dog. This jibes with my experience of dog people. With few exceptions, when you own a dog, your main priority is not to stay fit or experience wild nature. Dog people may say they’re going for a hike, but what they really mean is that they’re obligated to walk the dog(s), ideally for a half hour a day, and they seldom go farther on foot than 2 or 3 miles.
Once past the graded forest road, the trail begins a gentle climb into the foothills of the low mountain range. A mile or so past the road I approached another gate with a middle-aged woman on a horse and two more dogs. The dogs ran to meet me, and the woman waited for me to open the gate for her. She said she was trying to train a “new horse” and it wouldn’t carry her close enough to open the gate from the saddle. Of course getting off the horse would be too much trouble, I thought to myself. But I’m always nice to strangers as long as they’re nice to me.
After letting them through I kept climbing until I came out on a series of broad, heavily grazed grassy ledges overlooking dozens of miles of alluvial landscape to the east, punctuated by low hills and bounded by distant ranges. I’d been diligent about hydrating and realized I was running low on water, despite having plenty of time to reach the next trailhead. I normally bring 3 liters in winter, but had packed only 2 this morning, with the idea of a shorter hike, before deciding on this trail. I hated to turn back now, when I could practically see the trailhead only a mile or so away across the foothills, but dehydration would definitely bring my headache back, so I just went another quarter mile, then reluctantly turned around.
I hadn’t gone too far back before meeting the equestrienne and her entourage of pets. She’d started at the northern trailhead, and like the male hiker I’d met earlier, she was only doing about a 3 mile round-trip. As is typical, I was the only serious trail user among the whole day’s crowd.
Returning, I walked slower and paid more attention to habitat. The maze-like basin south of the foothills was just high enough for a few pinyon, but consisted mostly of open juniper-oak woodland with bunchgrasses, beargrass, and various shrubs in between. I remained frustrated to be unable to do the full distance, but was grateful my headache hadn’t returned. It was an easy hike I wouldn’t be anxious to revisit, but it’s always interesting to see a familiar landscape from a slightly different vantage point.
Two miles from my vehicle I came upon yet another party, a couple my age, this time with two obviously expensive purebred dogs, one a big shaggy wolfhound. They struggled to restrain the dogs as I passed. Like I said, I’m always friendly, but after passing them I’d exhausted my tolerance for pet owners.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, pets were for kids, in affluent or midde class families. Working class families couldn’t afford pets. The lifespan of cats, dogs, and horses is how long it takes humans to become adults, so as you became an adult, you left your pet behind. Childless adults, and parents whose kids had grown up, did not have pets.
In subsequent decades, as capitalism and technology increasingly fragmented human communities and isolated individuals, turning social services into commodities, individuals became lonelier, more vulnerable, in need of companionship their dwindling human relationships couldn’t provide. With the advent of social media in the new millenium, childless, socially isolated adults acquired pets in order to share and get “likes” from distant people called “friends” that they could only interact with digitally.
But social media can’t fully explain the epidemic of pet ownership among adults. Why do most childless adults now own pets, whereas virtually none did when I was a child?
The most common answer I’ve heard is that “I’ve always had one”. But this is simply acknowledging a habit you can’t control, like smoking cigarettes or drinking yourself into a stupor every night. To me, it suggests that in some sense, you never grew up – when you reached the age of adulthood and your childhood pet died, you simply got another one, clinging to that juvenile master-slave relationship with animals.
It’s widely acknowledged that for childless or single adults, pets are acquired as surrogate children or “living plush toys” – something to cuddle since you lack a human companion. The latter clearly shows the infantile nature of much pet ownership.
Mental health authorities commonly claim that pet ownership improves the individual’s mental health. But the anthropocentric and individualistic nature of our culture ensures that these specialists remain ignorant of the broader context, the root causes of social isolation and the ecological and sociological impacts of pet ownership. According to a recent Forbes survey, 78% of pet owners acquired their pets during the COVID pandemic.
Pet owners love to claim that they’re “animal lovers”, when all they really are is pet lovers. On today’s 12-mile hike through mostly wild, native habitat, I encountered 6 people with 7 pets, 840 lbs of humans with 1,230 lbs of pets. These people obviously consider themselves nature lovers, but by taking their pets into nature they reduce their opportunities for encountering wildlife, since their pets either scare wild animals away or actively chase them.
Geographically and ecologically, both humans and their domestic animals displace wildlife, taking resources away from wildlife, damaging and destroying native habitats and hastening the extinction of wild species. I’m sure all the trail users I encountered consider themselves conservationists or even environmentalists, but in reality, as a group, they’re increasing their consumption of natural resources by 150% through the practice of pet ownership.
Most of the world is inhabited by poor people who can’t take proper care of their pets. Dogs and cats roam semi-wild, eating garbage and human feces. But the U.S. is also failing to control its pets. According to some sources, the U.S. has about 60 million indoor cats and 70 million feral cats. Almost 80 million dogs and over 9 million equines, 300,000 of which are feral. On a societal level, pet ownership is clearly ecologically irresponsible.
The devastation of pet ownership isn’t just ecological, it’s also social. Affluent pet owners live in social bubbles where everyone has the luxury to observe the social compact. Cats don’t kill songbirds, dogs don’t bark or chase strangers. But it’s very different in working-class communities like mine. Working-class families now own pets, but can’t take responsibility for them. Cats and dogs run wild through neighborhoods, the nights are a cacophony of barks and sirens.
And it’s not completely true that affluent pet owners observe the social compact. The pet industry has trained affluent consumers to favor so-called “rescue” animals – a marketing euphemism for shelter animals, which is in turn a marketing euphemism for strays. These animals are largely untrainable, so now, their affluent owners increasingly enable their anti-social behavior.
When I encounter old friends I haven’t seen in years, I want to hug them. But if they’re a dog owner, the untrained rescue dog always precedes them – to me, it’s like they’re thrusting their animal at me. Instead of my friends reaching to hug me, the first thing I get is their dog jumping at my chest, soiling my clothes. Would you let your child kick a friend in the chest?
Sunday, February 19th, 2023: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
I was finally out of options. We’d had more snow in the past week, and more freezing weather. Rain was forecast for this Sunday, and more snow in the coming week.
There was literally only one hike on my list that might still be relatively free of flooded creeks, deep snow, and mud. I’d left it for last because the trail meanders through rolling mid-elevation pinyon-juniper-oak woodland just south of town, crisscrossed by ranch roads and grazed by cattle.
It was warmer in the morning – in the 40s – but I layered up with all my rain gear, and a light rain began as I headed off the paved highway toward the low mountains.
This would start like one of my regular midweek hikes – a route that’s one of my secrets, known to few others. I would take an unmaintained, high-clearance dirt forest road up a plateau mostly deforested by firewood cutters, leaving my vehicle in a little surviving stand of Emory oaks. From there I would walk up the deeply eroded road to where it dead-ends at the foot of a low peak, and from there I would take a short spur trail to where a seldom-used segment of the national trail skirts the base of the peak on its way north. I intended to follow the trail north for 7 or 8 miles.
But as soon as the dirt road entered the woodland, I unexpectedly found it under 4 to 6 inches of snow. Nobody had been up here, either on foot or by vehicle. The road climbs, and the snow got deeper.
The spur trail was doable, but when I reached the national trail my boots sank into snow over a foot deep. I hadn’t brought my gaiters, but even if I had, I was fed up with hiking through snow at this point. I made it about another hundred yards, but it was still getting deeper so I gave up, after only a mile and a quarter of hiking.
Why hadn’t I anticipated this? When I got home I realized that when choosing a hike, I’d glanced at the wrong line item on my list of routes. I thought this route topped out at 6,500′, which should’ve been snow-free, but that traverse across the base of the peak was actually 7,300′, and that additional 800′ made all the difference.
The result is that I now have no options left. This might be my last hike in a while!
After all, there’s no natural law that says humans should have access to nature at all times.
