McKnight
Monday, July 3rd, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
I’d waited six weeks to be able to do a real hike – probably the longest hiatus ever. Sure, I’d walked over 50 miles during that interlude, but mostly on level terrain in the Midwest and the canyons of Utah. For my return to serious hiking, I didn’t want to overdo it at first, but I also wanted something interesting.
Since last winter, I’d been trying to find a way to the crest of the northern part of the long north-south mountain range east of here. I’d avoided that area in past years because the west side of the range consists of dozens of long east-west ridges divided by deep, narrow canyons. It’s anomalous topography; most ranges in the West are block-faulted (tilted), with a steep face on one side and a gentle rise on the other. The west side of this range is elevated and almost level, more like a high tableland cut over time by myriad parallel streams.
The canyons are generally too narrow to support roads, but a few of the east-west ridges are relatively flat on top – finger-like mesas – and dirt forest roads have been graded up these, occasionally all the way to the 10,000 foot crest. Hence most of the west side – the only side accessible to me – was left out of the wilderness area, and is still grazed by cattle.
The plus side of these roads is that theoretically, they offer access to high-elevation trails. But this range has also been deforested by two successive mega-wildfires, and I’m discovering, hike by hike, that the trails I hoped to follow to the crest have mostly been obliterated by erosion, deadfall, shrubby regrowth, and general disuse. Their remoteness has always made them less popular, hence they’ve been omitted from recent trail work. Like most trails in this new fire regime, they’re listed as “Open” on the Forest Service trail guide, but they’re essentially abandoned and increasingly impassable.
Today’s goal was an area near the high point of the range, where one of these “mesa” roads leads to the junction of two creeks, with trails leading up each of them to the crest trail, so that I could potentially do a loop, ascending one canyon, hiking a little over a mile on the crest trail, then descending the other canyon. It would be a total of 13 miles and 2,700 feet of elevation gain – an easy day hike by the numbers. But I had no idea what condition I would find the road or the trails in, and unusually, there was no recent information online. The last trip report dated from 2011, before the first big wildfire.
I’d tried to take this road in early April, but it starts with a river crossing that had been flooded then from snowmelt. Today I found the channel only about six inches deep, but past the crossing, the road becomes surprisingly rough and rocky as it climbs steeply to the mesa. My 4wd Sidekick needs work so I was driving my little 2wd truck, and I was really worried about how it would do on this unfamiliar road.
About 8 miles up the gently rolling mesa, the road begins traversing steeply down into the narrow canyon on its right, and here’s where the drive became really exciting. It’s a narrow high-clearance section over jagged bedrock – with a virtually sheer drop-off, hundreds of feet to the canyon bottom, at right – and the farther down I went, the more worried I was about my little truck being able to climb back out of it. Finally I reached the fork that led down to the creek, and a hundred feet down that I came to a steep section of white clay with deep erosional ruts I knew the truck couldn’t handle. But when I tried to back up the shallower slope to the landing at the fork, I immediately lost traction – the driving wheels are in the back while most of the weight is in the front.
I’ve been in this situation many times, and after blowing tires repeatedly on rough roads, I recently installed all-terrain tires, so with a little tricky maneuvering I managed to get back to the landing, where I parked, shouldered my backpack, and set out walking down the steep forest road.
I’d awakened this morning with a profound sense of impending doom, something that occurs regularly as part of my anxiety syndrome, and worrying about my truck and the road put me in a pretty black mood, but I expected the hike to cure that. I wasn’t sure of the elevation here – probably in the low 7,000s – but I was surrounded with beautiful, intact alpine mixed-conifer forest. I’d packed for weather in the 90s, but here and now it was in the high 60s and often shaded by drifting, partial cloud cover.
However, I’d been immediately swarmed by little flies when I first got out of the vehicle, and before I’d walked a hundred yards I had to dig out my head net. It was going to be one of those days.
The road wound down through the forest onto the floodplain of an intermittent stream, where it got sandy and passed the ruins of a cabin and corral. Shortly after that, I came to a five-foot-deep sheer washout. Nobody was driving past that anymore.
After scrambling over a long debris field and rejoining another section of the old road, I came to the junction of the two creeks. What was left of the old road continued up the left branch, so I began searching for the trail that led up the right branch. I’d read that there was a trail sign here, but there was nothing remaining of it or the trail – apparently victims of catastrophic post-fire flooding.
Exploring along the left creek, I eventually noticed a shallow dip in its bank, with a matching vague dip in the opposite bank. I crossed and headed up the far bank, where I found no trail, but continuing across a meadow, noticed the slightest sign of an old road cresting a rise, overgrown and littered with boulders. This beginning would set the tone for the rest of my hike.
This narrow side canyon had mostly intact forest in its lower part, but it had experienced serious flooding and erosion. Instead of a trail, I found remnants of an old road, most of which had been washed out, so that my hike alternated between stretches of climbing over and around deadfall on a gentle slope, and picking my way across debris flows and logjams in the creekbed. I found signs of cattle but they looked to be about a decade old. The creek was almost completely dry, but flies continued to swarm me.
It was slow going, and I soon gave up any hope of the 13-mile loop. I was looking for the first milestone, where the canyon would veer left and another “trail” would head straight over a low saddle. On the way, the slope at my right became a burn scar. I finally reached the left turn in the canyon, and saw the low saddle ahead, but I was bushwhacking at this point – I could see no trails anywhere. Then, squinting through charred snags in the canyon bottom, I thought I noticed a wooden sign on a dead tree trunk.
Like the abandoned cabins I occasionally find, this trail sign with no trails was a poignant reminder of how temporary our so-called “Anthropocene” really is. Everything we build is a future ruin.
A little more scouting revealed the scattered remains of a sign for the trail up the canyon. But before proceeding, I wanted to climb to the low saddle, hoping for a view into the next watershed. So I started bushwhacking up the drainage. It was a short climb, and in the saddle I found an actual trail and a cairn on the edge of the burn scar. This trail descends about five miles to a valley filled with spectacular white rock pinnacles I hiked to a few years ago.
Returning from the saddle, I found the remains of the old trail leading back down to within a hundred feet of the junction sign in the canyon bottom. It was so overgrown I hadn’t noticed it from below. Now I needed to find a way up the canyon.
The left slope was very steep and eroded, so I started bushwhacking up the right slope, where I soon found what appeared to be an old cattle trail, blocked often by deadfall. This trail, deeply pockmarked in loose dirt, climbed high above the creekbed, which was now flowing intermittently. In places, it even looked like the remains of a human trail, but I hadn’t seen human footprints anywhere all day, not even on the road.
The cattle trail descended to the creek, which was flowing over bedrock, and the intact forest ended. From here on it was all burn scar and dense regrowth, much of it thorny locust.
Rain clouds were massing over the head of the canyon as I picked my way up the creekbed, looking for more old cattle trails I could use to bypass debris piles and logjams. I often found one that would then disappear in a thicket of thorns or a mass of blowdown, but the deeply eroded creekbed had become impassable with flood debris and the right bank was too steep, so I had to keep fighting my way up the slightly more accessible left bank.
Eventually, after pushing through an especially nasty thicket of locust, I came upon what appeared to be a remnant of the old hiking trail. Now it was getting really dark, I heard thunder to the north, and before long it began raining. The old trail was often interrupted by erosion, deadfall, or blowdown, but it was still much better than fighting through thorns, and although thunder continued, the rain slackened by the time I reached a big level area at the head of the canyon.
Here, the map showed the trail veering left toward another low saddle. But the remnant of trail ended, so I simply headed off in what I thought was the right direction through low undergrowth and a maze of charred, fallen tree trunks. The level area continued for hundreds of yards. I finally saw the low saddle off to the left. The map showed the trail making a sharp right just below the saddle, then traversing the slope of the ridge that had been on my right while crossing the level area. This ridge would’ve been my route to the crest of the range, if I’d been able to make good time on an actual trail instead of routefinding and bushwhacking all day.
But at several points on this hike I’d thought to myself, this is just my kind of trail! My favorite kind of hiking is without a trail at all, but it’s hard to do that in densely vegetated habitat. A trail on the map suggests that there is a way to reach some interesting destination. And an abandoned trail makes finding that route a challenge – and potentially an adventure.
I could find no trace of the old trail anywhere below the saddle or on the slopes below the ridge. The ridge itself bore stands of intact forest but the forested slopes consisted of the earthen mounds and pits left by the roots of fallen trees, so traversing them was like walking across moguls on a ski run. I kept studying the topo map I’d brought, trying to guess where I was, but it was fairly low resolution – I was never sure exactly where I was on the slope.
Finally I reached the top of the ridge, where I faced a seemingly endless thicket of locust and ferns. It’d continued raining lightly on and off, and just as I started through the thicket the temperature dropped and thunder crashed nearby. I was on an exposed ridge in a thunderstorm, just inviting a lightning strike, but there was nothing to be done about it.
It was almost time for me to be turning back. I estimated I’d covered less than a third of the planned loop, and I hadn’t reached anything of interest that I could consider a satisfactory destination. But as the thicket got thicker, I found myself approaching some white rock outcrops, and behind them I sensed the saddle where my route would cross into the next watershed and begin its ascent to the crest.
Thunder crashing behind me, I pushed through the last of the thicket and found myself on a pretty little forested ledge surrounded by boulders, with a view of the crest in the east. I knew I was finally above 8,000 feet, but would later learn it was closer to 9,000. I’d found my destination, at the most dramatic moment of the day!
The storm was moving away by the time I left my little ledge and began retracing my route. After I traversed the level area below the ridge and rejoined the old trail, I found it easier to follow it and cattle trails all the way down the overgrown burn scar of the upper canyon. Easier to follow, but painful – an entire day of sidehilling in loose dirt in my more flexible dry-weather boots had been really hard on my problem foot, and I vowed yet again to add foot exercises to my weekly regimen.
The sky was clearing and the whole landscape was now so vivid I felt like I was tripping on acid.
The lower canyon was a different story. Although it was wider and often had an actual floodplain, it had been so torn up by flooding that I seemed to spend most of my time climbing through debris. Finally in the worst pile of logs and boulders I lost my balance and fell, bashing my elbow on a hidden rock. It was a pretty minor cut but surprisingly produced the most blood I’ve shed in these past five years of serious hiking. Especially considering that everyone warns me not to hike alone, and a friend fell off a cliff and died while hiking solo.
My anxiety returned and increased the closer I got to my vehicle. I mentally ran through the scenarios. If the truck wouldn’t make it, could I back it down to a wide spot? Walking up the ridge looking for a signal for my phone, or walking the nine miles to the nearest cabin, some of it in the dark, to call for rescue. Doubting whether AAA would send a tow truck out that marginal road. Spending the night in the truck – since I’d recently switched vehicles, I wasn’t carrying a sleeping bag.
But thanks to the new tires, the truck made it up the road – with a lot of hard bouncing.
Monday, July 17th, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
Thanks to the wonders of technology, everyone with their face glued to a screen knows the Southwest is experiencing a dangerous heat wave. Unfortunately, my regular high-elevation hot-weather hikes have become impractical due to forest loss, blowdown, regrowth, or flood damage – all except for the one I did last weekend. The temperature in town was forecast to reach 98, and without a storm to cool things off, I could expect temperatures in the mountains to reach the high 80s. I was almost ready to give up on this Sunday’s hike.
But I’ve done serious hikes in the desert in the high 90s – I’d feel like a real wimp if I let this heat wave whip me. I kept thinking about the beautiful, shady mixed-conifer forest at the start of the abandoned-trail hike I’d done two weeks ago. Another equally-abandoned canyon trail started from there, and even if it turned out to be a dud, at least I’d be in nature, and ten degrees less hot than at home.
There was absolutely no information available online – even before the mega-wildfires, this had apparently been an unpopular trail. Like its companion trail, it had been subjected to two wildfires in a decade, and I could expect deadfall, blowdown, deep washouts, boulder-strewn debris flows, logjams, and thickets of thorny locust. But I found the post-fire remediation map from last year’s fire, and it seemed there might be slightly less severe burn in this canyon, and hence more shade during a heat wave. On the map, it reaches the 9,000 foot crest in only five miles – if I was lucky, I might find significantly cooler weather up there.
I was driving my little 4wd this time, so I could make it down the steep, deeply-eroded, incredibly rocky approach road onto the 7,200 foot floodplain to park in the shade of the old-growth. There was a flood warning sign, but the catastrophic post-fire flooding had already occurred last fall, and I figured enough regrowth had occurred in the meantime to forestall anything like that now. A storm would actually be really welcome today, to cool things off.
I’d gotten a late start, and it was already too hot in the sun when I got out of the vehicle. The creek had shrunken to an occasional algae-choked trickle, but my friends the flies were still there, swarming my head net. I climbed across the debris flows, deep washouts, deadfall and blowdown of the old forest road to the junction of two canyons where I’d started the previous hike. Today’s hike would continue up what was left of the road – mostly nice and shady.
The Forest Service map shows this road ending after about another mile, where it climbs the right bank of the creek and the old trail begins, climbing about 200 feet up a slope to bypass a rocky narrows in the canyon. On the ground, the road had mostly been obliterated by catastrophic flooding and regrowth, but I was able to read and follow its traces, finally arriving at an overgrown clearing on the right bank.
Straight ahead was a little erosional gully that might be the remains of the trail, and when I pushed through shrubs on the easier left bank of the gully, I sensed the vaguest indication of an old cleared corridor climbing the slope. I climbed a hundred feet or so up a rounded shoulder, repeatedly checking the topo maps I’d brought. They were the highest resolution I could get, but still omitted most of the actual topography I was seeing on the ground, so I had a really hard time figuring out where I was.
But before the shoulder merged with the higher slope, in a place where there was no other surviving evidence of a trail, I suddenly came upon a big cairn. The map shows the trail making a left turn two hundred feet above the canyon bottom, and a cairn often indicates a turn or crossing point, but when I looked left, a little thicket blocked my way. So I continued up the slope, imagining I was following the ghost of a trail.
Just before the shoulder merged with the main slope, I did come to some kind of trail that approached a steep gully. But I couldn’t see its continuation on the opposite slope, so I kept climbing. It was now impossible to judge how high I was above the canyon bottom, and the map just wasn’t detailed enough. I climbed another fifty feet or so, before giving up and heading down the gully. There was no sign of a trail anywhere, so I just began laboriously sidehilling across the very steep slope in loose dirt.
Eventually I emerged high above the main canyon again, and came upon a path that was so nice I assumed it had to be the remains of the old hiking trail, now used only by game. The map showed it leading back down to the creek after a quarter mile, but suddenly it ended in a dense thicket of thorny locust. I spent another twenty minutes or so scouting for a route through, above, or below, finally giving up and heading straight down the slope toward the canyon bottom. That’s where I found another cairn, hidden behind a big blowdown log, and looking back saw the old hiking trail leading up the slope far below where I’d been hiking. Talk about trial and error – I’d used up almost an hour routefinding in only a half mile of terrain.
The canyon bottom was fairly narrow here, alternating between surviving sections of floodplain where there were faint game trails, and washed out sections where I had to walk in the creekbed. But within another quarter mile I came to another cairn, pointing to an overgrown corridor up the floodplain. I was really encouraged – I hadn’t found anything like this near the start of that other canyon hike.
It was still hot in the sun, without a whisper of wind, but there was enough surviving forest to offer intermittent shade. What remnants of trail I found were overgrown and only maintained by game, but I continued to find cairns every hundred yards or so – until I came to a badly burned basin where side canyons came in from left and right. This basin was filled with debris, including logjams I had to make long detours around.
The map shows a point where major side canyons come in from left and right, with the trail making a sharp left into one of them. But I didn’t think I’d gone far enough. There was nothing to do but laboriously climb through the long debris field. And once past it, I did see another cairn, all by itself out in the middle of the boulder pile.
From there, I found a route up the left bank, and re-entering forest, soon came to a steep side drainage where I spotted another cairn, high on the slope to my left. And below it, the faint trail I was following ended.
The map shows the trail climbing the left bank of this side canyon, but the cairn beckoned me up the right bank. There was so little evidence of a trail up there I had to imagine it, but the canyon turned out to be so narrow that I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
After the late start and all the routefinding and bushwhacking, I was running out of time. But this climb up a side canyon was the beginning of the ascent to the crest, so I was excited to keep going. And although I seldom had a clear trail to follow, I kept finding cairns – much better than the previous hike in this area.
After about a quarter mile, I came to the convergence of several side drainages, some of which didn’t show up on the map. There were two little cairns in the convergence, but they didn’t indicate which way to go. I guessed that my route should go up a little shoulder and began climbing it, through an open forest where I had to detour around a lot of deadfall. There was no evidence of a trail, but squinting up the slope I finally spotted another big cairn.
A second cairn above this one led me around a rocky narrows in the next drainage. I even found an old, sun-bleached ribbon tied to a burned snag. This whole hike was like successfully solving a puzzle, using familiar clues in an unfamiliar landscape. I’d wasted a lot of time on unsuccessful forays, but if I ever wanted to come back, I now knew enough to avoid those.
I came to another stopping point, where a big gully came down from the right, with a very steep and rocky slope on the opposite side and impassable thicket on my side. I was out of time, but studying the opposite slope closely, I thought I could see a couple of cairns way up there. I zoomed in with the camera so I could confirm them later.
Returning, when I reached sunny stretches in the main canyon I figured it had to be in the high 80s. So I took it easy, drank lots of water and used my electrolyte supplements.
A few big cumulus clouds had formed and drifted over at times, but unfortunately no storms. I’d started the day with two trays worth of ice cubes in my uninsulated water reservoir, and the water was still blissfully cold eight hours later. Even so, I was repeatedly paralyzed by bad leg cramps, and my foot was hurting even in my best hiking boots. A worrying development since last winter.
The county road that leads to this trail may be the rockiest in our entire region. There’s a little signpost along the scary traverse out of the canyon, commemorating a guy who drove off and bounced down hundreds of vertical feet, probably ending in a fireball, in 1980.
It’s not so bad in my pickup truck with its leaf springs, but in the stiffly-sprung little Sidekick it feels and sounds like World War Three. So I had to take much of the 8 miles at less than 10 mph, and it was a huge relief to reach the paved highway.
Checking the map at home, I found I’d made it to within a mile and a third of the 9,000 foot crest. Now I’m familiar with the route, if I start the day on time I can probably go all the way. But as I’ve found elsewhere, the route on the ground deviates significantly from routes, including GPS, shown in mapping databases. So there are no guarantees.
I’d gone 7.15 miles out and back, with little over 1,100 feet of elevation gain, in seven hours. A pretty pathetic pace and a far too easy hike by my usual standards. But not bad for a hike in a heat wave when people are probably dropping dead elsewhere in the Southwest.
Monday, September 11th, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
This weekend was forecast to feature what I hoped was the last of our seemingly endless Southwest heat wave. Ironically, Sunday, my hiking day, was forecast to reach 90 in town, while highs in the following week were predicted to drop into the 70s.
I’d already done all the high-elevation hikes in our area, except one – the crest hike that requires a two-hour drive and traverses a moonscape burn scar with hundreds of logs across the trail. I was grimly determined to deal with both the drive and the logs, when at the last minute I remembered another crest route – a route I’d never considered because it’s not wilderness, and most of it consists of a road instead of a trail. At this point, even if I didn’t get much hiking in, it would be worth it just to escape the heat.
This route is approached from the west side of the north-south range east of town. I’ve delayed exploring this area until the past six months, because all the hikes must be accessed via long drives up long ridges – “finger” mesas – on rocky roads. After several tries, I’d given up – none of the trails have been cleared in the wake of two mega-wildfires, one in 2013 and one in 2022, that burned almost the entire crest of the range.
At 10,020 feet elevation in the south half of this range, the second-tallest peak hosts an active fire lookout, and I’ve climbed that many times on what is probably the best-maintained trail in our area. But in the north half of the range, there’s actually a forest road that climbs to a cabin less than two miles from the 10,165 foot summit.
It’s almost 18 miles from the highway at 6,200 feet to the cabin at 9,500 feet. I’d driven the lower 9 miles twice – the last mile of it is over sharp ledges of bedrock with a sheer dropoff and is very nerve-wracking. The upper 9 miles is widely reported to be one of the most brutal roads in existence, completely undriveable without high clearance and low-range 4wd. Since I was looking for more hiking and less driving, my plan was to try to drive within 7 or 8 miles of the summit, but I didn’t even know if that would be possible with my vehicle.
Since the road follows the crest of the range and spends about three miles traversing a burn scar up there, I would be exposed for most of the hike. I wasn’t worried about sun, since there would likely be a breeze across the north-south crest, but we were forecast to get clouds in the afternoon, and although I hoped for rain, lightning would be a real concern.
The vertiginous upper road climbs over 2,000 feet in the first six miles, and it turned out to be barely driveable in low-range with my 9 inch ground clearance, as I slowly pushed the little vehicle up a seemingly endless series of sharp bedrock ledges. Including the easy stretches, I averaged about 6 miles per hour.
I did bash the undercarriage pretty good in one spot, but the payoff was the views. Approaching the crest, I was facing the highest points in the range across a wide canyon that had been burned to a moonscape. I was looking for a saddle with a surviving stand of conifers where I could park in the shade, and I finally found one, at the site of a SNOTEL – a snow telemetry site maintained by the National Weather Service.
From the snow telemetry installation, I had about a four-mile walk on the road to the cabin, followed by about two miles on a trail I was sure was unmaintained and overgrown. But first, I was curious about the junction with the northbound crest trail, a trail I’d hiked many times from the south, and tried to reach recently from a canyon that parallels this road, below on my right.
The first thing I noticed was wildflowers – they were probably peaking now at this elevation, helped by the little moisture we’d received in the past two weeks. Then I reached the trail junction. I suddenly realized that although I’d be walking a road, the road here is actually a segment of the crest trail. That made me feel better – I wasn’t choosing to walk the road, it was actually the only route available.
Since the trail junction marks the beginning of the crest, it also marks the crossing to the eastern watershed. This is a huge watershed in which three long creeks cross a broad basin to merge into one at the bottom. The surrounding ridges and slopes are topographically diverse, ranging from cliffs and pinnacles to shallow slopes blanketed by annuals. I’d never seen any of it before so I made slow progress as I stopped to study the landscape opening out below me.
Walking the crest, I hadn’t expected much elevation gain or loss, but this is where I realized it would actually be a rollercoaster. My whole day would be spent ascending and descending hundreds of feet, crossing back and forth between eastern and western watersheds, over and over, up in the sky.
After about two-thirds of a mile with that eastward view, the road crossed to the other side, where I could view that badly burned canyon I’d seen on my way up. The stands of aspen and fir that had been killed in the fire created bands of black and tan on the slopes that alternated with white outcrops of volcanic conglomerate and green regrowth of locust and Gambel oak.
There are always hawks along a crest, and I encountered the first of the day here.
Finally I reached the cabin, and the end of the road, in a small forested basin facing east. I remembered seeing photos of this cabin on InciWeb, wrapped in foil to protect it during both of the big wildfires. Structures like this are where firefighters invest most of their effort.
I could barely discern the trail leaving the cabin for the peak. There was no sign, but there was a vague disturbance in the annual ground cover, heading up in the direction of the ruined outhouse. When I followed that, I noticed a branch veering off into the forest. No one but animals had used this trail in the current growing season – it was almost completely overgrown and blocked repeatedly by deadfall. But it had been used heavily by firefighters last summer, so there was enough tread left under the vegetation that I could read it by going slow.
Before approaching the summit, the trail climbs to a 9,800 foot peak – it’s actually hard to identify the summit from a distance because it’s surrounded by peaks that are only slightly lower. The almost invisible trail first crossed to the eastern slope, then at the top of the lower peak, crossed again into a new watershed that was tributary to the big canyon I’d seen on the drive up. I was crossing so many watersheds it was hard to keep track!
Past the lower peak, the trail traversed a steep slope that had been badly eroded and colonized by thorny locust. Here, I flushed a small hawk, not much more than a foot long, probably a Cooper’s or sharp-shinned. This was the slowest part of my hike, and the hardest to follow. But again, the trail crossed watersheds, and I was facing east again on an even steeper slope, where the trail seemed to be maintained by deer and elk. I’d seen no evidence of humans on this trail, probably not since the summer 2002 wildfire.
The last stretch crossed back to the west, and climbing through dense ferns, entered a young stand of aspens, fir, and spruce. A wide corridor had been cut through these, and a few small peaks rose on my right, but I had no idea if any were the actual summit, so I just kept following the open corridor.
Finally I emerged from the trees, and could see another peak about a quarter mile away across a low saddle. My trail seemed to continue downwards to the east, looking more like an old road. I checked my map, but still wasn’t sure, so I started up the opposing peak, and soon found myself stopped by regrowth and deadfall with no easy way forward. Checking the map again, I became convinced I’d passed the actual summit – it was probably one of those little bumps I’d passed in the forest.
I returned into the corridor through the forest, and eyeballed an easy way up. Sure enough, I soon emerged on a little rocky bump, where a rusty can covered a jar with a record of ascents. I had no interest in that, but just below the bump, a grassy ledge offered a 360 degree view, a view I’d only dreamed about.
Clouds had been forming for the past hour or so, looking like a storm in the north, with wind rising and temperature falling. Now I could see curtains of rain to the north and east. I tried to absorb these views, but was most captivated by the view of the big eastern basin. I became more and more convinced that this was the most beautiful landscape I’d ever found in this area. It was worth walking that long road, just to reach this view!
Returning, I could see rain ahead in the west, and as I emerged from the corridor in the forest, there at 10,000 feet, I was hit by showers blown by a strong wind, and had to dig out my rain poncho.
From the next couple of hours it would rain on and off, with temps in the 60s, occasionally clearing here and there. I’d definitely escaped the heat wave!
After leaving the cabin and rejoining the crest road through the burn scar, I came upon two hawks, soaring together and apart, hovering, diving and briefly grappling mid-air. My views of the landscape were an ever-changing pageant of monsoon weather.
As I left the western watershed and re-entered the eastern for the final segment before the trail junction, it was great to be able to see the southern peak that I’d climbed so many times, from this angle. When descending the back side of that peak I’d been facing this road, but at nine miles it’s just too far to pick out with the naked eye.
It hadn’t been a long hike, nor entailed as much elevation gain as I prefer, but I couldn’t have gone much faster – the unmaintained peak trail made it challenging and slow. The drive up the road had taken two hours, and the hike, with many stops, had taken six-and-a-half. With the two hour drive back home, it turned into a ten-and-a-half hour day.
And the agonizing drive down that road, where I bashed my undercarriage on rocks twice, convinced me that I shouldn’t be doing this anymore. Comparing the way my vehicle drives on rocky roads vs paved highways, I finally realized that the MacPherson struts that make it handle well on pavement, are definitely not designed for off-road use. They have little give, producing a stiff ride, which is just miserable on rocky roads, where I have to drive extra-slow.
This is more pronounced when I see others driving the same roads in more capable vehicles. On this Sunday evening, I was surprised to encounter a young guy driving a pickup with camper shell up the upper part of the road, obviously intending to camp out at the cabin. We met in a rare level clearing with plenty of room to pass, but as he continued, it suddenly dawned on me that if I’d met him at most places on this road I wouldn’t have been able to back up for him without destroying my vehicle. My road clearance is so marginal I need to scope out a precise line to get over these rock ledges, which I wouldn’t be able do in reverse. In some situations I’d be obligated to back up for the other driver, and there are plenty of rednecks around here who would sooner shoot me than give way.
Monday, July 8th, 2024: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
Sunday was forecast to be clear across the area, with a high in town of 95. I faced the same old challenge, finding a hike that would keep me out of the heat without crippling my knee. Reviewing the map of hikes I’ve already completed, I noticed there was a gap in the crest trail east of town. At over 9,000 feet average elevation, it should be cooler, and hiking it would connect previous hikes on the northern and southern segments, yielding a total of 21 continuous miles hiked on that crest.
The out-and-back distance would be ten miles with an accumulated elevation gain of 2,200 feet, which is about all my knee can handle now. The only problem was that the access road is the worst in our region, requiring all of my vehicle’s ground clearance in low-range 4wd to climb over 3,000 vertical feet of exposed bedrock ledges. I’d only driven the entire road once, and had sworn never to do it again.
Plus, I didn’t know what kind of trail conditions to expect – would it be cleared or blocked by logs and overgrowth? There had been two mega-wildfires across that crest – would I find shady forest or exposed thickets? Fortunately, there was a shaded option about an hour’s drive downhill if the crest hike didn’t work out.
I can take the lower gravel-and-rock-lined half of the road at an average of 30 mph, but my vehicle’s safe average on the second half – a distance of seven miles – is 5 mph, with much of it at less than walking speed. Still, I was feeling pretty good until I reached the 9,400 foot turnout for the trailhead, and the inside door handle broke off when I tried to get out. No problem, I just rolled the window down and opened the door using the outside handle.
Then I stepped out into the sunlight, and it already felt like the mid-90s at 10 am. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breeze in the air. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, but it’d taken me more than two hours to get here – I was committed whether I liked it or not.
Another reason why I’d chosen this hike was because it started with a descent, and hence ended with an ascent, which would be easier on my knee. At the beginning, it teased me with a patch of shady forest, then confronted me with a wall of New Mexico locust. The locust, the first wave of regrowth after the alpine mixed-conifer forest had been burned off, had grown to ten or twelve feet tall, and covered the ridges and slopes in virulent green as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by scattered patches of surviving forest.
My route forward was indicated by a shoulder-height corridor of younger growth through the mature thicket. Apparently a crew had cleared a path a few years ago, and new growth had completely fill it in since then. Virtually no one had used this trail in the past decade, so on the ground below, there was no tread – no actual trail – at all. There was only hard, uneven dirt. Not only did I have to push my way through a thicket of thorns, I was continually stubbing my toe or tripping over the stumps that the earlier trail crew had left, which were now hidden under the regrowth.
I’d had a lot of experience with locust thickets before, but never this much – this was probably a hundred times what I’ve encountered elsewhere. It shows how much we lost in these fires, that hundreds of square miles of forest were replaced by this. Of course the main impact is on the native ecosystem, but for me, it involves always hiking in long sleeves and long pants made from a rugged material, and holding my arms upraised in front of me, twisting from side to side as I push forward, to deflect the thorny branches.
Ridge trails wind up and down and around high points and saddles, and the thickets were interrupted often enough by trees that I could occasionally escape the burning high-altitude sun. I saw and heard lots of birds, and although my route was only sparsely scattered with wildflowers, butterflies and other pollinators were abundant.
After about a mile, I came upon what was obviously an old, long-abandoned forest road, and remnants of that would reappear over the next few miles. This led me from the 9,400 foot level to the 9,000 foot level, around which the remainder of the route would oscillate.
My main purpose in taking this route was to see unfamiliar parts of the landscape, to complete my mental map. But in this early stretch, I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen from other angles.
I’d brought a map, and after two miles I knew I was approaching a major saddle, a divide between east and west, at the head of a long west-side canyon. That would be a little more than halfway.
I reached the expected saddle and found myself looking down a long, wide canyon, eerily deforested by the wildfires and lined with bright green locust and Gambel oak. My map didn’t show the name, and it wasn’t until reaching the next big canyon that I realized this is the one hikers sometimes use to do a loop with the next trail. A cairn in the middle of the saddle marked the point where the canyon trail came up, and I followed it a ways down, but it seemed to be equally overgrown with even less tread.
From the beginning, I’d found big logs cut to make way for the trail, which I assumed had been done long ago, after the 2013 wildfire. But now I was beginning to notice logs that seemed to have been cut recently, often surrounded by sawdust. And past the cairn for the big canyon, the nature of my route completely changed. It was lined with cowshit, and occasionally horseshit, and dotted with the invasive grasses that cattle spread. Luckily the cowpies were at least a year old, maybe more.
And I found bear scat only a few hours old, and started making more noise to announce myself.
Past the saddle the route seemed to climb forever, once again through a wide swath like an old road, until it finally crested on a long plateau with expansive views to east and west. The view to the east was across a high, rolling basin, and at the southeast end of it was the 10,000 foot peak I climbed two weeks ago. I’d never seen it from this angle, and today’s hike was intended to link up with the trail I take north from that peak. The long plateau also brought the first breezes of the day, a huge relief in such an exposed position.
I was also joined on my right by a barbed-wire fence; west was cattle country, and east was federal wilderness – but the cowpies on my side proved the fence wasn’t holding.
At the end of the long plateau my route began traversing the west slopes of a series of hills. The old roadway ended and most traces of the route disappeared. I followed what looked like faint animal trails, always keeping the fence in sight below. The fence trended gradually downwards, so I knew I was heading for the junction saddle that would be my turnaround point.
I knew I was on the right track when I came upon a cairn, followed by a ponderosa with a blaze in its bark – neither of which were accompanied by a trail. After a mile and a half, the barest vestige of a trail appeared, and I emerged on the rim of the next big canyon, and saw my old familiar trail descending the opposite slope, with the high peak behind it in the east. That peak is an old friend, and I was now seeing the back side, which I’ve hiked so many times, in perspective for the first time.
Below, I could now see my current route continuing down to the saddle, but I’d visited that saddle many times and it held no attraction. This canyon rim view provided a much better turning point.
It’d taken me four hours to go five miles, fighting through that locust. I dreaded the hike back, especially since it involved more uphill in this heat. It seemed to take forever to reach that midway saddle, but I was so tired I wasn’t even aware I’d passed it, so that in the end, I suddenly found myself facing the final ascent by surprise. That last stretch was the hardest, especially knowing I had that nerve-wracking drive left to do.
With so much locust to push through, I was constantly reminded of how important my hiking clothes are. You can’t get clothes like this at REI – they make outdoorwear as if wildfire never existed, using thin synthetic fabrics that are expensive and wouldn’t last one day in these conditions.
My shirts are made from chambray, a lightweight but tough cotton weave, and my pants are canvas. Thorns do tug at them and they don’t last forever, but they do last at least a year, which for me means up to 1,000 miles of hiking. There are tougher fabrics, but they’d be too hot in our summers.
After seeing dozens of logs sawn through recently to clear this route, I was puzzled that the trail crew didn’t attempt to clear the locust thickets. At home that night, I found an online report that a Forest Service crew from Montana had cut those logs in April. Apparently they were only equipped, or only had time, for sawing logs, so they just pushed through the locust like me. Or maybe they were horseback, and made their horses endure the thorns?
I made much better time returning – five miles in three hours – but the drive down the mountain took 50 percent longer. I hope I never try it again.
