Nabours
Monday, July 31st, 2023: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Nabours, Southwest New Mexico.
For the past week, our forecast had predicted the afternoon high to dip below 90, beginning this weekend. So I was looking forward to more hiking options – I wouldn’t be limited to the now-mostly-impassable trails above 9,000 feet.
But the ranges over in Arizona would still be too hot, and as I studied my list, I realized the remaining local trails were either too exposed or spent most of their time at elevations where temps could still exceed 90. I was about to give up when, a half hour before departure time, I remembered the trail I’d tried to reach a few months ago, only to be turned back by a road flooded with snowmelt. Snowmelt! Those were the days.
I’d forgotten to add this trail to my list. It climbs out of a narrow canyon to a ridge that it follows to the 9,000 foot crest, where after five and a half miles it connects with a two-and-a-half mile southbound trail to the 9,800 foot peak I pass on one of my old favorite hikes. Of course, it crosses the burn scar of our 2012 mega-wildfire, but the first three miles had been cleared last fall, and the rest was scheduled to be cleared this fall. So maybe there were enough clues left for me to be able to puzzle out. If I could reach that southern peak – unlikely in this heat – it would be a 16 mile round-trip with 5,700 feet of elevation gain.
Deciding at the last minute, I got a late start. And amazingly, although it was Sunday, a road crew was busy at the halfway point on the highway north, delaying me another fifteen minutes. I had plenty of time to recall how this has long had one of the best road surfaces in our region. But the creek crossing, a raging flood a few months ago, was now bone dry. The trailhead logbook had been removed, but a rocky section of the road requires high clearance so I figured this trail sees few visitors.
Choosing this trail had involved some denial and wishful thinking. The trailhead lies at 5,100 feet, almost a thousand feet lower than my home, so today’s high was likely to reach 95 there. And most of the climb up the long ridge would be exposed, through scrub and open pinyon-juniper-oak woodland. It’s a continuous climb from the trailhead, and at an average 14 percent grade, it would be the steepest trail I know of anywhere. I’ve done steeper bushwhacks, but trails are generally routed with gentler grades. I was surprised, but also pleased – this is the kind of trail I like, and the steeper the ascent, the more rewarding the descent.
The trail begins by climbing two hundred vertical feet out of the narrow canyon to the top of the ridge, which is near the lower edge of a dissected alluvial bench. This bench forms a broad, gently sloping skirt below the western wall of the range. Parallel streams dissect it, either into flat-topped mesas or long, narrow ridges like this one.
The sky was clear, the air was still, I was totally exposed and sweating like a pig as I labored upwards, wondering when I would either get too hot and turn back, or reach the shade of a ponderosa forest above 7,000 feet. The ridgeline consists of a series of little peaks or humps, each of which the trail climbed over at between 20 and 30 percent grades. And from these, the 9,000 foot peaks and ridges above beckoned.
Reading the trail, I soon confirmed no one else had been up this trail besides cattle, probably not since the trail work last September. The cattle sign was really old, but the trail was in great shape, and while suffering in the heat, I looked forward to an easy descent later.
Eventually I left the totally exposed scrub zone behind and began passing between pinyon pines and junipers where I could step off occasionally into some momentary shade. Radiant heat was my nemesis – it felt like the low 90s on the exposed trail, and the mid-70s when I stepped into the shade. Finally I surmounted the steepest grade yet, traversing a prominent hill, and came to a saddle with a big cairn.
Past the saddle was another steep hill, and traversing the north slope of that I encountered my first ponderosa pines. But then the cleared trail ended at a shallow slope covered with bunchgrass and strewn with charred deadfall.
After some scouting, I found some pink ribbons that had been hidden by charred snags falling after last year’s trail work, and eventually picked up a faint trail on the high side of the clearing. The trail crew had continued up the ridge, cutting some brush but leaving the deadfall, and soon I came to oak thickets where the old tread had been completely obliterated by the erosion of post-fire sheet flows.
Miraculously, I was still able to find an occasional pink ribbon that beckoned me forward. Most of these ribbons were in the midst of thickets, so you couldn’t see them until you pushed your way in. Some of them led to impenetrable blowdown that I had to back out and circumvent.
Finally I reached the last ribbon. Beyond it was what looked like the ghost of the old trail, but it was completely blocked by low shrubs and deadfall for as far as I could see.
I turned back, descending a hundred yards or so through the maze of scrub oak. It was still early, storm clouds were forming over the crest and providing occasional shade, along with breezes, that cooled me off. I still had plenty of energy and wanted to keep going, but the slopes above were getting steeper and rockier, and without a route, I would soon be lost and blocked by a rock wall or boulder pile.
I kept checking the topo maps I’d brought, but the landscape I could see from this thicket seemed nothing like the topography shown on the maps. I began to suspect the trail workers had deviated from the original route.
There was an opening in the maze that led south over the ridge. I explored that for a couple hundred yards, but was no wiser for it. I turned back and hiked back up to the last ribbon. I’d pushed through thickets before, so I chastised myself and began forcing my way up the trace that I thought might be the old trail. After climbing over a bunch of deadfall, I reached a point where the “trail” became a deeply eroded drainage, ending in a wall of shrubs that was just too dense for me.
So I gave up and, with difficulty, found my way back down through the maze. But I wasn’t happy, and when I reached the point at the lower edge of the oak thicket where the trail crew had stopped clearing brush, I stopped again and started feeling guilty about not trying harder.
So for a second time, I turned back, re-climbing the two hundred vertical feet and fighting my way back through that quarter mile of maze. Along the way, I picked up bits of pink ribbon I found lying on the ground, so I could add my own ribbons past the last ones tied by the trail crew, to guide my return.
I’d seen quite a few birds, but nothing unusual. Flocks of ravens were circling, vultures rocked on thermals, and finally I saw a big raptor hunting among the peaks far above. When a hawk appeared to give the bigger bird scale, I realized it had to be an eagle. It hunted up there for quite a while but was too far for a picture.
This time, I climbed a deeply eroded slope crisscrossed by deadfall, above the thicket that blocked the gully where I’d stopped before. I climbed to the base of the steep slope above. I saw two peaks above me, where my map showed a level ridge. They looked to be at least a thousand feet higher, and I assumed one was the named peak on the map. The slope ahead of me looked impassable, and I had no idea where the old route went, or if I was even close to it. This was as far as I would get.
On the way down, I untied my ribbons so as not to mislead anyone. I became convinced the trail crew had deviated and was hacking a new route up this ridge, one which was likely doomed. I’d captured some GPS waypoints with my messaging device and at home, would compare them with the trail shown on the maps to see how far off they’d gone. I planned to notify USFS as well as the equestrian trail crew.
But in the meantime, the clouds were dispersing and a fierce heat was radiating off the trail onto my face. I figured the ground, which was gravel and hard-packed dirt, had stored and accumulated heat throughout this record heat wave. It was like walking across the crust of an active lava flow, so I descended the steep, treacherous surface as fast as was safe. My only consolation was the broad vista ahead, from the valley 3,000 feet below me to the series of blue mountain ranges on the far side, ending on the horizon at the barely visible Mogollon Rim.
Finally I reached a point where I could turn around and get a view of the crest I’d been climbing toward. Now I saw that the landmark peak and most of the crest had been hidden from me when I was in that oak maze. And when I got home and checked my GPS waypoints, I learned I’d covered much less ground than expected – 7 miles in 6-1/2 hours. I’d been on the right trail until that last pink ribbon – from there, the trail turns 90 degrees left and begins winding its way up toward the hidden peak, far north of where I’d gone. I’d gotten stuck below slopes that hid the upper landscape, so there was no way I could’ve found a route on my own, let alone reconnecting with the old trail.
In the canyon bottom, even though I’d parked it facing west with the reflective sunshade over the windshield, my vehicle was like a pizza oven. I opened all the doors and left the AC on high for a while, but even so the sweat was pouring off me as I drove out to the highway.
It was after 5 on a Sunday, but the road crew was still at work, resurfacing a highway that didn’t need it. The national bureaucracy and infrastructure most of us believe we need is actually a juggernaut of habitat destruction and waste. But people cling to the evil they know, imagining the only alternative is chaos and suffering.
Monday, December 4th, 2023: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Nabours, Southwest New Mexico.
For the past three months, foot trouble had prevented me from doing the high-elevation-gain hikes I crave. But after last Sunday’s successful test, I felt I was ready to up my game. I scanned my eight-page list of hikes but couldn’t find anything exciting within an hour of town – until it struck me that the brutal trail that’d defeated me during our summer heat wave might’ve been cleared during this fall’s season of trail work.
Back then, I’d only been able to hike about three miles of the five-and-a-half miles to a high saddle and major junction. This is a fairly obscure hike I’ve been craving since I recently discovered it on the map, but it’d been a low priority for trail crews, and twelve years of post-fire erosion and regrowth had mostly blocked it and obliterated the old tread, especially in the upper part that traverses steep slopes.
It took me a while to track down reports of recent trail work, but I finally learned that an additional two miles of the trail had been cleared in October. Now the only potential obstacle was runoff – we’d had two storms in the past two weeks, and the high-clearance forest road to the trailhead crosses a creek draining the biggest and highest watershed on the west side of the range. Even if I could cross it early in the morning, by late afternoon it might be a raging flood.
I decided not to take the chance, but rather to turn off the highway earlier for a closer, much less interesting hike I’d done many times before and wasn’t excited about today. But on the drive up, I saw that all the smaller creeks crossed by the highway were dry. So I just kept driving, and when I got to the big creek crossing, it was bone dry – it normally flows underground at this point, and not even the highest afternoon temperatures on previous days had melted enough snow to flood it. Yay!
The first snowfall in these mountains had been two weeks ago, during my road trip to Arizona. And the second had been during the past few days. The temperature in town was just below freezing when I left home, the sky was blue to the horizon in all directions, and as I drove north I could see the snow line on the mountains lay at about 8,000 feet.
But the climb to the top of the long ridge is steep enough that I shed my storm shell, knit cap, and lined gloves on the way. And as I remembered, the climb up the ridge toward the foot of the mountains, mostly exposed through sparse scrub and open pinyon-juniper-oak woodland, is one of the steepest sustained climbs in our region. But I was motivated to see the newly cleared trail ahead. What attracted me to this trail on the map is that it doesn’t mess around – it climbs directly from the lowest to the highest elevations of this most dramatic western side of the range, crossing watersheds at the end, promising spectacular views both west and east.
In the dirt of the ridgetop trail, I found the hoofprints of the equestrian trail crew, two or three bootprints, and tracks I at first thought were from cattle, but soon realized were a bull elk and one or more cows. Like I’ve found elsewhere, they’d used this man-made trail as a quick and easy path to the crest.
The moment of truth came when the previously cleared ridgetop trail entered a maze of deadfall and regrowth near the foot of a steep, rocky upper slope. This is where I’d wasted the better part of an hour unsuccessfully trying to find a route last summer. And sure enough, deadfall logs had been cut, a wide swath of brush had been cleared, and a path lined with loose rock led up the mountain.
Trail workers had cleared a winding path across a couple of steep drainages that had been filled with post-fire debris flows and dense brush, and I knew that path would be washed out again in the next heavy rain. But for now, it led me almost a half mile north across the western slope of the rocky peak above, which temporarily hid the higher peaks from sight. It wasn’t until later, looking up from below, that I discovered the canyon below the long ridge is blocked on the other side of this peak by a sheer rock wall that extends from side to side like a high dam, with only a narrow slot for the creek to drain through. This, and the rock bluffs surrounding the lower peak, is why the trail had to be routed far to the north.
But eventually, the trail took me around a corner into a drainage that would lead, via many switchbacks, back toward the crest. This drainage is in shadow all winter, so the snow from both storms still covered the trail. I’d already climbed 2,500 vertical feet and had amazing views west, across the valley of the San Francisco River, to the rim of the alpine plateau I’d visited on my Arizona trip, and even to the now-snow-covered range ninety miles to the southwest that I’d last climbed in mid-September. This is what excites me about these crest hikes, climbing through a view that encompasses a vast landscape I’ve explored on foot and gotten to know up close as well as from far away.
The trail climbed steeply up this first drainage and reached a broad saddle where there had been a big blowdown – dozens of mature ponderosa pines snapped off at the base or uprooted, all toppling eastward. But the trail snaked its way through them, logs cut by the trail crew where necessary.
Past the blowdown saddle at 8,000 feet, the snow cover became continuous – at first an inch deep, then two. The trail switchbacked up into another steep, north-trending drainage, even darker than before, where snow had accumulated from four to five inches deep, and I was daunted to see the continuation of my trail towering above, cutting clearly through burn scar and talus slope. I’d forgotten to bring my storm pants and gaiters, and snow was soaking into the cuffs of my canvas pants.
It was here, in the deeper snow, that I discovered one previous hiker, a bigger man, had hiked this far in the past two weeks, between snowfalls, because his tracks had been filled in by last week’s storm but were still faintly visible. But his tracks ended at the last talus slope, which I had to cross very carefully because the snow hid the deep cracks between rocks. And past that, in an eroded gully, the rebuilt tread ended.
This is a situation I’ve learned from several different mountain ranges and national forests – initially, trail crews scout far ahead, flagging a route, and even doing cursory clearing of brush and cutting of smaller logs. Then during a formal work party, they return with more people and gear to clear everything and rebuild tread, but only up to a shorter distance. A hiker can continue beyond the rebuilt trail, as long as you can find the pink ribbons, which can be far apart and hard to see.
Beyond that gully, the route switchbacked and traversed a sunny, snow-free slope up a shallower drainage, then, on a short stretch of surviving, snow-covered tread partly blocked by deadfall logs, ascended what appeared to be the last slope to the crest. At this point I was beside myself with anticipation of a never-before-seen view.
Pink ribbons led me into a thicket on the crest, where I found myself with a view across the head of the canyon I’d started out in today, nearly five miles and 4,000 vertical feet below. I could see the peak whose shoulder I’ve climbed many times on one of my other favorite hikes, but I couldn’t seen the interior summit crest of the range, which is what I’d been hoping for.
East of the thicket I stood in lay a steep, rocky, trackless slope covered with stubby scrub oak and deadfall. I could see another pink ribbon in the distance, and it appeared that by traversing that slope for a few hundred yards, I might round another corner and get a view toward the heart of the range.
There was no trail left, but I found the fresh prints of the elk, so I just followed them from ribbon to ribbon. They led to a rock outcrop which was almost too good to be true: it was like a viewing platform for the highest peaks of the range, laid out before me in their fire-scoured, snow-blanketed majesty.
About three hundred feet below I glimpsed another red ribbon, in the saddle which led to the trail junction. And at my feet were piles of elk scat, which was so fresh – still moist – they had to have been there earlier today. Due to the steep grade and the snow, it had taken me more than four hours to go five miles. But this was already one of my favorite hikes.
In fact, with a nearly fifteen percent average grade, this is the steepest major trail in any of the mountain ranges in my region. That became painfully clear on the descent, when I struggled to walk slow enough to protect my foot and knees.
But in stretches where the grade decreased, I was able to study the view to the west, trying to identify peaks I’d climbed or driven past. The landscape was all laid out for me, but much of it remained a puzzle until later, when I could study a large-scale topo map.
The final traverse of the newly cleared trail took place in the full light of the setting sun, and I had to stop to take off my sweater and thermal bottoms. In the process of taking off my snow-soaked pants, I got my socks wet and had to change into the spare pair I always carry. I’d developed a sharp pain in my right knee and wondered how bad it would get – I still had over 2,000 vertical feet to descend.
The answer is, pretty bad. Halfway down the long ridge I strapped on the knee brace – my heavy pack is permanently loaded with first aid and other emergency gear for situations like this. That ridge always seems to go on forever, but with the brace, I was able to reach the vehicle about fifteen minutes after the sun sank behind the western horizon of the river valley. Ending hikes in pain is a fact of life now, but in this case, I guess it was worth it.
