Round
Monday, February 5th, 2024: Hikes, Pinalenos, Round, Southeast Arizona.
For months I’d been wanting to return to the archetypal sky island over in Arizona, to try a trail that seemed to offer the perfect winter hike – mid-elevation so it should be snow-free, devoid of forest so it should offer endless views, and with plenty of elevation change to provide a cardio workout.
This is the range that abruptly rises 6,000 feet above the desert plain like a southeast-to-northwest-trending wall, its crest a tilted alpine plateau – 9,000 feet high at its western edge, 10,700 feet high on the east. A paved road winds up the big southeastern canyon to the crest, where there are campgrounds, but other than that, the flanks are too steep for either roads or cattle. So although this has no designated wilderness like the other ranges I hike, it’s plenty wild.
Most of the trails in the range begin on the plain and climb up a canyon or ridge to the crest, and they’d be blocked midway by snow now. But today’s trail is an unusual traverse of the eastern flank of the range, beginning at 6,000 feet in the southeastern canyon and crossing a half dozen intervening ridges and canyons before finally ascending to crest fifteen miles later.
I was hoping to get about halfway and back in a day hike. But the trailhead is more than a two-hour drive from home – that’s why I don’t come here more often. And although I was ready for an early start, it took me fifteen minutes to get my windshield clear of frost.
I drove west under a cloudy sky, but it was beginning to clear as I drove up the canyon to the trailhead, where I arrived a half hour later than planned.
The southeastern trailhead is on the highway up the canyon, but the map showed that I could avoid the first intervening ridge and thus get farther into the backcountry by taking a short cut from a lower picnic area. I found an older man parked there in a pickup with camper shell; he preceded me up the trail dressed in colorful old-school flannel – making me feel like a real yuppie in my high-tech duds from REI and Patagonia. I soon passed him, and he remarked on how cold it was.
But this first segment of trail, climbing to the first ridgetop, unfolded at an average 15 percent grade, so I quickly shed layers. Sunlight glinted off the snowy crest thousands of feet above, while the thawing dirt of the trail had been deeply chewed up by horses as well as hikers’ boots. Thankfully it was sand and gravel and didn’t stick to my boots like the clay mud farther north. And I was admiring the surrounding igneous boulders and outcrops, which reminded me of my beloved desert.
That first climb was about 1,300 feet, and ended at a knife-edge saddle overlooking a completely new watershed. This was all unknown terrain, miles of it unfolding for me to explore. The tallest peaks of the range glittered above, and I could hear a creek roaring a thousand feet below. Far to the north I could see a prominent stone spire rising from the distant ridge I hoped to reach. From here, it looked much too far – especially since at the end of the day I’d have to climb back up out of this canyon.
The upper part of the descending trail was frozen solid under a thin layer of snow, and was steep enough that I had to go slow to keep from slipping. This trail was literally clinging to the wall of the canyon, with overhangs in some spots. Eventually I reached switchbacks that were mostly in sun, but there were so many I soon lost count. It seemed to take forever to reach the creek.
Brush had been cut recently all along this trail, and cut branches had often been left blocking the trail. The canyon was impressively rocky; the bottom was lined with sycamores; I easily found stepping stones to cross on.
Although the slopes on the opposite side of the canyon were gentler, they were also rockier, with big exposed slabs of igneous rock. After crossing a much smaller side canyon, I reached a bigger side canyon bearing a creek as big as the first, lined with solid rock. I began noticing metasedimentary rock with deformed strata just like the rock on my desert land. This is what I love – much rockier than the landscape around my New Mexico home.
Past that canyon, the trail climbed over a low divide where I reached a junction with an ascending ridge trail, now abandoned, then down into a hollow where I met the lower end of the abandoned trail. The recent trail work ended here, as did the human tracks and horse tracks. And it suddenly occurred to me that despite the lack of wilderness designation, and the gentleness of the grassy slopes all around me, there was no sign of cattle here! How could our Gila Wilderness at home be overrun with cattle, while this range, unregulated and closer to a bigger city, remains ungrazed?
Past that junction, the trail was mostly either blocked by shrubs or overgrown with tall grasses, and there was no sign anyone had gone there for years. But I was able to keep going by reading the landscape.
I made it another two-thirds of a mile before running out of time. My planned destination was another mile and a half farther and 1,200 feet higher, on the ridge that led to that prominent rock spire. With an earlier start, I might’ve made it.
But I wasn’t disappointed; this route had turned out even better than expected. Sure, it’s a challenge climbing over those intervening ridges, but this turned out to be the most spectacular landscape in our region, and I look forward to returning in better shape, and with more time.
I flushed a white-tailed buck out of the second canyon, and a dove out of the brush along the trail, but I was surprised not to see any hawks or eagles.
I took my time climbing out of that first deep canyon. It did take about an hour, but the frozen part was easier going up than going down.
The final descent to the trailhead was mostly in shade. I discovered someone had come partway up on horseback while I was over in the backcountry, so the trail was even more chewed up than in the morning.
I’ve been studying maps of this range for years. As I mentioned above, most trails start on the plain and climb to the crest. But since the catastrophic wildfires of the teens, and the ensuing erosion, all the crest-bound trails on this side of the range have been destroyed and abandoned. So this round-the-mountain traverse is my only option to explore this vast area, and today was just a first taste. I’ll be back!
Another night in a motel, followed by a lonely drive home through a wild landscape.
Monday, March 18th, 2024: Hikes, Pinalenos, Round, Southeast Arizona.
For me, the onset of daylight savings time, in March of each year, means that I can venture farther west for my Sunday hikes – because Arizona rejects daylight savings time, and when crossing the state line, I gain an hour. This is especially important in late winter when the high mountains are still covered with snow, because Arizona offers more lower-elevation hikes, and with daylight savings time, I can leave my home at 8 am as usual, drive 2-1/2 hours, and still hit the ground at the reasonable time of 9:30. Yeah, I’m still not gaining much daylight – but everything’s psychological.
I decided to return to the area with interesting granitic and metamorphic rocks and dramatic topography that I’d started exploring a little over a month ago. It can also be accessed via an old ranch road that would allow me to bypass the initial steep climb and deep canyon and get closer to my original destination, the ridge above the next watershed to the north.
I’d already discovered in a short midweek hike that I’d lost a lot of conditioning during my recent trip back east. Today’s hike would require a climb of over 3,000 feet, but the round trip wouldn’t be much over 8 miles, so I should have plenty of time to stop and catch my breath.
The dirt road to the trailhead is less than 4 miles long, but it took 20 minutes to drive because much of it is rocky. It crosses the mouth of the creek that drains the deep canyon I’d hiked to last time, in a grove of cottonwoods that had just leafed out. Then it climbs past a corral to a bench above the creek, where the trail begins.
There was already a cloud mass hanging over the crest of the range, and as the day progressed, the entire sky filled with scattered, ever-changing cumulus clouds, so that I found myself moving between sunlight and shadow, warmth and chill. Sometimes it became quite dark.
The trail was steep from the beginning. The overall average grade is almost 14%, making it one of the steepest long trails around, with a lot of short climbs in the 30% – 40% range. I soon came to a gate past which the vegetation changed dramatically, and I understood why the broad slopes above are blanketed with stands of tall native grasses – cattle have been fenced out of this entire watershed.
I spent a long time climbing over the rounded foot of an outlying ridge, finally reaching a side canyon that I knew led to the junction with the trail I’d explored last month. Past there, I expected to have to find my own way up the abandoned, overgrown continuation. But the rocks here continued to excite me – so much like the rocks in my desert mountains.
I reached the junction, and had gone a few yards down the main trail when I suddenly realized it had been cleared, and very recently – within the past couple of weeks. I’d actually been looking forward to some routefinding and bushwhacking, but this meant I could go faster and potentially farther.
The trail leads up the gentler left slope of a canyon whose right slope is lined with granite, and a sheer-sided granite outcrop above that slope became my landmark. Below that outcrop, the trail cut sharply left into a smaller side canyon, and the vegetation changed dramatically.
Whereas below, the slopes had been lined with grass and open oak woodland, from here on up they became a steep maze of boulders and thickets of oak, manzanita, and thorny locust.
I was aiming for a saddle on the ridge above, but the convoluted terrain at the head of this watershed required the trail to switch back and forth before getting there. And the grade was still steep so I had to stop often to catch my breath. It had rained here yesterday, and the ground was damp, but thankfully in this granite terrain the trail was sandy, not muddy.
Finally I could see the high saddle up ahead and knew I was on the verge of a new watershed and a new canyon.
Normally in an out-and-back hike, after only going 4 miles I would be only about halfway to my destination. But I’d dreamed about reaching this point for a long time, and I wasn’t in shape to go much farther. Still, I continued down the trail a few hundred yards – the trail crew had continued too – hoping to get a better view. The slope I found myself on had been burned in an old wildfire, but still bore some living pines and firs, whereas the opposite slope, far across the big canyon, was heavily forested.
I now had a phone signal from the city below the mouth of the canyon, and by the time I’d returned a call, I decided to call it a day. I discovered later on the map that if I’d continued only about a half mile, I would’ve rounded a corner and obtained a view of the summit of the range.
Still, I felt great. After going three weeks without a hike, I’d climbed over 3,000 feet and gained a view into a new watershed. And this is still my favorite place for rocks in our entire region.
On the way down, I noticed isolated, charred skeletons of pines rising among the oak thickets on the upper slopes. These slopes which I’d accepted as covered with thickets had once been lined with mixed-conifer forest.
Passing some burned snags cut by the recent trail crew, I caught a strong odor that immediately sent me back to my childhood bedroom with its cedar chest. I leaned to sniff the fresh cut. Years after the wildfire that had killed the juniper, the heartwood retained enough fragrance to fill the air around it.
Past the trail junction, paying more attention to my surroundings, I discovered a few more early flowers. The grassy slopes enabled clear views, and far below me I watched a white-tailed buck crossing between clumps of oak. And when I finally reached the livestock fence with its hikers’ gate, what did I see on the other side but a bull, blocking the trail!
With the fence between us, I yelled at it to move, with no effect. I was in no mood to wait, so I passed through the gate, but on the other side I caught my sleeve on a prickly pear cactus. Standing about twenty feet away, the bull watched me, unconcerned, as I cursed and struggled out of my sweater. By the time I’d picked the tiny glochids out of my elbow, I was more pissed at myself than worried about the bull. It was a young one anyway, and hornless, and it had resumed grazing, ignoring me. I’m still getting used to these local bulls – so far they’ve seemed to lack the aggression of our desert bulls.
I made a short detour around the young bull and reached my vehicle with plenty of daylight left.
The entire crest was obscured by clouds when I left for home the next morning, and a storm brewed to the east as well. That country is littered with low desert ranges that might offer some interesting winter hikes.
Monday, April 15th, 2024: Hikes, Pinalenos, Round, Southeast Arizona.
You’d think I would’ve learned by now that the twelve-to-eighteen-mile hikes I crave are simply not accessible from January through April. But I guess it will always be frustrating to give those up every winter.
I was so frustrated this weekend that I decided to return to the route I’d hiked over in Arizona only four weeks ago. The trail continues down into a new canyon, and it appeared to have been cleared of brush, so this Sunday’s goal was to reach the bottom of that canyon, adding a thousand vertical feet to the return hike.
The day was forecast to be clear, with afternoon temperatures at the trailhead reaching the 80s. My vehicle’s air conditioning was destroyed when I hit a deer two years ago, and on the back road that leads to the trailhead, it was warm enough already that I had to roll down my side window. There, I was amazed to discover brittlebrush – encelia farinosa, one of my favorite spring wildflowers in the Mojave Desert – covering the foothills.
By the time I hit the trail in the mouth of the canyon at 9:15 am, it was already warm enough that I had to unbutton my shirt. The sweat was dripping off me as I labored up the steep, rocky trail over the shoulder into the tributary canyon. Spring flowers were exploding, but I was discouraged to notice isolated patches of invasive brome grass even within the wilderness study area, which hasn’t been grazed in decades. Other than that, the vegetation here is remarkably wild.
Past the trail junction above the tributary canyon, the dauntingly steep climb to the distant saddle felt as hard as ever. Damp stretches of trail showed the tracks of three hikers who preceded me more than a week ago, two men and a woman. Despite the trail being clear all the way, I had to stop frequently to catch my breath, and it took 3-1/2 hours to go the four miles. As the tributary canyon narrowed, a cool breeze came up and I had to re-button my shirt.
Last time, I’d ventured less than 200 yards on the trail into the new canyon, where as I mentioned above, a trail crew had cut brush. But now I discovered their work ended right beyond the point I’d reached before. Beyond that, the trail was overgrown with shrubs, blocked by deadfall, and in many places the old tread was completely eroded away – all 1,000 vertical feet of it.
I debated turning back, but after a few minutes of that I started pushing through, figuring I would just see how bad it was. The advantage of the brushy overgrowth was that it stabilized the soil, so in overgrown stretches, you could easily follow the old tread. I found myself comparing this with the scrub oak thickets that have replaced mixed-conifer forests near home after wildfires. The scrub oak thickets have very stiff branches, but they only reach chest height, so you can use your torso to force your way through, optimizing your center mass and avoiding scratched hands.
But these Arizona post-fire thickets had long, slender trunks and branches that grew high overhead and arched over the old trail, interlocking from both sides so I had to walk with my arms upraised and head bent forward so my hat would keep the branches out of my eyes. My hands ended up covered with scratches, but since long stretches of overgrowth alternated with clear stretches, I kept going.
My first goal was to round a corner to my left which would give me a view of the crest above, featuring the summit of the range. But when I reached that point, it looked like the canyon bottom was only a few hundred feet below, which encouraged me to keep going.
For the next hour, I pushed my way through thickets, crawled under fallen logs, stepped high over the outstretched branches of deadfall crowns, and inched carefully across steep slopes of loose dirt where the old trail had completely collapsed. One blessing was a scarcity of thorny locust, the scourge of higher elevation burn scars back home, but there was still enough to damage my new shirt and canvas pants.
Switchbacks took me downstream of the point I’d seen from above, and I knew it would be even harder to bushwhack back up from the bottom, but now I was committed.
The old wildfire had almost completely destroyed the mixed-conifer forest on this slope, but as I approached the bottom, where the fire had been slowed by cooler temps and higher humidity, I finally entered intact forest, and soon I found myself on a grassy bench. Below lay a broad debris field which had been colonized by post-fire trees and shrubs. I had to pick my way through more thickets and deadfall, stepping precariously over the boulders in the debris flow, while somewhere beyond, the stream was roaring, still unseen.
On the other side of the overgrown debris flow I reached a vertical bank and saw the stream cascading over rocks ten feet below. A major post-fire flood had deposited the hundred-foot-wide debris field, then vegetation had colonized and stabilized it, and finally, winter snowmelt and summer monsoon flows had cut a deep channel along the edge of the debris field.
Of all the backcountry water sources I’ve visited, this had to be the purest – its origin is the back slope of the summit, an endangered-species preserve where humans are prohibited and there are no active trails, and the entire canyon has been free of livestock for decades. I just had to fill my drinking bottle and take advantage of it.
Surprisingly, now that I knew what to expect, the bushwhack out of the canyon was easier than I feared. I just had to take it slow.
The descent from the saddle is so steep, it was hard to control my speed going down. I kept telling myself I had plenty of time, then a few minutes later I would find myself running down a stretch of hard-packed dirt. Unsurprisingly, that took its toll on my knees.
But the worst was yet to come. I’d forgotten how much worse the surface is on the final two-mile stretch to the trailhead. This is not only steep, it’s either lined with loose rocks or cut into deep steps by rectangular boulders emplaced by the original trail-builders. The result is one of the hardest trails I’ve ever found on the knee joint.
On the plus side, as I traversed the lower slopes of the tributary canyon I was serenaded by frogs – or toads? – with a resounding croak like a slow, low-pitched machine gun. Due to the long bushwhack, the steep grades, and the brutal trail surfaces, it ended up taking me 8-1/2 hours to go less than 11 miles out-and-back.
I spent the night in my new favorite small-town motel, discovering a burrito that turned out to be big enough for three meals, and waking up to an espresso bar next door. I keep saying I live in paradise, but sometimes it’s hard to end one of these weekend getaways…
