Gila
Sunday, August 15th, 2021: 2021 Trips, Gila, Hikes, Regions, Road Trips, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Short Hike on a Poor Trail
Sunday was departure day, but I didn’t want to just race back home. I didn’t want to leave at all, and I’d considered staying an extra night, but back home, the city was resurfacing the street where my house is located during the coming week, and on Monday morning I had to move my truck off the street into the driveway all the contractors were using, arranging to switch with them. To avoid getting the truck towed, if I stayed here another night, I’d have to leave really early in the morning.
I had a few hours before checking out to study the maps, and I figured if I could attach some padding over the swollen ankle, maybe I could stop along the way for a shorter hike. I identified a few possibilities along the Arizona-New Mexico border.
While packing, I put on all my hiking clothes, applied biomechanical taping to my foot and a felt pad over the swollen ankle, and finally slipped into my boots. I tried to walk across the floor, but there was no way I could walk in those boots with that ankle. Damn!
I took off all the hiking gear, and changed back into my driving shorts and t-shirt. My sneakers were so low cut that they didn’t bother the ankle – I finally realized it wasn’t any kind of a strain or sprain, it was just some kind of pressure- or friction-caused inflammation. And then it occurred to me to try my other pair of boots, which I’d brought as backup in case the primary pair got wet.
My primary boots are designed for maximum ankle support – the shaft or collar of the boot, around the ankle, is reinforced. This is the part that is apparently irritating my ankles on long hikes. The other pair of boots are cut below the swollen area, so when I tried them on, they didn’t even contact it. I realized I could probably stop for a hike after all, so I set aside all my hiking gear for quick access in the vehicle.
As usual, I took the scenic route through the mountains before connecting with the highway home. It seems shorter every time – it’s so beautiful you don’t want it to end.
Back on the highway, the first turnoff I tried was at a pass between Alpine and Luna. It was a forest road I’d always wondered about, that claimed to lead to a fire lookout. It turned out to be one of those actually scary mountain roads – steep, twisty, rocky and deeply eroded, and strictly one-lane, with a deadly dropoff at the edge. The trail I was optimistically looking for was probably impassable – maps showed it crossed a large burn scar, and it hadn’t been maintained since the big wildfire – and the trailhead was almost 6 miles back on this road. The road went up, and down, and around, very slowly, and the first couple of miles took me 10 minutes, so I found a wide spot in a bend and turned around. Then I encountered a big truck coming up, and had to back uphill to the turnaround place to let them pass.
The next possible hikes were off a prominent backcountry road between Reserve and Glenwood, and would be my first exploration of the legendary Blue Range Primitive Area and Wilderness. I’d always wanted to explore this area, but it was simultaneously too close to and too far from home to be convenient.
It was a glorious day, like my first day of hiking. This area was a couple thousand feet lower than the alpine region I’d just left, with parklike pinyon, juniper, and occasional ponderosa over rolling hills at the foot of higher ridges and mountains in the near distance. I had two trails to choose from. The first was represented by an unnamed kiosk and had clear tread that beckoned up a shallow canyon. But from the map it looked too easy and didn’t seem to offer views.
The next trail was listed as “cleared” by a trail crew two years earlier, and appeared to climb a low ridge for a mile or two. There was no real trailhead – I was looking carefully at the roadside as I drove slowly along, and just happened to notice one of those little “hiker” icons on a post at an overgrown turnout. There was no tread leading inward, only the vague, overgrown suggestion of an opening through the parklike forest. But when I took a few steps past the signpost, I glimpsed a faded wilderness sign on a pinyon pine far ahead. So I figured I would gear up and check it out.
It was well past lunchtime, and I decided to not only make a sandwich – utilizing my new cooler as a table – but to drink a beer as well, breaking my usual habit of not drinking until the evening. Nothing says vacation like drinking in midday, and especially before a hike!
This trail turned out to be mostly forgettable. No one besides trespass cattle had used it in ages, and the surface was my most hated local footing – a mix of embedded and loose volcanic cobbles that is maddening and dangerous to walk on. Marked frequently by cairns, the route climbed the ridge at a generally shallow grade, mostly exposed so despite the mild temperature I was sweating pretty bad. But I was determined to get as high as I could, in hope of some kind of view.
The main attraction of that view turned out to be behind me – the peak with the fire lookout at the end of that scary road I’d given up on the way here. It was about 5 miles away to the northwest, and was a pretty mountain with a complex mosaic of rocky slopes, forest, and meadows.
Marked only by its cairns, my route drifted in and out of a cleared corridor through the open scrub forest, suggesting that in some distant past there might’ve been a wagon trail. The path completely ended in dense chaparral at the top of the ridge, after only a couple of miles of hiking.
When trail workers reported this trail “cleared” two years ago, it was obvious that all they meant was that they’d checked it to the chaparral on top – there’d been no clearing required. And it seemed that nobody but me even cared.
On the way down I lost the trail at one point, where a false cairn beckoned me onto a game trail down a side drainage. After wasting 5 minutes on that sidetrack, I dismantled the fraudulent cairn and found the right track to continue back to my vehicle. By my standards it hadn’t been much of a hike, but at least I’d set foot in a new wilderness area and seen some new mountains.
I had a pleasant drive home as usual – apart from the minivan driver who wanted to race down the twistiest part of the highway, tailgating me dangerously, finally passing only to slow down in front of me on the straight part of the road as he drifted back and forth across the center line, probably texting on his smart phone. By that point I was relaxed enough not to care.
My home is always first and foremost a studio, an office, a workspace, so the only way I can take a break from work is to get away from home. This trip had been my first getaway – my first vacation – in almost two years. And it had been over two years since I’d visited those mountains. So on the drive home I was re-evaluating my relationship with that place, and my attitude toward it.
One problem I can see is that it has kind of an awkward combination of extreme beauty and overwhelming recreational culture. It’s kind of like a huge national park in which the visitors are widely dispersed instead of concentrated like they are in, for example, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.
Despite its huge size, the area has historically far fewer hiking trails than the national forest in my backyard, and after the 2011 wildfire, only the half dozen most popular and easily accessed of those trails have been maintained. So all the hikers are concentrated on those few trails, none of which is particularly challenging. The trails in the large, rugged wilderness area at the south of the range have been abandoned and are essentially impassable, because that was the origin of the wildfire.
So for me, as a hiker looking for challenges and new discoveries, the area actually doesn’t seem to offer much.
But since the northern half of the range consists of those vast grassy meadows divided by hills and ridges with relatively open mixed-conifer forest, it suddenly occurred to me that off-trail hiking might be the solution. Maybe in the future I should just ignore the limited trail network and set off across country. I’m not sure how feasible that would really be, but it’s worth trying…
Monday, June 17th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Gila, Hikes, Middle Fork, Mogollon Mountains, Regions, Road Trips, Southwest New Mexico.
The paired wilderness areas north of my hometown, the first established in the U. S., encompass almost 1,200 square miles of mountainous terrain. After I moved here 18 years ago, it was another 12 years before I found the time to begin exploring them on foot.
There’s a challenging dirt road, closed in winter, that runs north between them, but apart from that, this vast block of wilderness creates a roadless barrier between us and the rest of the state. I’ve long been curious about the north end of the wilderness, but until now I’d never ventured up there, because it requires a three-hour drive around the perimeter, most of that on rough dirt roads.
But with travel and joint pain forcing me to give up hiking since early May, I was going stir crazy. It’s been hot here, and I found myself longing for the cool shade of our high-elevation mixed-conifer forests. I could find that near home, but the highest point I can drive to is up on that northern edge of the wilderness – the legendary road, also closed in winter, that traverses the entire northern edge.
I’d driven up there from the west a few times to hike the crest trail, but past the trailhead, the road continues into terrain I’d never seen, terrain that’s got to be among the most remote in the lower 48 states. Although it’s crisscrossed with dirt forest roads and ranch roads, there are no paved roads anywhere near it. It’s a two-hour drive on rough dirt tracks from the nearest paved road or cell phone signal. It’s a three-and-a-half hour drive from the nearest small towns, and a five-hour drive from the nearest city.
The mountains rise to almost 11,000 feet, and the lowest points, the canyon bottoms, are nearly 7,000 feet in elevation. Once I reached the end of the paved road in the tiny ghost town, I entered the cool forest of pines, firs, spruce and aspen, and began climbing over 2,000 vertical feet on a rocky and deeply eroded dirt road that in many places was only wide enough for one vehicle. For the rest of the day, I would approach every blind curve not knowing whether a big truck would come barreling around it toward me, and if we didn’t collide, one or the other of us would have to yield and back up to the nearest wide spot.
The road tops out at 9,000 feet and begins traversing the north slope of the high mountains, winding in and out of deep drainages, with a long view to your left across a 3,000-foot-deep canyon to another big mountain in the north. I needed a break from the dangerous driving so I turned off as soon as I reached the traverse.
These slopes burned patchily but at high intensity in the 2012 mega-wildfire. My turnout remained forested, but a dirt track led upward into the burn scar, to a small cleared plateau which had probably been used to land firefighting choppers, and I hiked up there, about a third of a mile, to get a view north. This scar had filled in with dense New Mexico locust, which was in bloom.
Not a cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see, but a thin haze hung in the canyons and lowlands. Breezy and cool up here, but the day was obviously going to be warm.
That high traverse is only a little over five miles long, but takes about twenty minutes to drive. I soon came upon a Ford Escort – you can’t drive a car up here, but city SUVs will just about handle it. The little SUV was backing toward me, so I waited to see what he was up to. He pulled to the left for some reason and let me past – a retired couple out sightseeing.
I passed the trailhead that was the farthest I’d driven before. From now on, everything felt more and more remote. I encountered a couple of widely-separated trucks, but the traverse has plenty of wide spots for passing. In and out of dark forest, locust-choked burn scars, and black volcanic talus slopes. Finally I reached the end of the traverse and descended onto a long, narrow east-trending ridge, with a steep dropoff at my right to the deep canyon of a major creek. From studying maps, I knew the road would eventually descend to the creek, where there would be a campground.
The landscape ahead of me to the east was rolling terrain, averaging 8,000 feet, burn scars and grassland punctuated in places by higher forested mountains with gentle slopes. It reminded me somewhat of my beloved White Mountains of eastern Arizona, although nowhere near as spectacular. The best thing about this area was its remoteness.
The heights had been dry, like most of our region for the past three months. So it was a relief to see the creek running through dense willows and lush grasses beneath tall pines and firs. However, the road soon turned away and entered the harshest burn scar I’d ever seen in this region. Apparently the soil and its seed bank had been scorched and sterilized, so as far as the eye could see the low slopes were lined with nothing but dry grasses and annuals beneath the snags of burned tree trunks.
After climbing to a plateau at 8,000 feet, the road stretched out due east, almost perfectly straight for seven miles. I passed a little Jeep SUV, and came upon a big truck with a huge fifth-wheel trailer, parked in the road, which was fortunately wide enough to pass. A beautiful young girl wearing hippie garb sat on an ATV in front of the truck, and I waved as I slowed to pass.
A mile farther, nearing the end of the plateau, I came upon a Forest Service truck that stopped next to me. The driver said to be careful because a truck was broken down up ahead. He said the RV I’d passed was part of the same group, waiting for help. It was Sunday and I figured the nearest operating tow service would be four or five hours away.
I passed the disabled truck and descended into a shallow, grassy valley where the road turned south, and spotted a little lake below forested hills at the far end.
This was the reservoir of a creek that been dammed – maybe for ranching originally, but now for recreation. The road had been skirting the northern boundary of the wilderness the whole way, and the reservoir lay at the center of the northern boundary. It was hard to imagine a more remote place, but it looked well-maintained.
It’d taken me four hours to get here, and by chance it was noon. The big parking lot was empty, and I could see only two or three vehicles in the campground that sprawled back in the forested hills above the lake. I drove up to a scattering of unoccupied picnic tables overlooking the lake and found one in the shade where I started on the snacks I’d brought, and made the unusual decision to have a daytime beer.
Sitting there with that idyllic scene laid out before me, featuring ponderosa pine, the west’s iconic tree, I couldn’t help thinking of my dad. He’d love this place, once all the chores were done and he could relax. So many of us – Calvinists, WASPs, northern Europeans – both benefit and suffer from the compulsion to put work before pleasure, and the beer was helping me self-medicate.
Too much of the day remained for me to even consider driving home, and I wanted to try an easy hike. But this area was too exposed for such a cloudless day. I decided to drive back to the creek crossing and check out a trailhead I’d passed on the way here.
I pulled into the small dirt lot at the trailhead alongside a big truck, and a short man jumped out holding an even shorter fishing rod. “You fishin’?” he asked with a smile. I said no but wished him luck.
The trail entered the big trees where a smaller tributary joined the main creek. I saw the fisherman scrambling over rocks and stopping to cast a fly on a long line upstream. I’d never seen such a short rod used for fly casting.
The narrow valley was beautiful, lined with dark volcanic bluffs, the trail winding through shady groves and sunny meadows, the creek always near, murmuring over rocks. Birds and butterflies were everywhere – swallowtails, woodpeckers, flickers, bluebirds. I made it more than a mile and a half – my knee complaining every time I had to step over a log or boulder – finally emerging into a wide, shady “pine park” where the creek flowed wide and shallow and I watched native trout hatchlings shimmy their way upstream.
On the hike, I’d felt a lot of pent-up energy rising to the surface – my body really missed being put to work. I felt like I could’ve walked all day, but would’ve ended up in serious pain. Still, I was happy, and temporarily at peace, just being there.
As I mentioned before, the traverse along the crest is pretty nerve-wracking, never knowing when or what you’re going to meet coming around those blind turns. But I was plenty calmed down. I did encounter one truck that was coming faster than was safe, but I had enough space to pull over and wait for him to react. I actually ended up passing the sightseeing retirees again toward the end of the traverse.
The descent to the ghost town is the most dangerous part, because it includes really long blind, narrow stretches where backing up safely would be almost impossible. But I made it to the bottom without meeting anyone, only to reach the abandoned cabin – the most remote of all the cabins in the forest above the ghost town – to find a truck pulled over and people standing in the road.
I stopped next to them, and a tall man introduced himself as the new owner of the abandoned cabin. A young girl leaned out the driver’s window of the truck, and another man squatted outside, sharpening a chainsaw. They all seemed really excited. Having a cabin in the forest like that would feel like a dream come true until the next wildfire and the ensuing flash floods tearing down the canyon, destroying your access if not the cabin itself.
From there, it was a short drive to the paved road and the ghost town, the next scary stretch of twisting one-lane descending to the mesa, and finally rejoining the lonely north-south highway. I could more or less take the highway home on autopilot, until when approaching the gate of our biggest ranch, I spotted what looked like a small mammal ahead in the middle of my lane.
I was going 65 but had enough road left to carefully slow down. The thing wasn’t moving, but when I was close enough to focus on it, it looked exactly like a porcupine, facing me with all its quills erect. Porcupines supposedly live around here, but I’d never seen one. This one wasn’t yielding right of way, but another vehicle was coming fast behind me, and I suddenly realized that what looked exactly like a porcupine was actually the top of a narrow-leaf yucca that had rolled onto the highway! So I swerved around it and stepped on the gas.
By the time I returned home, I had driven over 200 miles, ascending and descending nearly 20,000 feet of accumulated elevation. And I’d still only driven about a third of the way around the perimeter of our wilderness!
Monday, September 9th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Gila, Regions, Road Trips.
With weather cooling off, I could target lower elevations in my “no hiking” weekend road trips: drive somewhere interesting, explore a little, have lunch, drive home. This time it would be a remote, quiet, hardscrabble village at the edge of a Mormon farming community, at the foot of mountains I’d like to hike.
Lunch was red enchiladas, smiling and chatting with the local country folks. On the way back, I hoped to check out access to the east side of a wilderness area I’d explored from the south last winter.
Back then, I’d hiked across open range between two cattle herds and up a steep canyon between sheer cliffs, into a white-out blizzard of sleet at the top. And on the way back I’d been threatened by a bull and two ranch dogs. The storm had prevented me getting deeper into the wilderness, which encompasses most of this northern section of this extremely long and narrow range. But this section is so rocky and beautiful, I wasn’t giving up. After studying maps, I was hoping to find a less risky approach from the east, but I knew I’d be crossing more ranchland and had no idea if the roads would be open.
Also, I was driving my low-clearance 2wd pickup and had no idea how bad the roads would get. It’s a long approach on graded gravel, past an uninhabited backcountry railroad crossing, then more miles on an ungraded dirt and rock road that gets progressively rougher and less traveled, often detouring around washouts. I passed a spread-out herd and lots of what I assumed were feed dispensers, but didn’t see another human or moving vehicle. These flats looked terribly overgrazed.
The map showed two roads leading to the wilderness boundary at the foot of the mountains, one branching off from the other. I continued straight without ever seeing the branch, the road getting rockier, showing only one clear tire track. Eventually I reached a No Trespassing sign. There was no gate, and I see could see the road ahead cresting a rise, so I continued to the rise to see what was beyond.
From the rise I saw a metal roof down in a hollow, and couldn’t tell if it was a shack or a shed, so I turned back. A rural landowner myself, I have great respect for No Trespassing signs, but this sure was a beautiful place with the cliffs rising all around.
Some research back home revealed that this was where Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor grew up. At over 160 square miles, it supports 2,500 mother cows with 3-4 full-time cowboys, none of whom I saw.
On the way back, looking for the branch road turnoff, I stopped to watch a dust devil cross the road ahead. I assume overgrazing encourages their formation.
I found the turnoff in a big cleared area with more feed dispensers. After driving through a deep gully I reached a primitive gate. There was no sign here, so I continued, closing the gate behind me.
This even less-traveled road led back into a beautiful box canyon on the north side of the crest I’d hiked last winter. It dead ended at a stock dam, windmill, and water tank at the foot of the mountains, with a huge bull and a cow lounging a dozen yards apart – an odd couple to find isolated and alone like this.
God, what a beautiful place! I figured once I got my knee working again, I could probably find a way around the bull.
To someone familiar with this country, the vegetation is markedly different over here. This area is 2,000 feet lower than my home, and significantly drier, and on the way back I wondered how different it was before the introduction of cattle. I hope I can figure out a way past the bulls and dogs in the future!
Friday, November 29th, 2024: 2019 Trips, 2024 Trips, Gila, Regions, Road Trips.
I found myself alone again on Thanksgiving. Last year I was lucky enough to be invited over by neighbors. But it’s been eight years since I was able to spend the holiday with family, and 16 years since I was last invited to spend it with friends. So despite many memories of convivial Thanksgivings in the past, it’s become a lonely day I no longer look forward to.
But I’d been shut up in the house, sick, for the past ten days, and I just had to get away. In a few days, I expected to be moving back east, for weeks or even months. Saying goodbye to my beloved wild mountains, to live in a place that’s flat as far as the eye can see, in the midst of a vast city surrounded by plowed fields.
So I headed north, hoping to find access to a couple of hikes I’ve been dreaming about. I can no longer hike, and travel means I can’t recover from my knee injury, but at least I can dream.
The next couple of days were forecast to be cool and cloudy, and clouds gathered and dissipated above me as I drove north.
The first hike I wanted to check out climbs a 9,800 foot peak 14 miles east of the village where I was staying. This is one of many peaks of roughly 10,000 foot elevation that rise at random from the very remote high country at the north end of our national forest. This peak features a fire lookout accessible from the north via a long and winding dirt road, but the ascent via trail, from the west, would total 15.4 miles out-and-back, with 4,000 feet of elevation gain. If I ever recover from my knee injury, that would be perfect.
I’d tried to reach the trailhead last winter, but was stopped by an icy road. The backcountry dirt road, serving remote ranches, descends into a broad sandy wash, then climbs steeply over a low saddle forested with juniper and pinyon. Today the surfaces were dry and cold, and on the other side of the saddle, I discovered a spectacular new world.
This new world is the canyon of a tiny river with a romantic name. The map had made me curious, but the reality exceeded expectations. This turned out to be one of the prettiest river canyons in our area – adding to the myriad reasons why I love living where I do. Even after 18 years, I can still drive a couple hours and be surprised, and I’ve only scratched the surface.
After continuing up the canyon and across the river, the road climbs more than a thousand feet up the opposite side, to a beautiful plateau forested with ponderosa pine. Driving up the plateau, I got occasional glimpses through the trees of the mountain above with its dusting of snow. This is a classic conical mountain with ridges and canyons fanning out on all sides. Eventually the road dropped into a shallow canyon that separated the plateau from the slopes of the mountain. According to my map, I would soon hit a side road leading to the trailhead.
The side road I found had a barbed wire gate made with tree branches and was clearly seldom used. The map gives this trail a number, and an online search leads to a Forest Service trailhead page, but there’s absolutely no other information online, which is what I prefer. Closing the gate behind me, I drove across a steep slope into a narrow canyon under big ponderosas, reaching the next turnoff in a few hundred yards. This led up a steep grade on a very rough and rocky track. The track continued over the crest of a ridge, but I parked at the top, figuring the trailhead was only a few hundred yards farther.
I was wrong. I ended up walking almost a half mile down into a canyon in near-freezing temperatures, wearing only a light sweater, while still trying to get over my lingering cold. The road was so rocky it was questionable if I could have driven it, and I never did reach the trailhead. The walk out and back, less than a mile, hurt my knee so bad that I would have trouble standing, sitting, or using stairs for days. But at least I got a feel for the country – as wild as I’ve ever seen.
That river canyon was definitely the highlight of my morning exploration, and the clouds and shadows made it even more beautiful on the drive back. I will return!
After lunch in my room, I set out to find another trail I’d been unable to reach last winter – this time, about ten miles west of the village. This is a trail that forms the top bar of a “T”, with another trail I hiked a couple years ago coming up from the south to form the stem. That earlier hike was 15.5 miles out-and-back, and the stem of the T had been abandoned for so long it became my greatest routefinding challenge ever.
But the landscape around the remote junction had been really pretty, so I’d always dreamed about hiking the bar of the T. It’s an east-to-west traverse across the southern slope of another 9,800 foot peak that has dense fir-and-aspen forest on top. The trail starts at 6,600 feet in the east and ends at 8,000 feet on the peak road in the west, traversing 11.2 miles with almost 5,000 feet of elevation gain in the process, so it’s a little too far for an out-and-back day hike.
But today’s challenge turned out to be the approach road. This is a dirt road that gets very muddy after any precipitation. There are actually two parallel roads that start at the same place on the highway, separate, then rejoin 3 miles later. I took the left-hand road that climbs a low ridge, figuring I might return on the other road. The left-hand road turned out to be one of the two gnarliest back roads I’ve ever driven in this area, at the very limit of what my 4wd Sidekick can currently handle. Big trucks had driven it in the mud, digging holes up to a foot deep, and the rocky part really had me worried since my tires are nearly bald.
On my way up the ridge, I spooked a half dozen deer, then immediately after that, 8 or 10 elk crossed in the opposite direction, and finally, another half dozen deer crossed back, farther ahead. It was like one of those documentaries about the Serengeti!
But I made it to the trailhead, such as it was (no sign or kiosk), and now I know it’s reachable. It just takes forever to get there – 45 minutes to go 4.5 miles on that dirt road.
The old road continued past the clearing where I parked, but had been thoroughly washed out. I climbed across the washout and continued on the old road, a few hundred yards to where the trail proper starts. I still want to hike it some day.
I can’t overemphasize how remote this country is. It’s all cattle country, but it shows how much natural beauty and ecological diversity can survive when the cattle outnumber the human visitors. That’s why I ended up in this area instead of other places I looked at, like the Eastern Sierra, Flagstaff, Prescott, or Santa Fe. Wild habitat is far more important to me than urban amenities, but I seem to have found the best mix of both available anywhere in the Southwestern U.S.
I tried the other road on the way back, and barely made it. At the halfway point, the other road plunges down the bank of a 20-foot-deep creekbed, which would definitely wash out in our monsoon. Just as I prepared to drive down that bank, a big redtail hawk launched off a branch at my right and flew left down the creekbed carrying an adult Abert’s squirrel suspended from its claws. Second time I’ve come upon a hawk carrying a squirrel.
And on the drive back to the village, the sky created the perfect ending for my day of exploration!
Sunday, June 22nd, 2025: 2025 Trips, Gila, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Wildfire.
Yes, I realize that on the national and global scale, the news is terrifying. But in remote southwest New Mexico, we have worries that may never make the national, let alone the global, news – and we hope to keep it that way.
During the nineteen years I’ve lived here, we’ve had three large wildfires in the mountains just north of town, which rise to 9,000 feet in elevation and are covered with mixed conifer forest dominated by ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir. Strangely, the fires have been separated by exactly five years: in 2015, 2020, and now 2025. Each fire has started within fifteen miles of my home, growing to consume habitat I hike regularly, destroying places that are special to me.
But the fire that started just over a week ago has become by far the biggest – and in fact, the most dangerous in the entire country during this period. Firefighters and equipment have been moved in from all over the U.S. Thousands of people have been evacuated from nearby rural communities. In town, we’ve watched the apocalyptic smoke column towering above our skyline, the helicopters and jet tankers shuttling back and forth from the Forest Service fire station at our county airport. Our phones have buzzed with evacuation alerts, and the latest evacuation zone was created only two miles from my mom’s assisted living facility. The fire’s most active front is burning toward town in fire-adapted forest that has never burned within historic times, and is currently the driest vegetation in the U.S.
Calling my mom’s privately-owned facility to ask about their evacuation plan, I was told by the owner that they don’t have one – families are responsible for moving their loved ones to safety. Slowed by my knee-immobilizer brace, I made a rough inventory of valuables in my house, and shifted empty boxes up from the basement to carry irreplaceable documents and artwork.
With the “incident team” growing to over 1,400 people, the fire still showed zero containment after the first week. But on Friday, they finally claimed 11 percent containment, and the incident commander said that they’d bulldozed lines around the entire perimeter and were planning to restore power and begin allowing some of the evacuated back to their homes. They described a huge effort to protect structures throughout the vast area, and continued to claim that no structures had been damaged.
Friday afternoon, I drove my mom to the edge of town to see the smoke column. I figured, and hoped, that she might never have the chance to see something like this again. I wouldn’t have considered showing it to her a few weeks earlier, but her chronic anxiety has subsided, and she appreciated the opportunity to experience this awesome vision of nature’s power.
Throughout the week, I followed the fire’s advance online – hour by hour – via several apps, discussed it with neighbors, and attended community meetings. By the following weekend, the danger was reduced, but the fire was now burning through some of my favorite places, destroying more of our last remaining old-growth alpine habitat. I was a wreck.
There was a place northwest of town where I’d always wanted to picnic or camp, a ledge in ponderosa forest atop a ridge a thousand feet tall, overlooking the north end of our wilderness. I’d just learned that a brew pub had recently opened in the village nearby. Unlike the two existing restaurants, it stayed open Sunday evenings, and I wanted to check it out.
I arrived at noon and was the third customer. The owner, a big bearded guy, latched on to me and told me his story. I was shocked to discover he had ten beers on tap, but only one was an ale. Every other craft beer joint – and I’ve been in hundreds – carries an equal number of ales and lagers. His explanation was that he’s burnt out on ales, implying that what the customers want is irrelevant.
But it got worse. He said his menu consists of Italian dishes – rather than pub favorites or Mexican food (which the village lacks and needs). Not because he’s Italian (he’s not), but because nobody else here serves Italian food. Such is colonial culture on Turtle Island.
I had a salad, it was bland, and with no ales on offer, I won’t be returning.
My destination is a short drive up a dirt forest road from a pass on a remote stretch of highway – there’s no signage, and even after studying the map you’d never know it was there. With a high of 85 in town, up there at 8,300 feet it was in the 70s and breezy.
I unfolded my camp chair in a patch of shade on the rim and drank ice water out of my mini-cooler for a couple of hours. With the aid of field glasses and a BLM topo map, I challenged myself to identify all the peaks on the horizon, while admiring the occasional passing butterfly.
On the drive back, I mentally compared the pub owner with a motel owner in an alpine resort an hour further northwest. She runs scent diffusers in all the rooms, despite visitor complaints, because she likes the smell and doesn’t care what customers want. This is what you get off the beaten path – eccentrically selfish business owners.
I wasn’t looking forward to the return to town, where I would get the day’s first view of the current fire. It’s burning down an outlying finger of the crest of the range, about nine miles from the center of town now and still approaching. The forest ahead of it is what I was describing earlier – unburned in historical memory, and drier than anyplace else in the U.S. It’s also roadless, so it can only be fought with air drops, which are only marginally effective.
We’re expecting monsoon rain this week, but thunderstorms include outflow winds which could push the fire in new directions.
