San Francisco Mountains
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, October 25th, 2021: Hikes, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
In my last Dispatch I said life was only going to get harder, and that was an understatement. But 14 months after the fire, I was finally back in my (still under construction) house, and this Sunday, I was determined to resume hiking.
With only one other hike during the past 5 weeks, and my sanity on a cliff’s edge, I didn’t want to pick something brutal. But I didn’t mind driving, so I decided to return to the area a little over an hour and a half away where I’d only done one short exploratory hike last summer. The accessible hikes there didn’t look challenging at all on the map – the one I was targeting today looked like a ten mile round trip with less than 2,000′ of elevation gain – a walk in the park. With the extra driving, I’d hit the trail late, and I figured on doing only a seven hour hike so I could get home before dark.
It’s an extremely “wild” area – an incredibly rugged range of lower mountains on the New Mexico-Arizona border with a small river draining through it. Like our other local mountains, it’s not a distinct range – it’s simply a lower-elevation section of the continuous mountains that run for hundreds of miles across the Southwest. The topography is so convoluted I can’t even make sense of it with a topo map.
From the New Mexico side, a graded gravel road leads into the heart of the area, lined with dirt pull-outs which all seem to be occupied by long-term RV dwellers, folks hiding out from the modern world.
It’s one of the twistiest roads I’ve ever seen, but fortunately my trailhead is only a ten minute drive from the already remote and lonesome highway.
The trail starts in parklike ponderosa forest, following the bank of a now-dry creek which obviously saw some big floods during our monsoon. I saw one boot track during the first hundred yards, but after that I saw no more sign of humans. The trail was being used only by cattle.
A quarter mile in, the creek was running and I ran into five skittish cows, one of which was a longhorn steer. They’d been fouling the creek pretty bad.
Eventually the trail crossed the creek, marked by cairns, and began climbing. It led out of the riparian forest into open pinyon-juniper-oak, where I stopped for a drink and a snack.
Under the tall pines, I’d had my sunglasses hooked on the front of my sweater, which I needed to take off, so I temporarily hung the sunglasses through a loop on the back of my pack. Then I flipped the lid of the pack open (covering the stashed sunglasses), took off my sweater, and stuffed it into the pack. Then I remembered I’d been carrying the sunglasses, and pulled out the sweater to check for them. Not there, so I began scanning the ground around my pack. Damn! This was the second time I’d lost those expensive sunglasses!
I picked up the pack and looked all around it, still not seeing them. So I left the pack and started back down the trail, watching closely on each side. I made it all the way back to the creek and never found them, so I gave up and began climbing again. Damn! All the stress had turned me into a basket case and I was making bad mistakes.
Halfway back to the pack I suddenly remembered where I’d put the sunglasses, and felt like an even bigger idiot. PTSD is no joke, and I’d unknowingly inaugurated the theme of the day: continually getting sidetracked.
Despite feeling like an idiot, I was really excited to be hiking again, especially in this brisk fall weather. It’d been freezing at home when I left town, but the sky was mostly clear with a forecast of 60s in the afternoon.
I was climbing a southern arm of a branching ridge that would eventually lead to my destination, and the first payoff came as I crossed over a small rise and found myself on the brink of a cliff, the head of a small box canyon lined with stratified white conglomerate.
From there, the trail climbed steeply up a south-facing slope toward the main ridge. Twice it dipped through small drainages lined with ponderosa forest, but mostly it was exposed, and the higher it climbed, the rockier it got. I spooked a couple of mule deer and ran into at least a dozen cattle coming down the trail. And as I climbed through the sunlight flies began to swarm my face, which surprised me considering the temperature couldn’t be higher than 60 at that point. Out with the old head net.
But that was a minor inconvenience compared to the trail surface. The final climb to the main ridge was lined with my nemesis, the ankle-wrenching “volcanic cobbles”. This is a surface you can’t avoid – as bad as it is on the trail, it’s even worse off the trail. This had been the surface on my first hike in this area, but for some reason – probably PTSD again – I’d come here in denial, expecting this trail to be different.
At the top, the trail entered more parklike ponderosa forest and began descending the shallow slope of a seemingly endless forested bowl. This area had been heavily grazed, and in the flat bottom of the bowl the trail led through an open gate into a primitive corral. A black calf stood staring at me to the left of the corral, and its mother stood staring on the right.
On the far side of the corral stood a big cairn. From the map I’d expected to find the junction of this trail with the main trail that came up from a campground 3 miles away, but there was only one trail leading on from the corral, and it seemed to be going the wrong direction, southwesterly toward the campground instead of northward up the ridge. Not having any other option, I started down the well-trampled trail, which followed a barbed-wire fence. It didn’t look promising, but maybe it would get better.
Like the previous section of trail, this one also had been used only by cattle. And suddenly it ended in an overgrazed clearing. I scouted around the edge of the clearing, and eventually found a little tread leading into the forest on the far side. I followed this, and it led down into a ravine. I kept going a few hundred yards, and then the tread ended under a juniper. I didn’t think my trail was supposed to go downward at this point, but for some reason I failed to check the map.
I headed back toward the corral, and a hundred yards from it I saw another trail branching off, with a cairn. I was now completely confused, but I followed the branch, and soon came to an old signpost, on the bank of a deep gully across from the corral. Now I understood. The trail I’d been following was indeed the trail from the campground, and this was the junction. But it still wasn’t clear where to go from here. A small gully led down from the north, and a much-trampled trail continued northeast through the forest. I couldn’t see any evidence that the gully had ever been a trail, so I started up the trampled trail.
This led into the small valley of a dry creek, and after a quarter of a mile it petered out. It was nothing but another cattle trail.
I finally decided to check my map. Fortunately I was never confused about directions – I had a watch, and my shadow showed which way was north. The map clearly showed that the hiking trail led due north from the junction at the corral, climbing straight up the next slope of the ridge.
On my way back to the junction, I glimpsed a gap sawn through a fallen log, a hundred feet away in the forest to the north. Finally, sign of a trail! I returned to the junction and sighted up the little gully toward the log gap. Apparently the gully had been the trail at one point, so I started up it.
I was actually trying this trail because the Forest Service website had a map showing “cleared trails” in this area, and as I recalled, this trail was listed as having been cleared only two years ago. But that clearly wasn’t true. I’d hiked trails near home that had been abandoned for almost a decade and were in much better shape than this.
I was beginning to confirm a suspicion about this area. There’s almost no information on the hiking trails here – they’re simply omitted from most topo maps, and none of them is featured on the crowd-sourced hiking websites. The Forest Service map I looked at shows an extensive network of trails, but there are no descriptions available anywhere, and no record of anyone ever hiking here. From a hiker’s point of view, this area is Terra Incognita – which has a certain attraction to me.
The trail had been easy to follow to the corral, but from here on it barely existed. If I hadn’t already spent the past year bushwhacking and routefinding, I simply wouldn’t have been able to get any farther without GPS. And I suspect that even GPS wouldn’t show these trails.
There was no tread past the log gap, but I saw a blaze on a ponderosa up ahead. Past that I simply climbed straight up the gentle slope, where the ponderosa forest ended and pinyon-juniper-oak resumed. From the trail I’d hiked last summer I knew the way would sometimes be hinted at by a “corridor” through the open woodland, but an open woodland is full of natural corridors, so it can be impossible to figure out which are man-made.
Across clearings, I followed what seemed to be hints of bare ground, but there was precious little bare ground among the hard-to-walk-on volcanic cobbles. Suddenly I came upon an old dry-rotted tree branch laid between two rocks perpendicular to my path. This is the kind of thing trail-builders use to control erosion, but here it was set up on level ground. I could only interpret it as some unfamiliar kind of trail marker.
In addition to the perpendicular tree branches, I sometimes found small, almost random-looking cairns, which encouraged me to keep going. I was getting higher on the ridge, so I sometimes had views of the surrounding landscape. It remained confusing, but I did recognize the peak I’d seen from the other trail, with a fire lookout on top.
I often found myself without any clear path forward, and had to stop and scout around for clues, so it was slow going. I had little hope of reaching my destination now, and was starting to despair. This whole place was overgrazed and littered with cowshit, and clearly wasn’t maintained for hikers. And my pants were collecting the nasty burrs of cosmos, which carpeted the ground nearly waist-high.
Midway up the ridge, I was following a little stretch of tread when I reached a dead end below a bank dense with vegetation. I turned left and spotted a big cairn in a clearing up a short slope, so I headed up that way, although there was no trail visible. Then I had to spend some time scouting which way to continue.
The perpendicular branches seemed the most consistent trail markers, but they were often so primitive they were easy to miss, and there was seldom any other sign of a trail nearby.
Nevertheless, I eventually found myself heading toward a distinctive, conical, rock-topped peak. I assumed this was my destination – I recalled there was another trail junction on the lower slope of this peak, with branches leading east and west. So now I was motivated to keep going.
Several false starts later, I reached the base of the peak, and immediately, instead of a junction, found a clear trail that appeared to traverse through ponderosa and fir forest around the peak to the northeast. This was not at all what I’d expected, but it was such a clear trail I followed it anyway. I was now close to 8,000′, which was about the highest I would get in this area.
The trail still didn’t show any recent use, but it was such a relief to be on an easy trail that I kept going until it curved around to the north, clearly skirting the side of the peak. Finally I got my map out again, and found that my destination was still farther ahead. On the north side of the rocky peak, there lay a long series of saddles that formed a bridge to the base of a higher ridge, where hopefully I would find my junction.
I was now officially out of time. It had taken me so long to find my way here, if I turned back now, I still wouldn’t get home before dark. But I was so tantalizingly close, there was no way I could turn back yet. I just had to reach that junction. On the other hand, I was beginning to suspect my original estimate of distance and elevation for this hike was way off.
Now knowing how to interpret the signs, I was doing pretty well until I reached the base of the high ridge. There I was stumped by a small clearing with no apparent way forward. I found the remains of an ancient campfire, and after 15 minutes of scouting finally decided to climb over some deadfall and continue up through dense forest. Another corridor opened up, and another, and suddenly I came upon the junction signpost. It showed my overall one-way distance as 7 miles – two miles farther than expected – and made even farther by all the sidetracks and false leads.
It now appeared I couldn’t get back home before 8:30 – but I didn’t care. I felt great, and I was so pleased to get here that I didn’t even really want to head back.
Despite being at the base of a ridge, less than 8,000′ in elevation, the junction was sort of on the rim of the whole area, but although I was able to get occasional long views, trees generally got in the way.
I expected the return hike to be easier now I knew the way, but it was just as hard to routefind in reverse. I got lost several times, pursuing sidetracks down open hillsides and tight gullies, adding hundreds of yards and dozens of vertical feet to my hike. I stopped a lot to take pictures, but walked fast in between, despite the perilous footing on the rocks, and it took exactly two hours to reach the corral.
There I could see what had happened to the old trail – it had been cut by a deep erosional gully, like a little canyon, right next to the corral.
Next to the corral were two cows and two calves, all black. When they saw me, they stupidly ran into the corral, where they panicked and proceeded to run in frantic circles, until one cow and her calf jumped over the fence. The other cow seemed to believe her calf couldn’t make it over, so the two of them kept circling, as I stood still next to the open gate. The cow finally got up the courage to rush out the gate, and the calf followed.
I continued up out of the bowl, and at the top, again lost the trail and made a false turn. I was headed down the wrong ridge in the setting sunlight when I suddenly realized I was lost, turned back, and easily found the right trail. It could’ve been a bad scene after sundown, miles from my vehicle in unfamiliar forest…
But it got worse. When I finally reached the creek bottom, the trail ended at the bank and everything looked unfamiliar. I knew this had to be the right creek, but there was simply no trail, and no marked creek crossing. I scouted around for several minutes, and finally crossed the creek and climbed the opposite bank, where I found myself in another primitive corral, which I’d never seen before. It was getting dark and now I was really worried. Where the hell was I?
I crossed the corral and kept going down the left bank of the creek, but there was simply no trail here. I could see a narrow cattle trail on the opposite bank, so I dropped into the creek and climbed up the steep bank. I continued down the creek on the cattle trail, completely confused, and suddenly came upon the original trail, cutting down the slope from above. Ahead, I could see a cairn marking the creek crossing I’d taken this morning. Like so many times today, cattle trails had led me off my hiking trail, but I’d finally found it again.
On the long drive back in the dark, I devoted myself to putting together a recipe for the easy but delicious dinner I was going to cook when I got home. And the next day, when I calculated the actual mileage and elevation for my hike, I found that including all the sidetracks and mistakes, the distance and elevation gain had been 50% more than expected. So despite the frustration and stress, I was pleased with that as well.
Friday, June 21st, 2024: Hikes, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
For over twenty years I faithfully performed a personal ritual on the winter and summer solstices, inspired by the sweat lodge ceremony at the end of my 1990 field course in aboriginal skills. Then, health issues and family obligations began to interfere.
But I still try to be mindful of the solstices, wherever I happen to be, whatever else I have to do on those days and nights.
This year, I had a commitment the night before, preventing me from rising before dawn and traveling to a place where I could observe the sunrise. After a long hiatus from hiking, I’d found a hinged knee brace in my closet from an injury many years ago, and wanted to see if it would enable me to start hiking again. I really wanted to get out in the wilderness, but all of our nearby wilderness areas are mountainous, and I needed to minimize the elevation gain on this trial run.
I finally decided to try a secret trail over near the Arizona border. I’d discovered this trail on the Forest Service’s website last year, while looking up another trail in the same area. The secret trail is shown nowhere else, and when I tried to retrieve the Forest Service map on this solstice eve, I discovered that they’ve removed the map feature from their website. The only map I could find that shows this trail is in an obscure internal Forest Service study that I dug up online in PDF form.
The trail starts at a pair of electric power transmission towers, in a remote, unpopulated spot a mile off a lonely highway. Despite being omitted from public maps, it has an old trailhead kiosk, literally on the wilderness boundary. But this is a relatively small wilderness area, so remote and obscure that even the published parts of it see very little visitation.
Except for cattle. I’d first checked out the trailhead last winter during a rainstorm, and discovered that because the trail is a secret, the only current users are cattle – which should theoretically not even be in a wilderness area.
Not far past the kiosk is a fence and a gate – I guess it keeps the cattle in the wilderness from mixing with the cattle outside.
And in all fairness, the habitat inside the wilderness area looks really healthy.
The transmission towers stand on a low peak with a view west over the entire wilderness area, which encompasses an expanse of mid-elevation ridges and canyons ending at a high mountain on the state line. The canyon bottoms dip as low as 5,500 feet, and the ridges rise to 8,000 feet on the west side.
Big cumulus clouds were forming and shifting around in the blue sky, high winds were forecast, and I expected the temperature in the canyon bottoms to approach 90 in late afternoon. The hard-to-find map shows the trail leading over a series of ridges, down and up and finally down into a northwest-trending canyon, where it follows the canyon bottom for a couple miles before joining a much longer trail. I was dreading the heat and was hoping the canyon bottom would feature a canopy of shade trees.
By the time I reached the far side of the ridges and could glimpse the canyon I was heading for, it appeared that the knee brace was useless. The secret trail turned out to be in really good shape – because of heavy cattle use over the years – but the grades were steep and rocky and I had to take short steps to protect my knee.
Cattle sign was actually pretty sparse, and thankfully at least a month old.
Finally I reached the canyon bottom, where I was surprised to find both big sycamores and a few big ponderosa pines, which are normally found at much higher elevations. But the canyon bottom turned out to be wide and sandy, with virtually no shade.
Despite being kept a secret by the Forest Service, the trail was well marked with big cairns. As the canyon twisted back and forth like a snake, the trail continued upstream, crossing and recrossing the wide dry wash, keeping mostly up on the bank in the sandy floodplain. It was bright and hot in that canyon, but the farther I went, the more the floodplain filled in with trees – oaks, willows, walnuts, two species of junipers, pinyon pine, sycamores, and a few ponderosas – so I eventually got some patches of shade.
Farther up, some pools of stagnant water remained in the creekbed. And on the now-shady floodplain, I finally emerged in a clearing, noticed a crude wire fence at my right, and turned to see an old log corral tucked back in a dense grove of trees. And when I turned forward again and walked across the clearing to study where the trail led from here, I saw the bull.
He almost looked like a brahma, but was probably some kind of Angus, and was hornless like most of the bulls in this region. Standing in the shade below trees at the edge of the bank, he was staring at me, so I started talking to him. After a while he turned away and resumed grazing. What to do?
The last bull I’d seen had let me walk past him, but that was in an area with frequent campers and hikers. This bull had probably seldom, if ever, seen humans. The canyon is really wide at this point – another big canyon joins it from the west, so I couldn’t easily detour to my left. I decided to try climbing the right slope and traversing above the bull, because there was a wall of dense vegetation between him and that slope.
Bad idea. I made an effort to be really quiet, but he either heard or saw me through the trees, and began bellowing angrily, again and again, while crashing directly up through the forest toward me.
I immediately turned around and began traversing back across the slope, hoping to get the fence and corral between me and him. The bellowing and crashing stopped, but dense vegetation still separated us, and he could’ve been crossing the clearing toward me, so I kept escaping as quickly and quietly as I could, re-entering the riparian forest downstream from the corral. It was like an obstacle course, but I was motivated.
About a half mile down the canyon, as I was rejoining the trail on the bank above the big dry wash, a terrifying, angry noise exploded out of the canopy on the other side. It was much louder than the first bull and sounded like some legendary monster out of the time of the gods in a Greek myth. It had to be another bull, but I’d never heard anything like it. I couldn’t see him, but he must’ve seen me.
The only thing I could do was keep fleeing down the canyon and hope that would satisfy the invisible monster. I skipped the crossings and stuck to my side, and before I knew it I was at the base of the trail up the slope.
Now it was sweltering, there was no shade, my knee was hurting, and the trail was really steep. So I took it slow, with short steps and frequent stops, and as I climbed, the wind blew stronger – that was the only thing that saved me. Somehow I made it back to the peak with the transmission towers.
I guess this is payback for failing to perform the solstice ritual…
Vista Home or Desperate Lookout?
Monday, October 28th, 2024: Hikes, Indigenous Cultures, San Francisco Mountains, Society, Southwest New Mexico.
I drove two-and-a-quarter hours to the most spectacular viewpoint in our region, and climbed a rocky slope to a prehistoric site. My knee was already hurting from a hike three days earlier, and today’s adventure would add insult to injury. But these are desperate times.
Yet again, we had clear skies and the afternoon high in town was forecast to be at least 80. I’d wanted to explore places at lower elevation but they were forecast to reach 90 – at the end of October! Today’s destination is over 7,000 feet and the temps should be mild.
The drive north used to be one of the loneliest roads in the U.S., but in the past year it’s become some sort of mysterious commuter artery. From where to where, I have no idea, but this morning, most of the southbound vehicles were giant RVs. Tomorrow was forecast to be the last day of our fall heat wave, and it’s as if all the snowbirds decided to head south at the same time.
Finally, I reached the turnoff for the backcountry road west, and left the crowd behind. The single-lane dirt road traverses a maze of ridges and canyons between 6,000 and 6,500 feet, forested with ponderosa pine and Gamble oak, up and down around hairpin turns. RVs, fifth-wheelers, and pickups with camper shells were sporadically tucked away under the pines, and I passed at least one group of camo-clad hunters setting up camp.
The final climb to the high saddle is world-class, emerging from the rolling basin to a south-facing slope with forever views. Parking at the top, I had a chat with a retired couple from the village an hour south. I said this is an undiscovered gem, and they replied “Not anymore!”
As they drove off, I set out on my short hike up to the bluffs. I expected it to be less than half a mile, but the slope gets increasingly steeper and the ground is covered with big sharp rocks. This cliff dwelling is actually marked on Google Maps, but the person who recorded it only viewed it from afar with binoculars. From the road, it looks inaccessible, perched in an alcove way up in a sheer cliff. But you never know until you try.
Picking my way through those rocks was even harder than I expected. But cattle had been all over this area, and I followed their tracks where I could, walking slowly and carefully to protect my knee. At several points I had to climb steep sheets of exposed bedrock, lined with loose rocks that were constantly rolling out from under me. I was ascending an outlying shoulder with a deepening ravine at my left, and I could see that when I reached the foot of the actual bluffs I would need to traverse left up the steep side of the ravine toward the cliff dwelling.
Finally I emerged on a ledge below the bluffs with a 180-degree view of the eastern, southern, and western landscape.
The ledge lies at 7,500 feet and the ravine at my left hosts tall ponderosas and a dense understory of shrubs and grasses hiding bigger and sharper rocks – basically a vegetated talus slope. I had to traverse this upward at the foot of the bluffs – more slow going – but found occasional segments of a narrow trail. I’d entertained fantasies of being the first modern human to explore this site, and still hadn’t seen any footprints.
Finally I emerged from the scrub at the foot of the cliff, with the crumbling wall of the prehistoric structure about twenty feet above me, behind an overhang. The cliff curved outward at right, where a partial, primitive rope ladder was suspended, a dozen feet above the ground. I walked closer and saw it was made from nylon rope.
Pushing my way through more brush around the crumbling foot of the bluff, I discovered there was no way up the cliff. The prehistoric structure is inaccessible until someone finds a way to extend or replace that rope ladder. But below the hanging ladder is a small alcove with a sandy floor covered with recent footprints, and at the back of the alcove I found a tin box full of notes from previous visitors, as recent as six days ago. So much for my romantic fantasy.
When I first explored cliff dwellings in Utah 35 years ago, they seemed so exotic, and their locations so beautiful, that I didn’t really question why they’d been built or what life might’ve been like for their residents. It took decades of hard lessons for me to realize these were last-ditch hideouts for desperate people living in constant fear of attack – the prehistoric equivalent of today’s doomsday preppers. They were likely only inhabited briefly during times of known threat.
The wall above me had been incredibly hard to build, and has tiny windows that would be perfect for shooting arrows through. Unless there’s a spring inside the alcove – highly unlikely – whoever was using the shelter would have to traverse down a mile and 900 vertical feet to the nearest seasonal stream for water, and carry their supplies back up that difficult slope. To me, this appeared to be a lookout, from which scouts could scan a vast area of strategic terrain on a route between fertile river valleys in the east and west.
Now came the hard part – the descent of that difficult slope on my already hurting knee. When I reached the ledge below the bluffs, I saw another man approaching, and we exchanged waves as I moved to the side to get a better panorama.
Farther down, descending one of those stone sheets lined with loose rock, I finally stumbled and had a “soft” fall that hurt nothing but my already injured knee. Served me right – I would just end up taking more pain pills and enduring a slower recovery.
Late lunch in the tiny county seat to the north was so mediocre that despite my hunger, I couldn’t finish it. And the drive home on that previously lonely road was made stressful by an endless series of city people in Japanese sedans, tailgating me, imagining themselves race drivers on the tight, steep curves. Where did they come from, and where were they all going?
Monday, March 3rd, 2025: Hikes, Nature, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
Another trip back east meant it had been two and a half weeks since my last hike. Doc and I had agreed on a three-month rehab program for my knee, starting with 2-mile hikes and gradually working up. I’d done this before, and it’s not easy – two-mile walks don’t justify driving into the mountains, but it’s hard to get excited about walking around town.
Especially on Sunday, the day of my big wilderness hikes.
This weekend, I had a second goal – a thorough road test of the upgraded suspension and much bigger tires on my Sidekick. So I was looking for a short hike accessed by a road trip combining as many different conditions as possible, while minimizing the risk of hitting a deer and wiping out my investment.
Northwest turned out to be the only viable direction, toward the remote, rugged, little-known area I’ve been trying to explore during the past year. Since a two-mile hike lasts only an hour, and the round-trip drive was likely to take four, I needed a lunch plan, and the northwest trip offered three options, only two of which I’d tried already.
I compiled a list of eight short hikes along that route, most of which used the first mile of much longer wilderness trails I’d hiked many times before. The last and farthest hike depended on an abandoned trail that might or might not be passable, over and around a remote mountain I’d been obsessing over for years. It’s the high point of a small range rising amid terrain so rugged the peak tends to get lost and ignored by outsiders driving the highway across its shoulder. Surrounding peaks get in the way so it’s hard to even see the summit of this range from afar.
I’d driven the steep, rocky forest road, which climbs to within 200 vertical feet of the 8,970 foot summit, and I’d fallen in love with the views and the dark, spooky forest of firs and aspens that lines its deep, narrow canyons, where trees often fall and block the road for days or weeks. I assumed the road would normally be closed in winter, but this winter had been the driest in memory so I didn’t expect snow.
When I got up to start breakfast, I saw three deer in my backyard – two does and a yearling. By the time I headed out with my gear, they’d made themselves at home in a patch of sunlight. Better here than on the road, I figured.
Yet another sunny day with clear skies and a high forecast in the 60s.
There are dozens of options for a short hike – one main reason I’d picked this trip was because it combined high-speed highway, twisty mountain road, and rocky backcountry road to give the new suspension a workout. It adds a 2-1/2 inch lift, which was immediately noticeable in a number of ways: wind noise, buffeting in a cross-wind, loss of power on grades. I had to work the steering wheel more than before. But I soon got used to most of those changes, and had brought my headphones to cancel the noise.
Stock, this vehicle comes with excellent handling, so even with the modifications it still handles quite well. And my initial impressions about loss of power were disproved later in the day. The ultimate test will be the long, steep grade on I-40 west of Flagstaff.
The forest road to the summit did turn out to be open, but as usual, six or eight trees had recently fallen across it, then had been pushed or dragged to the side by other travelers. Since it’s regularly maintained, the road’s never been a challenge for the Sidekick, but the upgrades give me confidence that was always lacking before.
One of many neat features of this range is its sprawling summit plateau at 8,600 feet, with parklike ponderosa forest, grassy meadows, and not a single man-made structure apart from the old trailhead kiosk. This may be one of the least-developed mountain ranges in the U.S.
The map shows the hiking trail following an abandoned road that dead-ends just east of the summit, and from there, following a long ridge south toward a remote trail junction I’d bushwhacked to a few years ago. None of the trails in this area are maintained, and this trail is shown as a dotted line, meaning it may no longer even exist. I figured if it wasn’t passable I’d drive back south to one of the other options.
What I found was one of the worst burn scars I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t noticed it from the forest road, or the highway below, because firefighters defended the corridors, and lower peaks block a view of this summit ridge. The fire occurred in 2018 and was limited to the summit ridges and plateau of this tiny range, but it burned as intensely as any I’d found in our region.
Deadfall, blowdown, and thorny regrowth blocked the trail almost continuously, and in several cases had to be detoured around. I was only able to fight my way through because enough tread remained for cattle to follow – there was no evidence of other hikers going this way since the fire, and the cattle had become my trailblazers.
After an hour and a half, when faced with yet another solid thicket of thorns, I gave up. One thing I love about this range is its steep slopes, dropping abruptly to canyon bottoms two thousand feet below, so if you can see through the trees you get spectacular views. The burn scar did give me good views to north and south, but if I wanted to hike this trail farther someday, I would need a machete.
As usual, on the way back to the trailhead I paid more attention to details of habitat. I was particularly impressed by the color range of a native ground cover with holly-like leaves. I’d surely seen it before, but in this winter burn scar it was the most colorful thing in the landscape. And although this range doesn’t have much exposed rock, the loss of trees had revealed strange, isolated, stratified dolmen-like outcrops.
It ended up taking me over two hours to hike a mile and a half, and it was time for lunch, in the village a half hour down the highway. The three eateries that are open Sundays close at 2 pm, 3 pm, and 7 pm, and I’d never arrived early enough to try the first – which turned out to be the best. This is the historic heart of anti-government and pro-Trump sentiment, but the cafe was playing 60s psychedelic music, and when I was the last diner left at closing time, the bearded chef, his hair in long braided pigtails, brought out a slice of cheesecake “on the house”. First time I’d had one of my favorite desserts in years, maybe decades.
Since I still had a hour or more left for hiking, my plan was to do one of the partial hikes on my list on the way south. On the way back from the village, I spotted the burned ridge I’d hiked in the morning, peeking from behind intervening mountains – the first time I’d ever been able to identify this range from a distance in this dense, confusing mountain landscape.
The trail I’d picked for the afternoon hike is well-maintained, and one of the most spectacular in our region. The first stretch climbs above a vast grassy mesa, one of our most distinctive landscape features.
Combined with the morning bushwhack, the day’s hikes ended up totaling three and a half miles, and I could tell my knee would be complaining that night. My body and soul crave the mileage and elevation, so this two-mile thing is going to be hard to stick to.
When I got home just after sunset, one doe and her fawn were still in my backyard, so I chased them out, and they crossed the wide street to my neighbor’s small front yard, surrounded by a hedge. These seem to be strictly urban deer now – a whole new breed, comfortable around people, thriving on pavement, surrounded by city traffic, more than a mile from undeveloped habitat. Dystopia is no longer a fantasy of the future.
