Dragoons
Tuesday, November 4th, 2025: Dragoons, Hikes, Nature, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
Saturday morning. I was in Tucson, at the quiet, secluded courtyard hotel, in a residential neighborhood next to a huge park, where I’ve been staying on occasional visits for almost 20 years. Friday had been a miserable marathon of urban driving, traffic, looking for and failing to find solutions for my 18-month-long knee injury and my declining mom’s 14-month-long housing, care, and treatment crisis. The day had ended with four hours of tearful empathizing with caregivers and children of declining elders, leaving me an emotional wreck.
I’d left home Thursday afternoon hoping to make a mini-vacation out of this trip, but now that I really needed it, I was scheduled to check out of this peaceful retreat and make the three-hour drive home amid convoys of oblivious tractor-trailer rigs and Texans in giant pickup trucks seething with incipient road rage.
I couldn’t justify another expensive day and night in the city. My health was already suffering from the stress of driving, and my fitness had been set back, missing two workouts and a midweek hike at home. But the next day, Sunday, was the day of my longer weekly hike. What if I split the drive home into two short segments, stopping along the way to explore hiking areas I’d been researching for years? These are areas that are too far from home for a day hike, but nagging because I pass them regularly on longer trips.
My one feeble attempt at vacation life was breakfast at Hotel Congress downtown, a legendary hipster hangout which seems to have been colonized by retired tourists.
The first stop on my return trip was a relatively small mountain range that straddles the interstate highway. The interstate climbs to a pass in the small northern part of the range, where spectacular granite boulders remind me of my beloved Mojave Desert. But the larger southern part of the range has the hiking trails, branching out from what I’d always assumed was some sort of park or monument.
The long, lonely drive south from the interstate, past vacation homes and hobby ranches hidden in desert scrub, changed from paved to gravel when it turned toward the mountains. Spectacular granite cliffs rose straight ahead, so I pulled off the wide gravel road for a photo. Returning to the Sidekick, I noticed a vehicle approaching to pass me.
Driving at high speed on the wrong side of the road, it was a small Japanese sedan. I pulled out and followed it, trying to figure out what the driver was doing so far to the left. Sometimes on a dirt or gravel road where there’s no traffic, you drive on the wrong side to avoid potholes or washboard, but this road was both wide and smoothly graded. The car ahead continued to race away on the wrong side of the road, and when other vehicles approached, it would pull over briefly, then return to the other side.
When we reached a 90-degree bend at the foot of the mountains, the wrong-side driver suddenly pulled over to let me pass, and I saw that it was an old man with long hair and a stringy beard, looking distracted. I continued south into a narrow valley between granite cliffs on my right and low hills lined with oak and juniper to the east. Instead of a park or monument, I passed small rustic homes and ranches, crossing and recrossing a dry creekbed, until the road dead-ended in a small Forest Service campground in the shade of giant boulders and venerable oaks. There, I studied my map and learned that I’d already passed the parking area for a short trail up a boulder-lined slope, so I drove back, parked next to a small city SUV, and set off up the trail.
I had no expectations for today’s hike – I just wanted to get a feel for the area. I was exhausted and depressed after my failed city trip, but the climb, winding steeply through narrow gaps between boulders, reminded me so much of the Mojave, it felt like I’d been temporarily transported far away from my crushing problems.
I could see a saddle on the crest about a thousand feet above, but my map showed the trail ending a couple hundred feet below it. Tracks showed this was a popular trail, and I knew there was a party ahead of me. But after the first quarter mile I spotted a boulder pile to the right of the trail with a promising-looking hollow underneath. And crawling inside, I found pictographs.
As I said, I’d studied this area in advance, and although I hadn’t seen anything about pictographs, I remembered reading something about an “Indian trail”. This must be it! When I rejoined the trail, I discovered steps cut into the rock leading upward – steps that looked suspiciously non-Colonial. It may now be worth mentioning that this “rugged natural fortress” was the headquarters and refuge for Apache chief Cochise.
I found the next alcove with pictographs hidden in a bigger boulder pile above the first one.
Fully sensitized, I scouted farther afield, and immediately found another rockshelter containing a big sheet of plastic, under which someone had left a sleeping bag and sleeping mat. Sand had washed down over it, showing it had been there for a while. Who had left it, and why? The cliffs and boulders should be attracting climbers, but I had a hard time imagining them driving to this remote spot, far from the nearest city, then leaving valuable gear in such an exposed spot right off the trail. It looked more like the stash of a homeless person than that of a yuppie.
I continued, checking every likely rockshelter, and soon found another stash – this time a single backpacking pad laid loosely under an overhang just off the trail. What’s going on here – road-trippers walking a few hundred yards up the trail, spending a night, then abandoning their gear?
Right about then I heard the other party, a couple of guys, talking somewhere high above the trail. I never saw them, but I soon came upon a big ledge across the main drainage, where a thin stream of runoff had filled a small rock pool. The view was spectacular, and still tired, I decided to make this my endpoint and return to the vehicle.
Approaching the stone steps near the first pictograph site, I heard voices, and suddenly came upon a tall, attractive couple in their 20s, dressed and outfitted like they had just stepped out of an upscale suburban fitness center pumping loud techno. I smiled and greeted them, but they both frowned at me – trained not to smile at strangers, dismissive of older people, or just having a lover’s spat? I asked if they’d seen the pictographs, and I had to rephrase the question a couple of times before the bearded young man uttered a curt “Yes”, still frowning.
I wished them a good day, and returning to the parking area I found their immaculate, late-model 4-door Jeep Wrangler lifted on big AT tires. Clear evidence of progress – at their age I’d been dressed in thrift-shop castoffs, driving a 15-year-old, battered and oxidized VW Beetle.