2026 Trips
Completing the Circumnavigation
Monday, March 2nd, 2026: 2026 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
All the treatments that were supposed to be helping my shoulder pain were just making it worse. I had to be in the city Tuesday morning for an MRI, but driving is another thing that hurts the shoulder, and I didn’t want to get up early, rush the three-hour drive, and then drive right back for an entire day of pain and discomfort.
Meanwhile, I needed to get out in nature on Sunday, as a replacement for my usual hike. So after studying the map and driving times, I decided to break the city drive up into stages. The first stage would be exploring the southern end of the sky island that I’ve hiked so many times from the north.
The northeast part, where I’ve hiked all the trails many times, is world-famous for its big interior basin surrounded by spectacular cliffs, caves, and waterfalls. The northwest part has thousands of anthropomorphic stone pinnacles protected in a national monument. I’d already hiked into the southeastern and western parts of the range, slightly less spectacular but still beautiful. What I hadn’t seen, because it’s the farthest from home, is the interior basin at the southwest end of the range, where the map shows half a dozen trails leading to canyons, ridges, caverns, and rock formations with intriguing names.
We’re in the middle of a late-winter heat wave. The high in the 4,000-foot basins was forecast to exceed 90. I set off in late morning under mostly clear skies with scattered high, thin clouds. Even from 25 miles away, I was surprised to see snow remaining on north slopes above 8,000 feet. I stopped in the mouth of the northeast canyon for lunch, took a pain pill, then headed south toward Mexico.
It was only then that I suddenly felt a weight metaphorically lift from my sore shoulder. On the open road with virtually no traffic, exploring new territory, facing a couple of days with no obligations, my mind and heart returned to the days of my youth, when carefree road trips with friends and lovers regularly set us free from the stresses of city life: finding work, submitting to authorities, struggling to pay rent and bills, getting abused and ripped off by those worse off than us.
The remote region along the border features vast high-desert basins with cattle ranches dating back 150 years, where Geronimo surrendered in 1886 and smugglers and illegal immigrants now stream north in the dark of night. I’d driven this highway once, more than twenty years ago, but now I studied the south end of the sky island with eyes newly informed by my intimate knowledge of the rest of the range. From the highway, it looked only slightly less rugged than the cliffs of the northeast.
I was looking for a dirt ranch road that leads to the interior basin. The road I found was as wide as a boulevard, smooth-graded, and absolutely straight for miles.
Then it made a dogleg past a big ranch compound, dipped across a dry creekbed – where it clearly washes out in any decent rain – and entered what I believed was my planned destination, the interior basin. Except that the beautiful, rocky hills surrounding it were not the high mountains shown on my map.
Later, I realized that the big valley I reached first drains a completely separate watershed, and the road I took north from the highway mainly accesses that first valley, which is spectacular in its own right, and features intriguing trails I hadn’t even considered. Thus, I ended up discovering two spectacular interior basins for the price of one.
Here, the road got narrower and rougher and meandered back and forth, up and down at an elevation of about 5,500 feet past those beautiful rocky peaks that loomed 2,000 feet higher. And eventually, at the north end of this first basin, the road crested in a saddle.
Imagine my excitement when I reached that pass and first glimpsed the forested crest of the range on the other side! I could even identify the 9,400-foot peak with the old fire lookout that I’d climbed in December, from a canyon on the west side. But the road snaked down a shallow north slope where forest mostly blocked my view.
I’d never adequately studied the topo map, and was surprised to find that this second interior basin actually drains west. Where the road passed above gullies, they all held rushing creeks, which surprised me after such a dry winter. I should’ve realized that in the current heat wave, this represented the spring runoff from rapidly melting snow on the crest.
Nearing the bottom of the basin, I passed a big fenced meadow which I knew would feature the ruins of a 19-century Army post. Neither of these big interior basins is occupied now – they appear totally wild from the road. But although the surrounding slopes are designated wilderness, the basins themselves are grazed by small, widely separated herds of cattle.
At the mouth of the interior basin, my road joined the main road that accesses the basin from the west. On that road, I crossed the big creek and headed up its canyon to see how far I would get. All six of the trailheads I was looking for are accessed from this road, but I knew that catastrophic flooding after the 2011 wildfire had destroyed the upper end of the road, and I hadn’t been able to find out exactly where the road is closed.
On this beautiful Sunday afternoon, with temperatures here much more pleasant than in the low valleys and towns outside the mountains, I’d passed only two vehicles in the past hour. I could see one party in the campground above the creek crossing, and I passed another party at the crossing of a tributary creek coming down from the north. So much water here on the south side of the range – far more than I’d seen in the north!
I passed a big sign saying “Beware of Bears!”, an abandoned ranger station, then a debris flow where flooding had filled a former lake with white rocks. And finally, as the canyon narrowed below rimrock high above, I saw concrete barriers blocking the road ahead.
A small city SUV was parked in front of the barriers, and as I passed it to turn around, I saw a guy sitting behind the vehicle, reading a book. I turned around, parked at a discreet distance, and walked over with the map I’d printed out, showing the roads and trailheads.
He said he’d hiked the canyon trail from here a couple of times, describing it to me, and I said this was my first visit here, mentioning I’d climbed the peak above from the west side a couple months ago. He appeared be in his 30s, and I noticed he was reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov. I realized the temperature was perfect – it felt like the high 60s here in the shade of the creekside oaks and sycamores, which in contrast to 90 in the nearest towns felt like heaven.
But this guy was literally sitting in the road, wedged between the tailgate of his vehicle and the ugly concrete barriers. I wondered why he hadn’t parked somewhere off the road – there were a couple of informal campsites in the oaks above where I’d turned around. I asked how long he was staying and he said he would camp in this canyon for a few days.
Then some kind of rock-crawling side-by-side ute carrying a couple of middle-aged women growled up, followed by a pickup with teenagers riding in the bed, and this choice of peaceful sites for reading European literary classics seemed even less wise.
I’d passed a couple of side roads that my map shows as access to other trailheads, but the online trail guide says these roads are washed out and may be impassable. It was all so beautiful and intriguing, it was hard to leave, but I wasn’t prepared for camping in bear habitat and wanted to reach town before dark, so I returned west on the main road down the canyon.
The creek was running all the way out of the range. And for the first time, I got a close look at a small but impressively rugged freestanding range to the southwest. This range is mostly surrounded by private land and has no roads or trails, which makes it all the more intriguing.
Finally I reached the long, mostly straight paved highway up the big agricultural basin between sky islands, leading to the sleepy, half-dead town on the interstate and the end of my day of exploration.
Bears or not, if I’m ever able to hike again, I’m going to have to find a way to explore the south end of that sky island – now that I know it’s beautiful on all sides, and much less traveled away from the famous north end.
