Santa Ritas
Wednesday, July 1st, 2026: Hikes, Santa Ritas, Southeast Arizona.
After my ordeal back east, I was in a big Southwestern city letting other people cook and clean for me. I’d gone two weeks without a hike, but it was the hottest time of the year, and the only truly high-elevation hikes – 8,000 feet and above – were concentrated in a small area directly accessible from the vast metro area. I’d waited for a weekday, but online trip reports for weekdays mentioned overflowing trailhead parking, crowds at saddles, and climbers using power drills to drive bolts inside wilderness areas. Of course you have to buy a permit to park anywhere on the mountain, but it’s not like that solves the problem. This is what cities do to both nature and society – overwhelm natural habitats with their insatiable demand, while exacerbating the social cost.
A server in the restaurant mentioned the famous canyon in the slightly more remote mountain range to the south. She said it was less crowded, but I’d been there, and a map check showed all the trails starting in the tourist village at the end of the paved road, below 5,500 feet. I guess people who live below 2,500 feet consider that high-elevation, but it was still going to end up subjecting me to afternoon temps in the 90s, on heavily-used trails with western exposure.
I kept studying the maps, and finally found a trail on the much more remote eastern side – accessed by a rough dirt road – that appeared to get me to the 8,000 foot crest with just the right distance and elevation gain. According to Google Maps, the driving time would be only 15 minutes more than the crowded options. And according to the Arizona hiking website, nobody had reported hiking it in June since 2008.
I’d only seen the eastern side of the range once before, in winter 2002 on my first trip scouting for a community to relocate to from the Bay Area. A friend in the nearby city had taken me to see a quaint village southeast of the range, and on the way, pointed out some special high-desert native grasslands.
Now, as a twenty-year native of the region, I saw more. Where the highway south left the Interstate, I saw a vast, fairly recent suburb climbing to the foothills of a small but scenic range that topped out just over 6,000 feet. Pulling over and getting out to access something in back, I found that here, only 1,500 feet higher than the city, it was significantly cooler, with a sweeping view and only a half-hour commute. The wonders and blessings of suburban sprawl.
In a high-speed train of tailgaters, the highway looped through grassy hills over a low pass where I got my first view of the crest I was hoping to reach. Down into a valley where I found and turned west on the canyon road, dotted with dispersed campsites, and eventually to a huge ranch with expensive infrastructure and different breeds of cattle and horses in different pastures, and seemingly embedded in the ranch, something called “Boulder Crest Foundation” with a fancy iron gate and new, imposing residential buildings.
Past there, the graded gravel road became rough and rocky. The maps and other info I’d studied all disagreed on where the road ended and the trail began – apparently a road used to continue up the canyon to an abandoned mine – so I was surprised to find the road suddenly dead-ending at a dry creek crossing, with a definitively signed trailhead and gate.
At 9:30 am, despite the remoteness, a well-maintained late-model 4Runner had beaten me to the trailhead. The elevation here is just below 5,800 feet, nearly as high as my home, and the ambient temperature felt like the 70s, with a cool breeze pouring down the canyon. Heading up the south bank of the dry creek, I could barely tell the creekside trail used to be a road, as it is still shown on my GPS mapping platform.
A trail description from last fall mentioned a “link” trail connecting this with the next canyon south, and I soon came to that junction. There are few flowers in this habitat at this time of year, but I was surprised to encounter big Apache pines at only about 6,000 feet – their elevation range is lower than the more familiar ponderosas, which they can be confused with at a glance. That encouraged me to focus on trees for the rest of the hike. Ponderosas were missing here, but two different species of pine with medium-length needles left me puzzled.
I never saw evidence of the old mines, but about midway up the very well-maintained trail I came to a boulder-choked convergence of side canyons where the trail began switchbacking up the north slope toward the crest. Although the entire canyon was forested, openings in the canopy subjected me to what was going to be a hot day, so the recurring breeze from above was more than welcome.
My forays across the state line have taught me to respect this Sky Island habitat. From 6,000 feet upwards I was surrounded by Douglas-fir, Apache pine, pinyon pine, the two species of mid-length-needled pines I mentioned, alligator juniper, four species of oak, madrone, manzanita, yucca and agave, and a half-dozen prominent species of arid-habitat shrubs. The lower canyon had featured abundant sycamores and willows and one Fremont cottonwood.
Nearing the crest on nearly 20 switchbacks, I entered the first obvious burn scar, where I found two flowering shrubs I recognized from the crest I’d hiked in New Mexico three weeks ago, almost 200 miles to the northeast. The wind blew stronger and stronger from the saddle above, until it whipped the big pines and thundered like a freight train.
I’d been planning to stop, hang out, then turn back at the saddle. It faced north, and would’ve had a great view if it weren’t for the standing snags. But in an old burn scar, it was no place to dawdle. I could turn right and climb to what appeared to be a shady pine grove a few hundred feet higher. Or I could turn left onto the crest trail. That was a no-brainer.
A short distance up the crest trail I encountered a guy about my age heading down – the 4Runner driver. He was doing a loop, which he said was probably ten miles total, using the link trail to climb the next canyon south, then across the crest to return down the trail I’d just climbed. That would’ve been an easy hike for me two years ago, before my knee injury, but I’d recently learned I wasn’t ready for ten miles quite yet.
I studied some new trailside trees – which now included Gambel oak – and soon arrived at a higher saddle, which was likewise fairly bleak. But a sign pointed right toward a side trail that looked like it might lead me across the crest to the west, where I hoped to look down the popular northwestern canyon and across the desert beyond.
The new trail traversed a steep, rocky slope which had burned at high intensity. Less traveled and less well-maintained, it was often slippery with loose rock, and the farther I went, the less hopeful I was of getting over the crest. Finally the trail began to switchback downwards and I gave up and turned back.
Back at the saddle, I decided to continue up the crest trail, which traversed above the canyon I’d already climbed, for a more expansive view east. Maybe I could reach another saddle with the longed-for view west.
But I figured I’d already done more than four miles, which would yield a total of eight for the day, and having taken a couple weeks off, I didn’t want to abuse my lower body.
The morning wind from the crest was fading as I headed down in early afternoon. Those switchbacks were steep, and my lower legs were burning and my ankles crying by the time I reached the gentler grades along the dry creek.
It was also much hotter down there now. I’d filled my plastic water reservoir with ice before leaving, and it was still cool, but I discovered a slow leak, so I began transferring the remainder to my hard plastic bottle and drinking it faster.
After hiking those burn scars on the crest, which remained unforested, I was paying more attention to the low outlying ridges. I could now see they’d all originally carried pine forest, which had been completely burned off and replaced by oaks and junipers.
In the last couple of miles the heat was hard to bear, my lower legs were worn out, my chronic foot injury had been triggered, and I was repeatedly stubbing my toe on rocks, tripping, and stumbling.
Back in my room, I found I’d actually gone only 7.4 miles total, with 2,500 feet of elevation gain, topping out below 8,200 feet, in 6.5 hours. None of the maps had correctly shown the access roads or the link trail. In all, I considered the hike a bust, offering noplace where I could hang out and enjoy the habitat or views, and taking a painful toll on my lower body.
Boulder Crest Foundation, on that big ranch in the lower canyon, appears to be a get-rich scheme for evangelical Christians exploiting “warrior heroes” with PTSD. They use a patented “science-based” therapy validated by a board of psychologists at obscure Christian colleges and universities nationwide.
The low pass on the highway south is the home of Empire Ranch, established by young East Coast entrepreneurs during the trendy late 19th-century cattle boom and now romanticized by the BLM as a tourist showplace of the “ranching lifestyle”. More recently it was the site of a massive wildfire started by fireworks at a gender-reveal party on public land. Welcome to Arizona.
