Road Trips
Thursday, September 14th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Road Trips.
The Legendary Ordeals
I put a lot of miles on my aging body while exploring the wild places I report on in these Dispatches, and in the past three years, I’ve started to discover that my body isn’t really built for this kind of abuse. I started life as a relatively weak, undersize boy who was often sick and didn’t qualify for sports. Instead, I came to rely on my head and heart, developing into an artist and scholar. It wasn’t until I was almost 40 that I started strengthening my body, developed a fitness regimen, and entered the physically active phase of life I’ve come to treasure.
With this gain has come an increasing level and frequency of pain, and accumulating damage to my joints. In 1990 a poorly-advised strength training regimen resulted in a stress fracture to a sesamoid bone in my left foot. Pieces of the bone were surgically removed, but the pain has recurred periodically. In 1999 I developed acute lower back pain, due to damaged lumbar discs, and this has become chronic. When I started rock climbing in 2000 I noticed limited range of motion in my right hip, and in 2007 I developed acute pain there, which was eventually diagnosed as a minor congenital deformity, requiring surgery. Beginning in 2009, I had recurring episodes of plantar fasciitis in the right heel, and after recovering from the latest bout early this year, I had a recurrence of the sesamoid problem in the left foot, which become acute and brought my activity to a halt for the fourth time in two years. Finally, in the meantime, I suddenly developed tennis elbow in my right arm, which involved sharp pain that was pretty much constant.
So far, these conditions have all been treatable, but the frequent pain puts me under chronic stress, while often depriving me of the means to relieve it by doing what I love – hiking in wildlands. Less of my time is spent doing what I love, and more of my time is consumed by maintenance: physical therapy, icing, stretching, foam-rolling, etc. And my local, rural, small-town healthcare system has proved itself inadequate to address the problems of an aging athlete. I’ve had to take matters in my own hands, seek outside help, and sometimes develop my own diagnoses and treatments. Part of the problem is poverty – New Mexico is one of the poorest U.S. states – and practitioners are simply not used to seeing active older adults. Their experience is dominated by the health problems of poor Americans: drug abuse, malnutrition, obesity, diabetes, and lung cancer.
When the sesamoid problem recurred this spring, our local podiatrist was unable to help me, and I had to do a nationwide search for specialists in this rare condition. I eventually found Dr. Richard Blake in San Francisco, and arranged a road trip to the Bay Area, during which I’d also have the chance to visit old friends, both coming and going. I was in the midst of my epic book project, which was only one scene away from its first major milestone, but I’d have to put that on a frustrating hold for a few weeks. In the end, this trip became an adventure full of ordeals that tested me, my friends, and our relationships, in the midst of natural spectacles that spanned the continent: a solar eclipse, a record heat wave, and catastrophic storms. In the end, I found the proverbial rainbow in, of all places, Las Vegas, and realized that as hard as it’s become, my life in rural New Mexico is still much healthier than it would be if I lived in a big city.
Everybody Hurts
Over the past thirty years, my weekly fitness regimen evolved into six workouts per week: two peak hikes totaling ten miles with 3,000′ elevation gain, two one-hour strength-training workouts focusing on core, and two one-hour stretching sessions. After hip surgery and the recurrence of foot problems, icing, stretching and foam-rolling became a daily requirement, taking up to three hours per day, and my visit to San Francisco added another hour and a half of foot treatment. This all adds up to nearly forty hours per week on physical maintenance (not counting personal hygiene). The goal of all this maintenance is to keep me active as I age, but clearly, I wouldn’t be able to do it if I had a normal job or a family to take care of. So at this point, fitness is my full-time job, and pain is the new normal.
But as I’ve become mired in my physical limitations and the treatment of them, my friends face their own formidable challenges. In one home I visited, household clutter had grown until the only open space consisted of narrow pathways between dusty piles of accumulated debris. Some homeowners expressed admiration for the “tiny house” movement, while renters were forced by the astronomical cost of urban housing into cramped apartments that wouldn’t accommodate everything they needed. Like so many urbanites, they had to commute to a distant storage locker that housed the essentials they couldn’t fit in their apartment.
Back home, I’d already come to view pet ownership as an epidemic disease after failing to get neighbors to take responsibility for their barking dogs. But on my trip, I found that more people are coming to accept pet urine and feces on the floors of their homes, because they’ve taken on pets that are either non-house-trained or incontinent. One friend was recovering from a series of battles with pneumonia – no surprise since she inhabits a dusty, cluttered, cat-frequented house. I’m allergic to cats, but almost all of my friends have at least one feline in the house, so I always have to travel with antihistamines and steroid nasal sprays. Pet ownership is at an all-time high, increasing our ecological footprint, displacing wildlife, and harming society as owners fail to train or otherwise take responsibility for the impacts of their pets on others.
Friends in the city were suffering under increasing financial stress and abuse from their jobs, in addition to air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, and the dangerous traffic they endure in their commutes. Many burden themselves daily with TV news about a world gone mad and the reckless antics of the rich and famous. Since I don’t watch TV at home, I felt bludgeoned by broadcast media, encountering the new head of state moving and talking onscreen for the first time, and it was not an edifying experience. Stressed-out white people come to feel threatened by immigrants, other races and ethnic groups, differently-gendered people, criminals, and the poor, blaming them for society’s problems as well as their own. Like my father in his declining years, some perceive the world around them as a seething mob of evil-doers barely held in check by our valiant police and military.
I also encountered and was impacted by depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction throughout my journey – and who could blame these disorders on people living under such stressful conditions? As I navigated apocalyptic traffic across the city and its suburbs, I saw, over and over, grotesque affluence flaunted alongside nightmarish poverty. My friends are among those who’ve benefited from the gentrification that contributes to homelessness, but the homeless continue to haunt them like living dead.
The Unforgettable Super-Mega Eclipse of 2017
On the way to the Bay Area for my foot treatment, I stopped to visit one of my favorite families, a botanist and ecologist who are raising their kids in the wildfire-ravaged Sierra Nevada foothills. We enjoyed an idyllic three days hanging out in the Merced River, walking their country lanes, and witnessing the solar eclipse, before I left to face the trials of the city.
Into the Maelstrom
I knew nothing of heat waves or hurricanes when I planned my trip, but I was reluctant to return to the soul-numbing congestion, gross economic inequality, and oppressive man-made landscape of my old home, the San Francisco Bay Area. The only saving grace, beside the hope of medical treatment for my foot, was the hospitality, generosity, and good fellowship offered by my hosts. By the nature of this trip, I ended up missing most of my Bay Area friends this time around – hopefully they’ll be able to join me in New Mexico sometime soon.
The medical part of the trip quickly grew in proportions far beyond what I’d anticipated. I ended up having to drive to San Francisco’s Nob Hill from the suburbs on four separate days over a week-and-a-half period, for visits at a sports medicine clinic with a foot surgeon, a non-operating podiatrist (Dr. Blake), the radiology department, and a physical therapist. The surgeon and podiatrist ended up giving different opinions on my treatment and chances of recovery, but on my second visit with Dr. Blake, he gave me a new set of orthotics that enabled me to walk normally for the first time in months! I actually danced a jig in front of my friends that night.
I was in culinary heaven from the start, eating spectacular Ethiopian, Indian, and Thai food on successive nights. Friends took me to my old favorite museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and on shopping excursions in search of things I can’t get back home. One errand on my list was to visit an Alfa Romeo dealer to look at their new SUV, but in the end, all I had time for was a glimpse of the back of the vehicle through a dark showroom window.
My Berkeley hosts pointed out the unusual homeless encampment near their house, which they said had been established last winter and accepted by the city because the residents were self-governing, prohibiting panhandling in the vicinity and contracting for the removal of their waste. The neat, well-ordered camp included a manned information booth, and there was a free clinic nearby where residents could go for checkups.
I savored an evening with one of my old roommates from the Terra Incognita loft, and it turned out his sons, who grew up in Ireland, had arranged a viewing of the Mayweather-McGregor fight. While not a boxing fan, I enjoyed the well-played spectacle, a public ritual like something out of ancient Greece or the Roman Empire, in which the blond, tattooed Celtic challenger appeared as a Viking berserker while the African-American champion entered wearing a midnight bondage jacket and mask like a tribal fetish from the land of his ancestors. The patterns of dominant societies play out over and over again throughout history.
At the end of my stay in Berkeley, I was invited along on a sailing race in the Bay. I hadn’t sailed in over fifteen years, and I was really worried about risks to my foot, but the boat people assured me I could sit down somewhere out of the way, wouldn’t have to work, and this race would be “casual” anyway. As it turned out, all three were wrong. Anxious crew members shouted back and forth constantly and climbed over each other in the crowded boat to tack or avoid collision. I had to continually shift position in my heavy boots on a surface that leaned precipitously, as I twisted and stumbled trying to get out of someone’s way. I was suddenly put in charge of something I didn’t understand, and the stranger I partnered with yelled unfamiliar commands and freaked out when I didn’t understand. I had moments of exhilaration, but my injured foot was strained by all the desperate maneuvering, aching more than it had in months.
One secondary mission of my trip was to find a solution for my beloved wooden sunglasses. A hinge wore out months ago, and repeated attempts to get them repaired had failed. I spent hours roaming the cities in search of either repair or replacement, and on the verge of giving up hope, finally discovered a guy who fixed them while I waited, for $25. He even used a laser! Check it out: All-American Eyeglass Repair, in Hayward.
Just as Hurricane Harvey was flooding Houston, a record heat wave hit the Bay Area, and I ended up staying with friends in a house without air conditioning, sharing some great conversation in front of a fan, and taking my first lengthy walk in the new orthotics in 105-degree weather. It was so muggy that I actually spent two straight days sweating continually, an experience I’ve never faced back home in the mountains of the Southwest.
The primary goal of this trip, medical care for my injured foot, achieved mixed success. After reviewing the MRI, both doctors say I have arthritis in the metatarsal and an incompletely healed stress fracture of the remaining sesamoid. They both prescribed a bone stimulator, an ultrasound device which is supposed to encourage bone healing but remains somewhat controversial, although they disagreed on the long-term plan and chances of recovery. The surgeon said the likelihood of needing surgery was 50% and a decision should be made after three months of treatment, while Dr. Blake wants me to use the bone stimulator for nine months, with a follow-up MRI after one year. Only one such device is FDA-approved, making its manufacturer a monopoly, and it threatens to cost me thousands of dollars out of pocket – how much is still TBD.
The pain I had after sailing was relieved by a physical therapist during my last visit to the clinic, when he demonstrated a series of exercises and manipulations I could do at home. So now, in addition to the time-consuming physical maintenance I’ve been doing in the past year, I have another hour and a half of work to do on the foot, each day. Hopefully there’s a light at the end of this increasingly narrow tunnel.
Escape to the Countryside
On the third day of the record heat wave, as the heat began to subside, I left the Bay Area and headed across the Central Valley to visit an old friend at the base of the Sierra Foothills. I’d already walked more during the heat wave than in the previous three weeks of milder weather, and by the time I reached my friend’s place my left foot was sore in an unaccustomed place. We went for yet another walk, again in 100-plus temperatures, and by the time we reached our destination my foot was red, swollen, and in considerable pain. And we still had to walk back.
The foot throbbed all night, and in the morning I emailed Dr. Blake, who suggested it was gout. Great! I still had at least a week of planned visits before returning home, and now I could barely walk. I reluctantly left my friend, whose tiny apartment made it difficult for me to take care of the foot, and drove two hours up to Lake Tahoe in the mountains, where I found a motel, crawled into bed, and began applying ice.
The swelling and pain subsided a bit by the next morning, and I drove down the Eastern Sierra, under storm clouds and through scattered rain, to visit more old friends, the expert on bighorn sheep and his physician wife. As I continued to ice my foot, we had some great talks about wild sheep, prehistoric tribes, and a half-dozen other topics of mutual interest, as on the other side of the continent, Hurricane Irma approached Florida, leaving a wake of destruction in the Caribbean. I drove up on the nearby volcanic tablelands to revisit some prehistoric rock art. But my friends were busy and distracted, and I was too crippled to hike, so after a couple days I continued on to Las Vegas.
Rainbow Over Vegas
With hurricanes in the South and a heat wave on the West Coast, Las Vegas had its own extreme weather – in this case, thunderstorms and heavy rain, with unseasonably cool temperatures. I was actually greeted by a rainbow when I arrived at the UNLV campus to meet my friend, another wildlife biologist. My sore foot continued to improve, and in between thunderstorms, my host took advantage of the rare cool weather to show me some beautiful springs in the low desert around Lake Mead. Although we were mainly looking for the endangered relict leopard frog, I also got to see the mysterious, almost microscopic springsnails, also endangered, and poorly known to science. So now, in addition to the biological soil crusts that recently captured my attention, I have a new tiny, humble, easily-overlooked desert life form to admire. As paleontologist and natural historian Richard Fortey has observed, it’s often the humblest and least aggressive life forms that persist, while powerful species like ours quickly rise, briefly dominate, and collapse into ruin.
No Place Like Home
I’d planned one more stop after Vegas, but at this point, I really needed to get home and start treating my foot. The swelling and pain had subsided but were still there, and I didn’t know whether I had the dreaded gout or not.
I took a detour on the way back so I could traverse the White Mountains plateau in Arizona, and my foot was feeling good enough when I got there that I went for a short hike – two or three miles at 9,000′ elevation – through the lush post-monsoon meadows and cool, fresh alpine air. After all that time in cities, finishing my trip in nature was the perfect way to restore balance.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Space vs. Earth
Some advocates of space exploration and colonization are also concerned about the damage caused by humans here on earth. Some of them believe we can give the earth a break by moving our civilization elsewhere. Others believe it’s too late to fix the earth’s problems, but now that we know better, we can move to another planet that’s in better shape, and start over, avoiding the mistakes of our ancestors.
Still other space nuts don’t care – they just want to hang out with all the cool aliens they’ve seen in Star Wars movies. Terrestrial life is passé – they’ve been there/done that on TV nature shows.
People who lack passion for either space or the earth may say “Why can’t we have both?” The answer is easy for the few of us who know where our resources come from. It takes big, energy-guzzling machines made on earth to study or explore space, and machines are non-renewable – every machine humans make comes out of a hole in the ground that used to be wildlife habitat. Space isn’t harmed by studying the earth, but the earth suffers when you study space.
Meanwhile, while living their lives as consumers, in cities far away from the ecological impacts of their consumer lifestyles, each generation of humans unknowingly destroys more of the earth. So-called “renewable energy” is a lie – solar and wind power equipment comes from nonrenewable mines, destroying nonrenewable habitat, and is manufactured and transported using fossil fuels. Wind farms and solar plants destroy habitat and harm and displace wildlife. Even if climate change were somehow stopped, or even reversed, the endless demand for consumer resources results in relentless industrial sprawl and conversion of wildlife habitat to toxic wasteland.
The next generation has no idea of what the earth was like for previous generations. If they experience rural environments at all, they view these now-degraded places as “nature,” just as city dwellers view their pocket parks full of imported vegetation as “nature.” In their ignorance of ecology, it looks fine to them – it has pretty flowers, and places to let their pets run off-leash – why should they worry about the loss of a few square miles halfway across the globe?
Sky Island on Fire
Returning home from a distant city, I decided on a whim to take a back road. The back road took me past a mountain range I’d flown over many times and had always been curious about. I knew there was a road to the top of it, where an astronomical observatory was maintained. In my homeward momentum, I drove past the turnoff, but a few miles farther, without making a conscious decision, I pulled over and checked my map. How far would it be? There were no services up there at all, but I had plenty of gas, a water bottle that was almost full, and a partial bag of trail mix.
This is the penultimate Southwestern “sky island” – an isolated mountain range that rises 7,000′ above the surrounding desert, allowing you to travel from the arid scrublands of Sonora to the alpine forests of the Canadian Rockies in just a dozen miles. It shelters species that have been isolated from their kin in other mountains since the last Ice Age, so that for those of us who love the earth, it’s a true frontier, a place with hidden wonders waiting to be discovered. But unlike most of these ranges, it has a paved road that goes nearly to the top.
A road that passes a Federal prison, at the northern foot of the mountains. A road that turned out to be perhaps the most dangerous paved road I’ve ever traveled. Narrow, and with more hairpins than any other I’ve seen. And you know those white lines they paint along the edge of the pavement? On this road, in many, many places, if you happen to cross that white line on the edge, your vehicle either disappears into a seemingly bottomless hole, or it falls hundreds of vertical feet down the side of the mountain. No shoulder and no guard rail, and in some places even that white line is crumbling.
The road’s so dangerous because this is one of the steepest mountain ranges I’ve ever been in. Even at the top, there are no large meadows or internal valleys. The paved road ends at 9,000′ elevation and turns to steep, twisting, washboarded dirt, and I followed it to its end. The entire mountain consists of precipitous slopes, with just a handful of small patches of grass on less steep slopes that are generously termed “flats.”
When I crested the first ridge it was all I could do to keep my truck on the road, because the views from this mountain range are mind-boggling in all directions. I could see the outline of the state prison way down there at the southern foot of the mountains, mirroring the federal prison on the north. But I was also surprised to enter a fresh burn area. At first I figured it to be a couple years old, but then I came to stands of slender fir, their blackened, drooping branches still holding charred needles. Later I passed slopes that were mostly clear except for big trunks white as bone, killed by a much older fire. The whole top of the mountain had burned in patches, at different times, and now, in springtime, the slopes were blanketed by virulently green ferns.
It was the day after Memorial Day. That’s one reason why I’d come up here – I figured all the vacationers would be gone by now. I had the mountain mostly to myself. I got to the small reservoir near the end of the dirt road, and the only people in the large campground there were a young couple taking a romantic stroll. Even the Forest Service information center was closed, but I did meet three kids playing blissfully in the forest outside the compound of staff housing. A tiny minority of children in our “advanced” society still get to experience a degraded form of what all our ancestors once enjoyed.
On the slopes above the road loomed rock outcrops and pinnacles, and throughout the shadowy forest rose the primeval shapes of lichen-encrusted boulders. Ribbons of water tumbled down from the peaks. Birds were everywhere, wildflowers were rampant. This magical range, isolated in the desert, is known to host the densest population of black bears in North America.
On the slopes that had been fully incinerated by the recent fire, it was easy to see why it happened: all the trees were spindly and had grown close together, a sign of generations of fire suppression by “experts” who were as ignorant of ecology as our city-dwelling consumers. This whole beautiful, damaged mountain range with deep-space telescopes on top, and mirrored prisons and a burning riverbed at its feet, was like a textbook case study of the cascading failures of Anglo-European society and its institutions.
Science vs. Nature
I only spent a few hours up there, so I’m by no means an expert. But I’ll try to summarize the story as it’s recorded by Forest Service ecologists and local historians.
For generations, white Americans stocked unsustainable herds of cattle on these slopes, overgrazing the forage and destabilizing the soil. They logged the old-growth timber while suppressing fires, encouraging dense stands of smaller-diameter trees. To get to the forage and timber, the road was built, and scientists – astrophysicists like media darling Neil deGrasse Tyson – began to covet that peak high in the desert sky as a site for the “world’s most advanced telescope,” to look deep into time and space to the beginnings of the universe itself. While Native Americans hold peaks sacred, white people see them as jumping-off points for their ambition to “conquer the cosmos.”
But environmentalists – that dying breed of obsolete earth-lovers – pointed out that the peak sheltered an endangered subspecies of squirrel, and a battle between scientists began. It became evident that astrophysicists are not conservationists. Different kinds of scientists have different values.
To most science buffs, this is inconceivable. At a time when science is under siege by right-wing fundamentalists and climate-change-deniers, scientists should close ranks! Science is science, and all science is good (except maybe those guys who work for Monsanto, and the oil companies, and pharma, plastics, the arms industry, those scientists who get paid lots of money to do nasty stuff that we don’t want to think of when we’re Marching for Science). Earth and space can live together in harmony – right?
Unsurprisingly, the astrophysicists – who by the nature of their empire-expanding work always have money and power on their side – won. A compromise was reached, because one thing you can never stop is “development” – i.e. replacing natural habitat with roads and buildings – and the astronomical observatory rose on the peak, with a few provisions to protect the squirrels.
It was then that the first fire hit, in 2004. Firefighters, being humans themselves, were naturally keen to protect the observatory, but not so much the habitat of the squirrels.
And last year, the second fire hit, spreading all over the mountaintop, decimating the squirrels. They are now expected to die out completely.
Consuming the Final Frontier
Squirrels are cute, and they’re also famous for burying nuts in the ground, to eat later. A little critical thinking might suggest that some of those nuts might germinate and grow into trees that would produce even more nuts. Like, the trees and the squirrels are working together in some kind of partnership. One will not survive without the other. That’s ecology – holistic thinking. Not so common in astrophysics, which like most science is reductive and mechanistic, treating nature as a machine which can be understood and controlled by breaking it down into its component parts.
The conifer forests at the top of these mountains, and the squirrels that are going extinct there, evolved together, along with thousands of other species – more than our science can ever identify and understand. But billionaires and popular media say we have to go to outer space to discover something new.
Meanwhile the sky islands – a unique frontier, one of a kind, that few people have ever experienced – are dying. The Forest Service, which as part of the federal government is one of our most conservative institutions, says that these high-elevation enclaves in the desert will be completely gone by the end of this century, due to climate change. Entire, incredibly rich and vibrant communities of sophisticated beings with their own priceless knowledge and wisdom, wiped off the face of the earth by our greed and ignorance.
Since conservative predictions are routinely being exceeded by reality, it’s likely that the magical sky islands will be gone in only a few decades. The scorched forests you see in my photos will not regenerate, nor will their squirrels return. It’s probably best not to take your kids out into nature. It will only depress them in the long run, and make them angry at the society that consumed their final frontier.
Summer Solstice 2018: Into the Burn
Wednesday, June 20th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, South Fork Little Colorado, Southeast Arizona, Whites, Wildfire.
On the day before the solstice, I wanted to try a short hike on a new trail. But all of the nearby trails were closed due to extreme fire danger, so I drove east to the South Fork of the Little Colorado, an area I’d never visited. The trail started in the shade of a beautiful forest beside a tumbling stream, but as I hiked beyond the human infrastructure that fire crews defended aggressively, I emerged into the heart of the most intensely-burned zone of the 2011 Wallow Fire. It continues the theme of wildfire and habitat destruction from my previous post, but this was my first hike through this kind of devastation, and I was shocked at how little the habitat had recovered in seven years.
The Wallow Fire was the biggest wildfire in the history of the Southwest. It consumed 538,000 acres, or 840 square miles, of the best wildlife habitat in our region – an area more than twice as big as the county I grew up in back east.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years – I can still remember the smoke plume and the choking pall that lay over us when the wind blew out of the northwest. The White Mountains of Arizona have been my favorite local getaway since I moved to New Mexico, and it broke my heart to know they were burning.
The fire was started by two campers who let their campfire get out of control. But that was just the proximal cause. Like all our really destructive wildfires, it was really caused by Western Civilization – European culture – and its Biblical mandate of man’s dominion over nature, inherited by “secular humanism” during the 18th century “Age of Enlightenment.” The machinery first invented during the Enlightenment has enabled us to replace most of the best habitat in North America with cities, reservoirs, industrial farms, and energy infrastructure, ultimately leading to global climate change. And that European drive to engineer our environment was behind the Forest Service’s policy of wildfire suppression, which resulted in disastrous buildups of forest fuel.
As I walked up the stark, sunny canyon past the skeletons of torched pines, it was easy to visualize the cool, shady forest that had been here seven years earlier. I tried to imagine what it would’ve been like in the midst of the inferno, with walls of flame pouring down toward the stream from the ridges above where the heat was most intense. Imagine being thrust into a furnace!
Wild animals, unlike civilized humans and their domesticated commensals, are resilient. They live lightly on the ground, adapting and migrating when necessary. Catastrophic change is a driver of evolution as well as of extinction. Many species are still hanging on here, but in the canyon I hiked – formerly a lush refuge of high water table, low temperatures and high humidity – they’re struggling in a much dryer environment with much fewer cool, wet refuges and much higher average temperatures, now that we’ve killed the great trees and their protective canopy.
Summer Solstice 2018: Return to the Cloud Forest
Thursday, June 21st, 2018: 2018 Trips, Baldy, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, Regions, Road Trips, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
Woot! Longest hike since my foot injury, over a year ago – 6 miles round trip, with about 800′ elevation gain.
First time I visited this magical place was during monsoon season, three months before my hip surgery in 2015. See the dispatch from that trip for the difference between wet and dry. Back then, despite my disability, I made it almost all the way to the top, twice as far and twice as high, using a walking stick.
This time, it was a hard slog climbing to 10,000′. It really hit home how much heart and lung capacity I’ve lost to my disabilities. Despite it being a Thursday, and very dry, I ran into a lot more people on the trail this time – two other groups of 3 or 4 each, all in their 20s. I also saw the smoke plume from a new wildfire, about 40 miles to the east, continuing on the theme of yesterday’s dispatch.
One young man who said he’d hiked this trail about 8 times saw his buddy holding up his phone to take a picture. “Dude, you can’t capture this with a camera!” I laughed. “That’s totally right!” We all need to spend more time in places like this, with infinite views, to stretch our eye muscles. I’ve been doing that for decades in the Mojave Desert, to counteract the damage done by living in the city and staring at screens. It works. You can actually see the curvature of the earth from this trail, but you can’t capture it with a camera.
Summer Solstice 2018: From Flowers to Flames
Saturday, June 23rd, 2018: 2018 Trips, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Southeast Arizona, Thompson, Whites, Wildfire.
I was heading home, but it was still morning, and I didn’t want to leave the mountains yet. I scanned my trail guide and found a trail that was kind of on my way, but also deeper into the mountains. And even the rather dryly worded Forest Service guide suggested it might be special.
But when I got there shortly before noon on this Friday, there were already four other vehicles at the trailhead, one of them parked so as to block half the parking area.
The trail followed a stream, the West Fork of the Black River, out of the high alpine meadows into its canyon, between steep slopes alternately forested and scarred by fires. Above the stream and the trail there was an old “railroad grade” – presumably the bed of a narrow-gauge track built to haul logs out of the forest in the 19th century. Now, this valley was a site for wildlife habitat restoration – the reintroduction of the endangered native Apache trout. As I walked through this lush protected area, I tried to imagine the scene more than a hundred years earlier, when crews of dozens of workers with heavy machinery were blasting and gouging away at the hillside above.
Despite the burn scars, the valley was a paradise of flowing water, lush vegetation, endless wildflowers, butterflies, and broken volcanic rock. My passing flushed two herons in a row out of the streamside vegetation. The first hikers I came upon were an elderly pair of naturalists poking their way through the thick riparian vegetation, wearing unfashionable khakis and those huge funny-looking hats they sell at REI. I later discovered they were the ones who’d blocked the parking area with their new SUV.
Then I came to the restoration area, where workers had built two small dams in a row to block invasive trout from swimming upstream. I passed three college students, two boys and a girl, returning up the trail, glowing with good cheer. I was feeling pretty good, too. On this trip, I’d been able to hike more than at any time in the past year. Hiking is my way of learning about nature, but it’s also my stress relief. Up until this trip, I’d been hit by one source of chronic pain after another, and I felt like I was losing control. Each time I began to recover from one disability, another would appear. This trip had been like a moment of grace in a long ordeal.
I came to a seep where water flowed out of the hillside and into the stream, and crossing it I glimpsed a tiny, fast-moving snake, smaller than a nightcrawler. I came upon recent trash left by other hikers, and stuffed it in my pocket. Then I came to a campsite in a grove on the bank of the stream.
It immediately seemed strange. This was the third time in the past two years I’d encountered backpackers camping next to a trail and within less than a mile of a trailhead – things nobody in my generation would’ve done. All these new-style backpackers are in their 20s. I wondered where they’d learned to backpack like this.
Four men, they were sitting in camp chairs carrying on an animated conversation, with a tent and two hammocks set up behind them, literally on the bank of the stream. Since I was passing so close I waved, but they ignored me. It was less than a mile from the trailhead, but I’d only intended to scout the trail and file it away for future reference, so I only continued a few hundred yards farther to a point where the floodplain opened out, then climbed up to the railroad grade to backtrack. On the way back, I encountered three more young people, high school aged, sitting in the shade of a fir tree eating sandwiches. An area both beautiful and popular.
When I got back to the truck, I checked the Forest Service trail guide. Sure enough, they tell people to camp out of sight of trails, and at least 200 yards from streams and bodies of water, to protect habitat and wildlife. I passed a small herd of elk out in the open meadows on the way to the paved road. I had to drive through a heavily used recreation area surrounding a big reservoir, and coming upon the RV dump site, I was faced with the deepest butt crack I’ve ever seen on a man wearing pants, on the backside of the maintenance guy bending over in his truck beside the road. Oh, the horrors.
I drove east through the rugged mountains with their swath of alpine forest along the highway that had been protected from the massive wildfire in 2011. A convoy of fat, leather-jacketed bikers suddenly thundered past on choppers with deafening pipes, their women holding on tight behind. I already knew that tough guys can’t prove their toughness without machines that go fast and make a lot of noise. I didn’t know they needed to prove that in the middle of an alpine forest, but we all have our insecurities.
When I regained a signal on my phone, I called the Forest Service office and reported the outlaw campers. After all, these selfish jerks were setting a bad example for all the other young people using this popular trail. Basically, what they’d done was carried their packs less than a mile from the trailhead, picked the most beautiful spot on the bank of the stream next to the trail, set up their gear and started partying, all before noon. They might’ve even arrived the previous afternoon, which would make it even worse. Apparently they intended to just sit there for the whole weekend, with everyone else walking past them. I call this new trend “slackpacking.”
In the meadow upstream from Luna Lake, a reservoir outside Alpine, I spotted between 50 and 100 elk grazing, the biggest herd I’d ever seen. Then, after crossing into New Mexico, coming down the grade between Luna and Reserve, I saw smoke rising from a wildfire somewhere up ahead.
South of Reserve, twisting and turning downhill through the forest, I caught glimpses of a helicopter spiraling above the column of smoke. Then I came to a stop behind a couple of other waiting vehicles. It was at the dirt-road turnoff for Pueblo Park recreation area, before the climb to Saliz Pass, where there’s an old burn scar. About a quarter mile ahead of us, white smoke was climbing steep forested slopes toward the west. There were some official vehicles milling around, and some utility trucks passed us, heading toward the smoke. We waited, and more vehicles arrived and lined up behind us.
I could see the fire growing up the slope. Suddenly a tower of black smoke rose up amidst the white – the fire had reached a vehicle, a cabin, or somebody’s fuel stash. A whole tree – maybe killed by bark beetles – turned into a bright red torch at the upper edge of the fire.
Then one of the official vehicles pulled out and led us in a convoy up the road toward the fire. This is the narrowest, twistiest part of the road, and we were driving close together, so it was hard to shoot any pictures without running off the road or hitting the vehicle in front of me. I glimpsed the silver flash of a small plane circling overhead. Suddenly we came upon a long line of pea-green trucks labeled as “Globe Hotshots,” “Payson Hotshots,” and others from locations in both New Mexico and Arizona, and then we were in the fire. Young men in bulky yellow suits worked alongside the road, amid ashes, smoke, glowing embers, and bursts of flame. Fire trucks hunkered on side trails behind old-growth ponderosa pines.
Out my side window, I caught glimpses of active burning, in a dense cloud of smoke up the steep western slope right above us. The forest up there was shrouded in billowing smoke. We passed the shaded gate of the Apache Plume Ranch, up in the middle of the burn area. The area around the gate had been protected from the flames, but I didn’t know what lay behind it in the steep forest – maybe whatever had caused that tower of black smoke.
Then we came out of it all, and we all continued in a convoy toward Glenwood, spread out at safe distances except for the jerk in the big old Buick that tailgated me all the way to town. Two college girls had died in a head-on collision on this dangerous stretch of road just a few months ago.
The gibbous moon was rising over the tall Mogollon Mountains east of us. The same moon was waiting over my house when I finally got home, at the end of another very long day. And as I drove over the final grade into Silver City, the next tune came up in the random shuffle in my truck, and Coltrane’s “Lush Life” was playing as I arrived home.
I normally honor the solstice by taking stock of my life and giving thanks for the lessons and benefits that have come to me in the past half-year. This time, I started the trip in pain and under considerable stress, and ended with an adventure. I can’t seem to avoid adventure – it’s the inevitable result of exploring the world, putting yourself out there to learn new things. As time goes by, and we civilized humans keep consuming the natural world, there’s less and less of it to explore and discover. Kids grow up in the city, lacking the freedom and immersion in nature that I used to take for granted. We raise generations of timid slackpackers. Forgetting what came before, many believe this to be progress.
