Hikes
Monday, December 11th, 2023: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Snowshed, Southeast Arizona.
After the relative success of last weekend’s big climb on an unfamiliar trail, I decided to drive over the state line this weekend to re-do a slightly longer big climb that I hadn’t done for over a year. Unfortunately, in multiple instances of wishful thinking, I mistakenly assumed I was back in top shape after more than a year of setbacks, and I forgot how challenging the hike actually is and what limited time you have to complete it once you drive over there.
It was 21 degrees out when I left home, and I packed my gaiters, expecting both creek crossings and patches of deep snow.
Approaching the mountains I was surprised not to see snow on the crest. The temperature at the trailhead, a couple hundred feet lower than home, was still in the mid-20s – colder than I remember in this location – and my uncovered nose quickly got cold, so I hurried through the shady spots. The creeks were lower than I’d ever seen, so the gaiters would just be dead weight.
The first three-mile segment of trail climbs 2,000 feet, with the first mile and a half at a steady 15 percent grade, from oak scrub to ponderosa pine forest. From there it traverses a shaded north slope to the junction with the upper trail. I always forget how hard a climb this is.
I’d seen a couple of footprints on the initial climb, but most people just do the first mile or so, and I was the first hiker on the traverse in many months.
The first payoff of this hike is when you cross into the next watershed, a big east-trending canyon whose head is on the crest of the range. Much of the forest was destroyed in the 2011 wildfire, and at this time of year the rocky, treeless slopes are dominated by ferns in their fall color, rust-red.
What follows is a traverse that climbs 1,300 feet in another three miles – which doesn’t sound like much, but the trail hasn’t been cleared in many years, the footing consists almost completely of loose, sharp rocks, and our wet year of 2022 resulted in erosion of tread and overgrowth of woody shrubs that block the trail in many places. There was no sign that any other hikers had tried this trail in the past year.
I found this traverse so difficult that I had to stop repeatedly to catch my breath, and in the last mile I realized I wouldn’t reach my destination, and began feeling like I’d made a mistake in coming. This trail climbs to a barren saddle, and from there continues across the head of the canyon to its junction with the crest trail. I’d forgotten that it originally took me three tries, simply to reach the barren saddle, and then another couple of tries to reach the junction, which offers a view into yet another big canyon.
You have to be in killer shape to reach that junction quickly enough so you can return down the trail before the cafe closes, and I was not in killer shape now. The six miles to the saddle had taken me almost 4-1/2 hours, and continuing to the junction would force me to hurry down that treacherous loose rock, almost certainly missing my deadline.
On the way down, I gradually became aware that I’d been so distracted throughout this hike – thinking only of my problems at home – I’d barely even been aware of my surroundings. Normally I love the views here, and I had noticed four redtail hawks working the canyon and a young whitetail buck crossing the saddle, but overall, this was the first hike I could remember that I simply hadn’t enjoyed.
To compound my discontent, I developed a leg cramp on the way down, so bad that for about fifteen minutes, I was screaming whenever I tried to move. This was the third hike in a row where I’d developed a cramp, despite drinking plenty of water and adding electrolytes. I’ve been bringing 3-1/2 liters since cold weather started – that was more than enough in the past – but this year I find I’m running out of water before trail’s end, and getting these terrible cramps.
By the time I reached the pine park – the halfway point – my neck, shoulders, hip, knees, and ankles were all aching. I didn’t know if it was due to lack of conditioning, or simply natural aging. My whole routine for the past five years has been oriented toward longer, higher-elevation-gain wilderness hikes. And whenever I find myself losing capacity, I wonder if the loss will be irreversible this time.
On the way down, instead of enjoying the hike, all I could think of was dining in a restaurant and spending the night away from the problems that are crushing me at home. But despite giving up on my original destination, I still ended up cutting the return too close – the cafe was closing so I had to get my burrito and beer to go.
Monday, December 18th, 2023: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Rain, Southwest New Mexico.
Trying to regain the capacity to do long, deep wilderness hikes with massive elevation gain, I thought I was ready for one of my favorites, on the west side of our local mountains. It involves steep grades that are brutal on the feet, so I’d avoided it for the past seven months, but I hoped I was ready now.
The sky was clear and the temperature in town was expected to reach the mid-60s. The hike involves crossings of two major creeks, but the drainages are on the south side of the mountains, we hadn’t had any precip in weeks, and I figured flows would be low.
I was surprised to find a new restroom installed at the remote trailhead. As I’d learned on my last visit, there’s a dirt airstrip a short walk away. It serves no purpose other than as a destination for aviation hobbyists, who like to fly into remote strips like this simply so, like birders, they can check them off their life lists. Fly in, fly out.
Anyway, they’d built a pristine new restroom at this trailhead that doesn’t need one, for their private convenience.
The traverse down into the first canyon gets full sun, so I was shedding layers all the way, until I reached the shade of the bottom, where the temperature immediately dropped 30 degrees. It was so cold down there my nose and face were in pain – probably another symptom of Raynaud’s syndrome – so I stepped up my pace.
The climb up the switchbacks on the opposite side soon warmed me up. I’d seen one footprint on the descent, but like most visitors here, other recent hikers had stuck to the canyon bottom, and the trail out of the first canyon had only been used by animals since the last work party, probably last spring.
My energy and wind seemed pretty good, but it still took me two hours to climb the two miles and 1,400 vertical feet to the west end of the rolling plateau, at a 13 percent average grade. It struck me that my old familiar trails are harder now, after months of foot trouble, than they were last spring. And last spring, they were harder than they were a year earlier, before my near-fatal illness. It seems that my loss of capacity is permanent.
After that sobering realization, the “walk in the park” north-eastward across the rolling plateau, toward the dramatic talus-draped wall of Lookout Mountain, cheered me up, and I covered that mile-and-a-half, including another steep climb in loose rock, in only 45 minutes.
The 1,200 foot descent from the saddle at the east end of the plateau, to the creek at the bottom, takes place mostly in shade and involves a steady 19 percent grade, in loose rock, for a little over a mile. Whereas most people find going downhill on loose rock more daunting than ascending, I’ve been downclimbing on this kind of surface for years and it doesn’t trigger my foot condition like going uphill.
Lunchtime had arrived, and I was holding an open bag of homemade trail mix at one point while hiking downhill and trying to do something with my other hand. A dozen or so nuts and sesame sticks tumbled out on the ground, but I still had plenty left, so I kept walking for half a dozen steps before catching myself. You’re deep in the wilderness, dude – waste not, want not. So I turned back and carefully picked every single nut and stick out from among the rocks.
It’s always a relief to reach the parklike ponderosa forest on the lower slope, where the surface immediately changes from loose rock to packed dirt and pine needles.
Sometimes I cross the big creek and traverse the opposite slope toward a third canyon. But my research had suggested that two miles of the upstream trail had been cleared since my last visits, so I wanted to try that today. But it’d taken me 3-1/2 hours to reach the creek, and I only had a total of 8 hours to finish the hike by sunset. Two miles upstream would take me at least another hour, getting me back to the vehicle in the dark. But carrying a headlamp, I wasn’t worried, and I really needed to check out the newly cleared trail, which could take me that much deeper into wilderness.
The upstream trail is another slow stretch, traversing a steep slope between ten and fifty feet above the creek, up and down and in and out of side drainages, around tree trunks and boulders, the forest blocking most of your view. I crossed the creek a few times, scrambled over some blowdown, passed the beautiful bedrock soaking pools I’d discovered a couple of years ago, and finally reached the debris flow where the trail had ended before.
Sure enough, there was now tread leading down the vertical bank and up the debris flow. I knew this was unsustainable – it’d be completely obliterated in the next big flood – but this is the future of trails in the new fire regime.
I had entered a stretch of canyon that had been devastated by the 2012 wildfire and subsequent flooding and erosion. The trail crew had done a huge amount of work here, but unlike trail work I’d seen in other more popular national forests, this was quick and dirty. Tread had been hacked up banks of loose dirt that would wash out in a heavy storm, and brush had been cleared across floodplains that would fill with debris in a wet monsoon. Still, it was new trail so I kept going.
After passing a huge pool, I finally reached a place where the creek ran wide over flat bedrock for 150 feet. I’d used up another hour and a half and really needed to turn back. But I saw a pink ribbon upstream, so I picked my way across, and saw that the trail continued on the other side.
It’d taken me five hours to get this far, and it would take me almost that much time to return. I’d never stayed out this long since I started doing these wilderness explorations, and I knew I’d end up hiking over an hour in the dark – but it’d be on familiar trail, with a headlamp.
On the way back down the canyon, while scrambling over all that flood debris, I managed to fall and slam the ball of my left foot against the point of a sharp rock – which is something I can never allow myself to do, because that’s where the inflammation is always latent. There I was, seven miles back in the wilderness, facing a 1,200 foot climb on loose rock at a 19 percent grade, and I might’ve set my recovery back six years, to when the condition first became acute.
But all I could do was keep going. I could still take short steps, thanks to my stiff winter boots. And when I reached the bottom of that killer grade, I forced myself to climb super-slow, with little mincing steps to minimize the flexing of my foot and the pressure on the ball. I’d never tried that before, and it worked – despite the grade, I could climb continuously, indefinitely, without stopping for breath – something I’d never been able to do before.
It took me an hour and a half to climb a little over a mile up that brutal grade.
The sun was still peeking over the plateau in the west, but I had a mile and a half of plateau to cross, followed by two miles of steep descent on loose rock, and the final climb of more than a mile out of the first canyon. I was trying to avoid rushing, trying to take short steps to protect my foot, but the sun was setting, I was running out of water, and I still had many difficult miles to cover.
The sun set as I descended from the plateau. My night vision is pretty good and I was able to see well enough to reach the steep switchbacks into the first canyon, but less than halfway down I was stumbling too much and strapped on my headlamp.
It’d been full dark for a half hour by the time I reached the first creek. I was still stumbling a lot, because with a headlamp there’s no shadows or contrast and you still have a hard time seeing the rocks in the trail. But I was still forcing myself to go slow, and that helped keep my spirits from sinking. That and the moon and the stars.
I’d seen the crescent moon overhead while back in the second canyon, and now it was setting toward the western wall of this first canyon. A bright red star hung high over the opposite wall, and as I climbed out of the canyon, I could see Orion rising in the east.
When I reach the trailhead, the Milky Way arched over the northern sky, Cassiopeia glittering at the crest. I’d gone fifteen miles and climbed a total of 4,100 feet, it’d taken me almost ten hours, and I didn’t think my body was up for this any more.
I’d brought my new noise-cancelling headphones to try them out – they’d worked amazingly well on the drive up. And now, wearing them again on the long, bumpy dirt road down the mesa, I had a revelation.
I heard every detail of music I’d been missing over professional studio speakers at home. But more than that, I was happy! A drive on a bad road after dark that has always been nerve-wracking was now peaceful. I was suddenly aware of the aural abuse I’d been subjecting myself to for years. I’d always believed that the rough ride was one of the major drawbacks of this vehicle – I needed to either find a solution for it, or find a different vehicle. But now I knew – it isn’t the rough ride, it’s the noise! From highway to 4wd road, the interior of this vehicle fills with an increasing cacophony of engine noise, road noise, wind noise, squeaks, rattles, and bangs.
And I now knew that I’m hypersensitive to noise. Noise makes me tense, anxious, and ultimately angry. It’s a disorder recognized medically as misophonia, and I’ve been suffering from it for years. It began with my neighbor’s barking dog. After two years of that, I went on a road trip in my new vehicle, accompanying a friend, and ended up having unexplained fits of anger so bad that we had to split up, and I sought therapy afterward. There, it was the dog followed by the vehicle noise that did me in. And since that was followed by two years of landscaping ordered by my new absentee neighbor – operating heavy machinery and gas-powered equipment a few feet from my office – I guess it’s no wonder I ended up a nervous wreck.
Now that I’m facing regular air travel, the noise of airports and airplanes is yet another trigger. But finally, I have a solution. And that night, driving home in the dark, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
Monday, January 1st, 2024: Hikes, Southern Indiana.
The Eastern Deciduous Forest is where I grew up. I formed a whole mythology out of it in early childhood. The radical swing of its seasons seemed to amplify the emotional rollercoaster of my adolescence, from the tantalizing fertility of summer to the Calvinist repression of winter.
On every visit to Indiana I hike this forest. Coming from a land of towering mountains with forever views in a roadless wilderness as big as some states, this tiny patch of second-and-third-growth habitat covering modest ridges and hollows only frustrates me and makes me long for the West. And that’s even worse in the monotony of winter, when the entire ecosystem is resting or decomposing to the base nutrients that will fuel spring’s renewal.
It was a dark day, the temperature hovering just above freezing. I was the first on this popular trail in the morning, but after a couple hours I was passed by a male trail runner. We’d had several rains in the past week, so the carpet of leaves covering the trail was especially slippery and hid the roots that crisscross the ground. It was hard enough for me to keep from slipping or tripping – I couldn’t imagine running in these conditions.
I passed a handfull of other hikers throughout the day, and on the highest ridge – only 300 vertical feet above the deepest hollow – I passed a young guy setting up camp under a lean-to, only a few yards off the trail, then noticed another farther off in the forest. It had started to snow lightly. The guy under the lean-to conjured romantic images of mountain men on the frontier, but he’d only walked a mile from his vehicle and climbed less than 300 vertical feet, you could still hear cars passing occasionally on the road he’d driven, and there were farms and more paved roads within the next mile.
Monday, January 29th, 2024: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
I assume everyone has experienced setbacks, and starting over. Losing the ability to do something essential, and facing a slow, arduous recovery of that ability. That seems to be the theme of my life now – every few months, I lose the ability to hike, and I have to fight my way back to a slightly lower capacity than I had before – so that in the long run, I’m gradually losing capacity. One step forward, two steps back.
When I say essential, I mean hiking is the way I keep my blood pressure low. When I can’t hike at capacity, my blood pressure quickly goes up 30 points, and if it stays there indefinitely I’ll have to start taking daily meds like most people my age.
Today was supposed to be my latest recovery hike, after more than a month off. I knew I shouldn’t tackle a hard one, and my favorite crest hikes were inaccessible anyway because we had more snow last week. I finally decided on a canyon hike I hadn’t done since last May. It’s a slow climb through a flood-damaged canyon to a mid-elevation saddle, and from there I could descend into a second canyon if I had time and the inclination.
It was a little below freezing when I left town, but it was forecast to reach the mid-50s later. Approaching the mountains on the highway, I saw a lot of snow above 8,000 feet – my saddle would be at 8,200, which shouldn’t be too bad.
This is a trail I’ve hiked many times, but it was washed out a few years ago. Last May I discovered that the first two miles had recently been cleared, and beyond that, it was slow going but I could find my way.
This time around, I expected to be out of shape from the hiatus, and at 6,800 feet, beyond the cleared section, I was surprised to run into some snow, which made it even harder to get through the obstacles. Boulder-choked narrows that had to be climbed around, debris flows of loose rock, big snow-covered logs that had to be crawled under or cleared of snow and climbed over. And that was only in the canyon-bottom section.
A mile beyond the cleared section, I came upon three heavy-duty cardboard boxes with plastic handles, containing square seven-gallon water jugs, sitting right on the trail. These could only have been carried in by pack horses or mules, and had to have been left by the equestrian group that has the permit to do trail work. They had to have been left here since my May visit, but there was no corresponding evidence of additional trail work. This was the second time I’ve come upon gear left by these people – using public trails as long-term storage for their gear. The cardboard will rot – what were they thinking?
Three miles in, the trail leaves the creek and begins traversing in and out of side drainages, climbing, at a steep grade, almost a thousand feet to the saddle through dense oak scrub. Since this trail is seldom used by anyone other than me, the stiff scrub has closed over it, and fire-killed trees continue to fall onto it. Since last May, despite a poor summer growing season, I found it had become almost impassable. As a recovery hike, it was brutal, and I had to put on my gaiters halfway up to keep snow out of my boots.
In May it had taken three hours to go the four miles – today, with the snow and worse trail conditions, it took three-and-a-half. I’d really wanted to continue into the second canyon, but only about 50 yards down the side trail I sank into 16 inches of snow and gave up.
In the little saddle, my boots in the snow, I sat in the sun on the end of the only snow-free log, eating my lunch of nuts and jerky, and noticed the last storm had dropped about four fresh inches here, on top of the earlier snowpack. Despite the effort of getting here and my disappointment at having to turn back, the landscape was beautiful and I’d have a fantastic view going down.
The steep grade and tricky footing quickly took their toll on my knees, making the descent almost as slow as the climb, and painful. Remind me to avoid this one in the future, unless I can somehow rebuild my capacity without another setback!
Monday, February 5th, 2024: Hikes, Pinalenos, Round, Southeast Arizona.
For months I’d been wanting to return to the archetypal sky island over in Arizona, to try a trail that seemed to offer the perfect winter hike – mid-elevation so it should be snow-free, devoid of forest so it should offer endless views, and with plenty of elevation change to provide a cardio workout.
This is the range that abruptly rises 6,000 feet above the desert plain like a southeast-to-northwest-trending wall, its crest a tilted alpine plateau – 9,000 feet high at its western edge, 10,700 feet high on the east. A paved road winds up the big southeastern canyon to the crest, where there are campgrounds, but other than that, the flanks are too steep for either roads or cattle. So although this has no designated wilderness like the other ranges I hike, it’s plenty wild.
Most of the trails in the range begin on the plain and climb up a canyon or ridge to the crest, and they’d be blocked midway by snow now. But today’s trail is an unusual traverse of the eastern flank of the range, beginning at 6,000 feet in the southeastern canyon and crossing a half dozen intervening ridges and canyons before finally ascending to crest fifteen miles later.
I was hoping to get about halfway and back in a day hike. But the trailhead is more than a two-hour drive from home – that’s why I don’t come here more often. And although I was ready for an early start, it took me fifteen minutes to get my windshield clear of frost.
I drove west under a cloudy sky, but it was beginning to clear as I drove up the canyon to the trailhead, where I arrived a half hour later than planned.
The southeastern trailhead is on the highway up the canyon, but the map showed that I could avoid the first intervening ridge and thus get farther into the backcountry by taking a short cut from a lower picnic area. I found an older man parked there in a pickup with camper shell; he preceded me up the trail dressed in colorful old-school flannel – making me feel like a real yuppie in my high-tech duds from REI and Patagonia. I soon passed him, and he remarked on how cold it was.
But this first segment of trail, climbing to the first ridgetop, unfolded at an average 15 percent grade, so I quickly shed layers. Sunlight glinted off the snowy crest thousands of feet above, while the thawing dirt of the trail had been deeply chewed up by horses as well as hikers’ boots. Thankfully it was sand and gravel and didn’t stick to my boots like the clay mud farther north. And I was admiring the surrounding igneous boulders and outcrops, which reminded me of my beloved desert.
That first climb was about 1,300 feet, and ended at a knife-edge saddle overlooking a completely new watershed. This was all unknown terrain, miles of it unfolding for me to explore. The tallest peaks of the range glittered above, and I could hear a creek roaring a thousand feet below. Far to the north I could see a prominent stone spire rising from the distant ridge I hoped to reach. From here, it looked much too far – especially since at the end of the day I’d have to climb back up out of this canyon.
The upper part of the descending trail was frozen solid under a thin layer of snow, and was steep enough that I had to go slow to keep from slipping. This trail was literally clinging to the wall of the canyon, with overhangs in some spots. Eventually I reached switchbacks that were mostly in sun, but there were so many I soon lost count. It seemed to take forever to reach the creek.
Brush had been cut recently all along this trail, and cut branches had often been left blocking the trail. The canyon was impressively rocky; the bottom was lined with sycamores; I easily found stepping stones to cross on.
Although the slopes on the opposite side of the canyon were gentler, they were also rockier, with big exposed slabs of igneous rock. After crossing a much smaller side canyon, I reached a bigger side canyon bearing a creek as big as the first, lined with solid rock. I began noticing metasedimentary rock with deformed strata just like the rock on my desert land. This is what I love – much rockier than the landscape around my New Mexico home.
Past that canyon, the trail climbed over a low divide where I reached a junction with an ascending ridge trail, now abandoned, then down into a hollow where I met the lower end of the abandoned trail. The recent trail work ended here, as did the human tracks and horse tracks. And it suddenly occurred to me that despite the lack of wilderness designation, and the gentleness of the grassy slopes all around me, there was no sign of cattle here! How could our Gila Wilderness at home be overrun with cattle, while this range, unregulated and closer to a bigger city, remains ungrazed?
Past that junction, the trail was mostly either blocked by shrubs or overgrown with tall grasses, and there was no sign anyone had gone there for years. But I was able to keep going by reading the landscape.
I made it another two-thirds of a mile before running out of time. My planned destination was another mile and a half farther and 1,200 feet higher, on the ridge that led to that prominent rock spire. With an earlier start, I might’ve made it.
But I wasn’t disappointed; this route had turned out even better than expected. Sure, it’s a challenge climbing over those intervening ridges, but this turned out to be the most spectacular landscape in our region, and I look forward to returning in better shape, and with more time.
I flushed a white-tailed buck out of the second canyon, and a dove out of the brush along the trail, but I was surprised not to see any hawks or eagles.
I took my time climbing out of that first deep canyon. It did take about an hour, but the frozen part was easier going up than going down.
The final descent to the trailhead was mostly in shade. I discovered someone had come partway up on horseback while I was over in the backcountry, so the trail was even more chewed up than in the morning.
I’ve been studying maps of this range for years. As I mentioned above, most trails start on the plain and climb to the crest. But since the catastrophic wildfires of the teens, and the ensuing erosion, all the crest-bound trails on this side of the range have been destroyed and abandoned. So this round-the-mountain traverse is my only option to explore this vast area, and today was just a first taste. I’ll be back!
Another night in a motel, followed by a lonely drive home through a wild landscape.
