Hikes
Monday, February 10th, 2025: Basin, Chiricahuas, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
This one’s for those of you who are tired of hearing about my knee…and for those, including me, who’ve been wondering if I’m ever going to do another spectacular hike. In fact, the last spectacular hike I did was the one that damaged my knee, in early May of 2024.
I deliberated far too long over where to go this Sunday. I was still deliberating on Sunday morning, when purely by chance I re-read the description of a trail in the mountain range I hiked last Sunday, a trail I’d always assumed would be boring.
In the middle of a paragraph describing the beginning of the trail, the author of the online guide mentions that if you leave the trail at the first creek crossing and bushwhack two miles up the side canyon, you might be able to reach a waterfall. He added, “Note that it can be quite a rugged off-trail hike to get to the waterfall, especially after flooding has rearranged the area significantly and brought a lot of debris into the canyon.”
In this dry winter I didn’t expect there to be much, if any, flow over the falls. But this hike seemed the best idea I’d had yet.
I’d been planning on doing the smart thing – an easy hike on a well-maintained trail with moderate distance and elevation gain to keep my knee pain under control until I see the doc in a couple weeks. But there are so few easy hikes around here that result in entertaining stories and pictures! A canyon bushwhack would probably be really hard on my knee, but it would force me to go slow, and I imagined I could turn back if it got too gnarly.
It was forecast to be yet another unseasonably warm day, reaching the mid-70s at the foot of the mountains. On the highway south, two young whitetail bucks darted out in front of me, and I just managed to drive between them and the rest of the herd, which I glimpsed in the rearview mirror crossing behind me in a long line. It was pure luck that I didn’t hit one head-on like I did in 2022, resulting in $3,000 worth of damage to my Sidekick, which was virtually totaled. Of course I’m driving my pickup now, which has a steel grille, but this little incident reminded me why I should not drive the Sidekick until the armored bumper arrives in May.
Fifteen minutes later I was driving down out of the mountains into the big basin and saw the range of my destination spread out along the horizon, some 50 miles away. By then, I was constantly coming up with ideas for the new song I’m working on, capturing them while driving as video notes on my camera. I have a theory that road trips in basin-and-range landscapes are best for stimulating creativity – whereas massive, iconic mountain ranges like the Rockies or the Alps enclose and hem us in, vast basins scattered with smaller, widely separated ranges allow the mind and imagination to wander freely.
The trailhead, at just over 6,200 feet, lies in dense oak woodland along the winding, rocky road that leads over the crest of the range. It’s not a popular trail and I left my little truck alone in the small clearing just off the road. It only took me a few minutes to reach the creek, which to my surprise was flowing and clear. I realized this canyon gets a lot of shade in winter; there must still be snow melting up on the crest.
I’d gotten a late start and it was already in the mid-60s here, so I was comfortable in my long-sleeved shirt. Initially, I found the oak forest free of undergrowth but lined with embedded rocks, and for a short distance I could follow a vague trail that appeared to have been used mostly by the occasional enterprising bull. I also noticed partial tracks of another recent hiker that I continued to find farther upstream, until the going became too rough for my predecessor.
I was spending most of my time on the north bank of the creek and shooting pictures toward the southern glare, so for the first time, I started experimenting with the exposure dial, hoping to lighten the dark areas in Photoshop later while avoiding washed out areas now.
I was surprised to come upon an old wickiup frame above the creek with a stone campfire windbreak, apparently built long ago by someone experimenting with the old ways. It’s great other civilized people are doing this, but when it’s only a one-time thing, we should return the site to its natural state instead of leaving ruins like this.
The forested lower canyon widened out, big ponderosa pines appeared, and the cattle trail led away from the creek. I entered patches of burn scar, and expanses of exposed rock where algae was choking the creek.
From here on, deadfall, flood debris, and thickets of thorny locust and other shrubs made the canyon bottom and neighboring slopes increasingly difficult, slow, and often painful to navigate. I looked for cattle trails, but they always led upslope away from the creek. The creek itself was becoming so choked with debris that following it was often impossible.
The ridges above were getting taller, the canyon darker, and tall firs began to join the pines in the canyon bottom. Under their shade, I was encouraged to see dense stands of fir seedlings that had clearly sprouted within the past year or two. I found minimal cairns left long ago by some hiker – hardly necessary, since you couldn’t get lost in this narrow canyon with increasingly steep sides.
And despite the warm weather, in one shady stretch the creek was frozen solid!
As the canyon narrowed, the ridges above literally towered above me so that I was in shade much of time, and big firs – many of them three feet in diameter – began to outnumber the pines. The creekbed was dry for long stretches but always reappeared farther up. My toil up the canyon became truly epic – the creekbed was almost everywhere jammed with fallen logs, there was no floodplain, and the steep slopes to each side consisted of loose rock – talus – sometimes exposed, and sometimes covered by dense thickets of thorny locust and stiff-branched scrub oak. I stumbled often and fell many times, but was always able to catch myself without injury.
Climbing above thickets on the north bank, I ended up high in a hell of talus and scrub, climbing up a rock-lined ravine that actually required bouldering moves. In the end, I forced my way through stiff brush, and half-sliding down half-buried talus to the creek, I realized it had taken me a half hour to go only 50 horizontal feet. The whole time, I was trying not to think about how hard it would be going back.
Staying near the creek now, I clambered over sharp boulders and fought my way through more deadfall and thickets, past more snow patches and frozen creek. Suddenly, I realized I was surrounded by white aspen seedlings, standing like ghosts in the deep shadow of the crest above. I love aspens, but I hadn’t expected to reach their habitat on this hike – from my glance at the topo map that morning I figured I would only be climbing a thousand feet or so above the oak zone.
The air temperature in the shadows was now below 60, but I was working so hard I still didn’t need a sweater. Would I ever make it to the waterfall?
The sky, impossibly far above and mostly hidden by cliffs or canopy, now appeared white beneath a thin cloud layer, and the canyon bottom became even darker, with only occasional rays of sunlight penetrating. I was forced to climb higher above the creek, and kept peering ahead through the big firs for an end to my quest.
Suddenly, through a gap in the black tree trunks, far in the distance I spotted scraps of brilliant white. I approached slowly and carefully across the steep talus, made slippery by a layer of fir needles, until a frozen waterfall, fifty feet tall, began to reveal itself, gradually as if to increase the suspense, around a bend in the canyon wall.
I’ll warn you the pictures don’t do it justice. Maybe I was more appreciative after the ordeal I’d endured to get there – to me, it was one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever hiked to, and made all the suffering worthwhile. We’re all jaded by lifelong exposure to photos and video of the so-called wonders of the world, including waterfalls hundreds of feet tall or wide. I probably could’ve taken better pictures, but the space I had was cramped, the dark cliff totally dominated it, and the contrast between white sky and shadowed waterfall made photography a challenge that overwhelmed my limited skills.
And I was finally getting chilly!
I lingered in this cold, dark, beautiful place long enough to log a waypoint with my GPS message device. I was surprised to be able to connect with a satellite, down in that dark canyon. But when I checked the coordinates against the topo map back home, I found the satellite had recorded my location one third of a mile off – the cliffs and solid canopy of firs had apparently deflected and/or reflected the signal more than I would think possible. GPS users, be forwarned!
On the way back down, I tried to find better routes, sticking to the creek as closely as possible. The slopes above may appear more attractive but can quickly lead you astray. And eventually, I found more cairns and remnants of old trail blazed by other hikers – evidence I’d missed on the way up.
Those remnants of trail still led me astray as I approached the trailhead. And a sharp branch finally tore a big hole in my hiking pants. More than any bushwhack I’ve ever done, this truly was an obstacle course requiring full concentration at all times, where I never had the luxury of reflection or daydreaming.
It’d taken me more than four hours to bushwhack the four miles up that canyon and back. But when I reached the original trail at its modest creek crossing, I figured I still had an hour left. My knee would surely hate me for it, but I was so elated at reaching the waterfall that I continued up the trail. The online guide had claimed that in less than a mile you would reach a ridgetop with awesome views. Even walking slowly to protect my knee, I figured I could do that, and return, in an hour.
It was an often steep but smooth and well-maintained dirt trail, and it seemed to climb on forever. But after winding out and back into deep ravines amid dense oak forest, with the sun setting behind the crest, I finally reached the awesome views. But the sun had completely set by then, and the landscape was too dark to photograph well.
And I realized I would now have to hurry back down the trail, to reach the cafe before closing. When I plotted my route at home later, I found I’d only gone 5.6 miles total, but gained an accumulated 2,141 vertical feet – far more than was wise with this knee injury.
Nothing that lots of pain meds can’t fix – temporarily, at least. I hope you enjoy the epic even a fraction as much as I enjoyed the hike!
Monday, March 3rd, 2025: Hikes, Nature, San Francisco Mountains, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
Another trip back east meant it had been two and a half weeks since my last hike. Doc and I had agreed on a three-month rehab program for my knee, starting with 2-mile hikes and gradually working up. I’d done this before, and it’s not easy – two-mile walks don’t justify driving into the mountains, but it’s hard to get excited about walking around town.
Especially on Sunday, the day of my big wilderness hikes.
This weekend, I had a second goal – a thorough road test of the upgraded suspension and much bigger tires on my Sidekick. So I was looking for a short hike accessed by a road trip combining as many different conditions as possible, while minimizing the risk of hitting a deer and wiping out my investment.
Northwest turned out to be the only viable direction, toward the remote, rugged, little-known area I’ve been trying to explore during the past year. Since a two-mile hike lasts only an hour, and the round-trip drive was likely to take four, I needed a lunch plan, and the northwest trip offered three options, only two of which I’d tried already.
I compiled a list of eight short hikes along that route, most of which used the first mile of much longer wilderness trails I’d hiked many times before. The last and farthest hike depended on an abandoned trail that might or might not be passable, over and around a remote mountain I’d been obsessing over for years. It’s the high point of a small range rising amid terrain so rugged the peak tends to get lost and ignored by outsiders driving the highway across its shoulder. Surrounding peaks get in the way so it’s hard to even see the summit of this range from afar.
I’d driven the steep, rocky forest road, which climbs to within 200 vertical feet of the 8,970 foot summit, and I’d fallen in love with the views and the dark, spooky forest of firs and aspens that lines its deep, narrow canyons, where trees often fall and block the road for days or weeks. I assumed the road would normally be closed in winter, but this winter had been the driest in memory so I didn’t expect snow.
When I got up to start breakfast, I saw three deer in my backyard – two does and a yearling. By the time I headed out with my gear, they’d made themselves at home in a patch of sunlight. Better here than on the road, I figured.
Yet another sunny day with clear skies and a high forecast in the 60s.
There are dozens of options for a short hike – one main reason I’d picked this trip was because it combined high-speed highway, twisty mountain road, and rocky backcountry road to give the new suspension a workout. It adds a 2-1/2 inch lift, which was immediately noticeable in a number of ways: wind noise, buffeting in a cross-wind, loss of power on grades. I had to work the steering wheel more than before. But I soon got used to most of those changes, and had brought my headphones to cancel the noise.
Stock, this vehicle comes with excellent handling, so even with the modifications it still handles quite well. And my initial impressions about loss of power were disproved later in the day. The ultimate test will be the long, steep grade on I-40 west of Flagstaff.
The forest road to the summit did turn out to be open, but as usual, six or eight trees had recently fallen across it, then had been pushed or dragged to the side by other travelers. Since it’s regularly maintained, the road’s never been a challenge for the Sidekick, but the upgrades give me confidence that was always lacking before.
One of many neat features of this range is its sprawling summit plateau at 8,600 feet, with parklike ponderosa forest, grassy meadows, and not a single man-made structure apart from the old trailhead kiosk. This may be one of the least-developed mountain ranges in the U.S.
The map shows the hiking trail following an abandoned road that dead-ends just east of the summit, and from there, following a long ridge south toward a remote trail junction I’d bushwhacked to a few years ago. None of the trails in this area are maintained, and this trail is shown as a dotted line, meaning it may no longer even exist. I figured if it wasn’t passable I’d drive back south to one of the other options.
What I found was one of the worst burn scars I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t noticed it from the forest road, or the highway below, because firefighters defended the corridors, and lower peaks block a view of this summit ridge. The fire occurred in 2018 and was limited to the summit ridges and plateau of this tiny range, but it burned as intensely as any I’d found in our region.
Deadfall, blowdown, and thorny regrowth blocked the trail almost continuously, and in several cases had to be detoured around. I was only able to fight my way through because enough tread remained for cattle to follow – there was no evidence of other hikers going this way since the fire, and the cattle had become my trailblazers.
After an hour and a half, when faced with yet another solid thicket of thorns, I gave up. One thing I love about this range is its steep slopes, dropping abruptly to canyon bottoms two thousand feet below, so if you can see through the trees you get spectacular views. The burn scar did give me good views to north and south, but if I wanted to hike this trail farther someday, I would need a machete.
As usual, on the way back to the trailhead I paid more attention to details of habitat. I was particularly impressed by the color range of a native ground cover with holly-like leaves. I’d surely seen it before, but in this winter burn scar it was the most colorful thing in the landscape. And although this range doesn’t have much exposed rock, the loss of trees had revealed strange, isolated, stratified dolmen-like outcrops.
It ended up taking me over two hours to hike a mile and a half, and it was time for lunch, in the village a half hour down the highway. The three eateries that are open Sundays close at 2 pm, 3 pm, and 7 pm, and I’d never arrived early enough to try the first – which turned out to be the best. This is the historic heart of anti-government and pro-Trump sentiment, but the cafe was playing 60s psychedelic music, and when I was the last diner left at closing time, the bearded chef, his hair in long braided pigtails, brought out a slice of cheesecake “on the house”. First time I’d had one of my favorite desserts in years, maybe decades.
Since I still had a hour or more left for hiking, my plan was to do one of the partial hikes on my list on the way south. On the way back from the village, I spotted the burned ridge I’d hiked in the morning, peeking from behind intervening mountains – the first time I’d ever been able to identify this range from a distance in this dense, confusing mountain landscape.
The trail I’d picked for the afternoon hike is well-maintained, and one of the most spectacular in our region. The first stretch climbs above a vast grassy mesa, one of our most distinctive landscape features.
Combined with the morning bushwhack, the day’s hikes ended up totaling three and a half miles, and I could tell my knee would be complaining that night. My body and soul crave the mileage and elevation, so this two-mile thing is going to be hard to stick to.
When I got home just after sunset, one doe and her fawn were still in my backyard, so I chased them out, and they crossed the wide street to my neighbor’s small front yard, surrounded by a hedge. These seem to be strictly urban deer now – a whole new breed, comfortable around people, thriving on pavement, surrounded by city traffic, more than a mile from undeveloped habitat. Dystopia is no longer a fantasy of the future.
Sunday, March 9th, 2025: Nature, Peloncillos, Rocks, Southwest New Mexico.
For almost 35 years, I’ve hiked to the plateau above my land in the Mojave Desert, a beautiful oasis with a prehistoric ceremonial site, and considered that the most dangerous hike I do. It requires climbing 400 vertical feet straight up a 67 percent grade on a surface of loose dirt, loose boulders, yucca spines, branching cholla cactus, and big, spreading acacia shrubs covered with thorns. I sometimes step on boulders heavier than me that I expect to be solid, and have them tip over under my feet. In places the easiest route is up ramps of crumbly granite bedrock, where a slip would result, at minimum, in torn flesh and broken bones. And I almost always make that climb alone, in a place with no cell signal.
On the way to one of my favorite hiking areas along the Arizona border, I pass a small mountain range with low granite peaks, cliffs, and boulders that reminds me of my mountains in the Mojave. The peak of the range has always intrigued me, because from the highway it looks unclimbable, a spire of solid rock. And while researching the area online, I was surprised and excited to learn there’s a population of desert bighorn sheep there.
The map shows a dirt road running up a southwest canyon toward the foot of the peak, and I wondered if maybe I could climb from that to the base of the spire and traverse around to the back, to see if it might be climbable on the north side.
We’d had a dusting of snow in town the previous day, and as I drove over there, I was surprised to see quite a bit of new snow on the high mountains peeking over the horizon. The drive includes about 15 straight miles on the interstate, which was a good test of the Sidekick’s recent alignment. And the unmaintained dirt roads to the foot of the peak turned out to be a good test of the bigger tires and suspension lift.
I’m under so much stress that I’m barely sane, and shortly after turning off the highway, I mindlessly took the wrong road toward the peak. It ran up a wash lined with deep, dry sand where I was immediately afraid of getting stuck, so I shifted into low range 4wd. I plowed a mile up that sandy wash, on edge the whole time, not realizing it was the wrong road until I’d reached the very end.
Back on the main road, I tested the Sidekick lift on deeply eroded and rocky stretches, and never bottomed out. It was great not to be stressing over the right line to take all the time. The road I needed, up the canyon to the foot of the peak, hadn’t been driven recently, and turned out to be as bad as the abandoned mine roads in the Mojave. As in the Mojave, the alluvial fan was lined with creosote bush, and there was even a deep dry wash next to the road just like in the desert. The peak loomed higher and more forbidding as the walls of the canyon closed in, but the road kept climbing and climbing, much farther than I’d expected.
I finally sensed the end was near, and backed off into a small clearing to scan the slopes ahead. They looked far too rugged to climb, and that deep wash, lined with big prickly pears, separated me from them anyway.
But farther up the canyon it looked like there might be a more gentle slope I could traverse left toward the sheer base of the peak – the direction I was hoping to explore.
I set off up what was left of the road. It soon ended – without space to turn the Sidekick around, so I was glad I’d stopped early. Here, floods had left a wall of rocks above the wash, but I could see some kind of narrow, overgrown corridor leading up to the right of the rock wall. I tried to follow what looked like an old mule trail, but in many places it was choked with cactus.
In the meantime I was scanning that slope across the wash that I’d hoped to climb. No dice – the lower part was too steep, and the wash was blocked by spreading prickly pears.
Above, I could see a little pile of mine tailings, and suddenly I emerged into a clearing that featured the rusted steel frame of a bench seat from a pickup truck. The path continued, and soon I saw a gap where I might be able to cross the wash between prickly pears, and hopefully climb to the mine tailings. It looked like I might be able to use that to bypass the slope I’d originally hoped to climb.
I immediately discovered this was dangerous terrain to climb – as dangerous as that plateau hike I make in the Mojave, with the same features. The slopes here were loose dirt and loose rock alternating with steep ramps of rough bedrock, and the way was blocked again and again by shrubs with inch-long thorns, prickly pear, and big agaves that would impale you if you happened to slip on a loose rock.
But atop the tailings pile was a flat ledge and the mouth of a mine.
It was a shallow mine, and fairly recent, with oxidized plastic containers and a rusty old can of insect spray – maybe from the 60s or 70s. Like most mines, it had some interesting rocks piled outside the opening – surprisingly similar to rocks in the Mojave.
The mine was on a slope opposite the one I’d hoped to climb, across a deep, narrow gully choked with boulders and cacti. As I picked my way from the mine toward the gully, I could see that this slope was much rockier, and got rockier still higher up. And the rock looked exactly like the rare metamorphic rock in the canyon on my Mojave land, which I’d never seen anywhere else.
If I wanted to continue this hike, I was going to have to climb this steep, thorny slope. The metamorphic rock has a rough, sharp texture which can be good for climbing, but at this level it was too steep, so I had to climb the loose rock – exactly what the bighorn sheep had been doing. Sometimes I was able to follow their route, but the higher I climbed, the more dangerous it got.
I was hoping to climb above the gully and traverse left onto the easier slope, but above the gully my way was blocked by a broad ramp of bedrock at about 40 degrees. It was just too dangerous to traverse.
So I turned right, where across a rockfall of sharp boulders, I could see a long, steep bedrock ramp leading up to the horizon, where there appeared to be a juniper beckoning me. I picked my way carefully over the boulders, and stepped out onto the ramp. The surface was like a really coarse carpenter’s rasp – a fall would tear your skin off down to the bone, and sand your bone down to bone meal. Traction was really good for climbing up, but how would I get back down? I blocked out the thought.
The ramp only took me part way – the rest of the climb was in loose dirt and loose rocks, winding my way between thorny shrubs, cacti, and agaves. I was more and more convinced this was a terrible idea and I’d end up badly injured or dead, but I was on autopilot and couldn’t give up.
I finally passed the little juniper, and emerged on a small ledge with a killer view. There was still a higher slope leading up to the sheer base of the peak, but I wasn’t going any farther today. I had little hope that I’d be able to get down from here intact.
It was lunchtime, and I snacked on homemade trail mix. I’d hoped to reach the cafe in the Arizona mountains across the big basin, but I was half convinced my life would end below this peak.
I’ve never been so cautious on a descent. I inched down that long ramp on my butt. I never want to tackle a climb like that alone again – but taking a slightly different route, somehow I got down without slipping or falling once.
The Sidekick did really well on the drive out. It makes a hell of a noise, but I wore my noise-cancelling headphones and drove faster as a result.
It was after 2 pm when I reached the cafe. Starved for protein after working out during the week, I ordered the steak instead of my usual burrito. My knee was killing me, so I took a pain pill.
This was not the kind of hike I’m supposed to be doing, to recover from the knee injury. Like I said, I’m barely sane. It’s like I’m on autopilot, blindly doing the same dangerous things I did at half my age – but now my family depends on my survival.
A half moon was rising in front of me as I drove home in late afternoon. I’d only hiked four fifths of a mile out and back, with 566 feet of elevation gain. An incredibly dangerous place, but incredibly beautiful.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2025: Hikes, Nature, Pinos Altos Range, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
After a week’s hiatus, here’s a short Dispatch from a short hike (still rehabbing knee).
Pics are dull under a cloudy sky, but after the hike I added up all the wildfire scars seen today and realized it’s actually kinda interesting.
The hike begins at 7,200 feet elevation, at the eastern foot of a long east-west ridge, in the narrow, pine-forested canyon of a seasonal creek. It traverses through pleasant, open ponderosa forest thinned by a 2020 fire that started at the west end of the ridge and mainly burned on the crest and the north slope – but surprisingly sneaked around to burn at low intensity at the southeast end.
The trail climbs the east end of the ridge toward an isolated outcrop of striking, bulbous white rock, where you next enter a gentle, exposed slope lined with ferns, locust, and scrub oak that is the small scar of a much older high-intensity wildfire that killed all the pines in this spot. That wildfire opened up dramatic views to east and south.
Climbing to the north side of a rocky peak, the trail briefly re-enters intact forest, which is where I turned back today, at a little over 8,100 feet elevation. But through the trees, I could see west toward the high-intensity burn scar of the 2020 fire. Temps were in the 60s today, but I found patches of snow in shaded spots from 7,000 feet upwards.
Turning back and emerging from the forest, I could see south across the canyon toward the apocalyptic moonscape left by a 2014 fire, and west to the Black Range, devastated by high-intensity mega-wildfires in 2013 and 2022. I’ve hiked all these burn scars extensively.
Sunday, March 30th, 2025: Hikes, Pinos Altos Range, Southwest New Mexico.
Continuing my knee rehab, I’m looking for 2-mile hikes with increasing elevation gain. And this weekend, I realized there’s a nearby 8,000 foot mountain that I’ve always avoided because the hike to the top and back is only two miles. It’s our most iconic mountain because its profile suggests a bear.
Since it’s only a 2-mile hike, I hadn’t really studied the topo map, and it wasn’t until I started climbing that I realized this is by far the steepest hike in my repertoire – an average 22% grade from bottom to top. So not so smart for my knee.
It’s just tall enough to host an island of ponderosa pines at the top, so one of the highlights of the climb was the final transition from pinyon-juniper-oak to ponderosa forest.
And of course there was a decent view, to northeast, northwest, and southwest.
When hiking downhill with patellar tendinitis, it seems the important thing is your gait. You need to use your whole foot, landing on the heel and rolling forward to grip with your toes. So I tried that on the entire 1,054 foot descent. It was still hard on my knee, but hopefully not as hard as if I’d descended mindlessly.
