Hikes
Color Returns to the Mountains
Sunday, May 17th, 2020: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Southwest New Mexico.
Returning to the wilderness area around a 10,000′ peak, where the snow is finally gone and color has finally returned!
I chose this hike because it was going to be a hot day and I hoped it would be cooler up there. It’s also a north-south ridge and tends to be windy – I would turn a bend in the trail and literally go from calm and sweating in the 80s to a wind chill in the 50s, instantaneously. I had to hold onto my hat several times.
This is a fairly remote hike, but popular with city people driving from Las Cruces and El Paso. Most people are focused on reaching the fire lookout compound on the peak, partly because it used to be occupied by local celebrity author Philip Connors; I couldn’t care less about Connors and am much more interested in the wildlife. I skip the fire lookout and continue down the crest trail on the back side of the peak to a remote saddle, around which there are still some big old-growth trees that survived the 2013 fire.
I was hoping to explore more of the crest trail, but north of the saddle, it was completely obliterated by a big blowdown of mature conifers. I will be surprised if the Forest Service ever restores the trail system around here. The trails themselves, like the fire lookout, are simply aspects of more than a century of failed practices. A microcosm of our entire society.
On the back side of the peak, trying to climb over a fallen tree trunk, I lost my balance and fell backward, grabbing a locust seedling by mistake. My hand was pierced by its long thorns, but miraculously, didn’t bleed. Hiking back to the trailhead in a heavy wind, I noticed a beautiful butterfly darting around my legs. It suddenly dashed under my heel just as I put my weight down, and was crippled.
Driving down through the foothills, where the speed limit increases and I was forced off the road a few weeks earlier by a reckless driver, I watched carefully as vehicles emerged one by one from the blind curves ahead of me. Nearly all of them were driving too fast and cut the curves, crossing the double yellow line into my lane, and I leaned on my horn again and again – something which is strictly taboo in rural southwest New Mexico. I was relieved to get home safe, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor butterfly.
Monday, May 25th, 2020: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Another unanticipated holiday weekend materialized – another national holiday I don’t celebrate. This one supposedly memorializes soldiers, mostly young men, who died in the various wars pursued by our aggressive, competitive, violent society. A society which is the direct descendant of European empires and their interminable, apocalyptic conflicts, which were all implicated in the development of the benefits we treasure from Western Civilization – the arts, the sciences, the “democracy.” All these entitlements fed and matured on an endless cycle of war, suffering, and death.
As we echo platitudes about these young men, we might consider the mothers, fathers, wives, and children who were scarred by their deaths. We might consider the much higher casualties of the “enemy,” including the civilians injured or killed either intentionally or as “collateral damage” by our trained warriors and weapons of mass destruction. We might consider the displaced or slaughtered wildlife and the productive natural habitat rendered sterile or toxic. We might consider the peaceful societies who, alongside our history of violence, have had the wisdom to avoid this legacy of destruction that’s glorified by our “advanced” civilization.
But it was Sunday, and like clockwork I was heading out for my Sunday hike, which is partly a tribute to my dad, who briefly joined the U.S. Marines, but missed the fighting as the war ended while he was still in training. He came from a churchgoing family but always told people nature was his church. As it is mine, hence the Sunday hikes.
Because of the holiday, the ongoing pandemic, and media hysteria about people violating lockdown orders and massing in dangerous crowds across the country, I was a little apprehensive. But traffic on the national highway west of town was even lighter than usual, with miles between vehicles. The trailhead, at the end of a five-mile dirt road, is empty four times out of five, but I figured I might have company today. Little did I know!
First I passed a full-size horse trailer. Then I came upon EIGHT vehicles, big trucks and SUVs, packed into the steeply sloping parking area around the trailhead. Most wore Arizona plates, but two were from Utah and Montana. I could hardly believe my eyes. During this pandemic, while everyone I know locally stays obediently near home, every time I go out for a hike, I find vehicles from out of state, some from as far away as Michigan. Renegades hiding in the forest, invaders endangering us locals. City people may be getting tired of travel restrictions, but we country folks are getting tired of thoughtless, careless invaders from the city. And this crowd at the trailhead was out of control, adding insult to injury.
There was only one narrow space left beneath a juniper where I could pull in without blocking anyone else. What was going on here? Eight five-seater passenger vehicles plus a horse trailer, that could mean up to 40 people and half a dozen equines. Two of the SUVs had been parked blocking two others, so it was clear that some of these people belonged together as part of a group. Even assuming the folks from Utah and Montana were outliers, I’d never encountered such a big group in the backcountry around here.
Strangely, the log book at the trailhead showed only two visitors since I’d last been here, two weeks earlier. There was no entry for this weekend.
I hate crowds in nature, and I was ready to give up, but where else would I go? This was one of the most remote trails in the area. My feet, anxious to get going, pulled me forward toward the trail. The canyon bottom was a mile ahead, and I envisioned it teeming with dozens of anti-government yahoos from red-state Arizona, enthusiastically violating lockdown orders and carelessly exposing each other to the virus. For some minimal exercise, I would just walk the half mile to the wilderness boundary. Or maybe the full mile down into the canyon, but as soon as I saw people ahead, I’d turn back.
Strangely, the sparse dry dirt of the trail didn’t show much sign of a crowd. In the first half mile I could distinguish two or three different boot or shoe prints and what seemed to be a single hoofprint. My feet kept pulling me forward, down into the canyon. Just before the first creek crossing I came on a single fresh pile of horseshit. I listened but could hear no voices, just the trickling of the shrinking stream.
The sky was clearer than when I’d last been here, and the air a bit cooler – in the low 70s in the canyon bottom – and I was comfortably warm in my tough hiking pants and long-sleeved shirt. You don’t wear shorts on these trails in burn areas because they’re often overgrown with thorny shrubs.
After another mile, moving from stark burn scar into semi-intact riparian canopy, I reached the trail fork, still with no sign of people. But someone had pulled down the Forest Service trail sign at the fork – it was lying facedown in the dirt – so I set it upright again and rebuilt the cairn that held it in place. I was going straight as usual, up into the high country. I knew the right fork led to an old miner’s cabin over in the next canyon to the south, but according to the Forest Service that trail hadn’t been maintained since the 2012 fire and was impassable. Yet it looked used to me. I carefully followed beside it in the grass, looking for tracks. Sure enough, there was a hoofprint and a single boot print. But that didn’t account for the crowd from the nine vehicles at the trailhead. The mystery deepened.
I continued up the canyon. Lush vegetation blocked my view ahead much of the time, so I stopped often to listen for voices. Had most of the group been on a guided backpacking trip? Were they off somewhere in the wilderness that I hadn’t been able to penetrate on my day hikes? There were guided horseback trips over on the other side of the wilderness, but I’d never heard of such a thing here, or on foot. And surely there was a moratorium on guided trips during the pandemic.
3-1/2 miles into my hike, I reached the base of the switchbacks at the head of the long side canyon, where the trail begins its steep climb to the 9,500′ crest. There’s an old fire ring there in the grass beside the now-dry creek where I usually stop for a snack and a drink of water, but there was no sign anyone else had lingered. So I continued, keeping my eyes and ears peeled toward the trail above. The next logical stopping place would be the mountainside spring at 9,100′.
But there was no one up there either, and no recent tracks. It was breezy, and cool in the shade of the forest, so that if I didn’t keep climbing I’d have to pull on my sweater. I was feeling much better at this point – even if I found people at the crest, I would’ve achieved a good day’s hike.
The approach to the crest is across a barren slope of crumbling white rock, so I stopped as soon as I rounded the bend that reveals a view of the crest and the little knob at its west end, about a quarter mile away. Anyone lingering at the crest would be up there for the panoramic view, so I squinted and waited for movement. There was a shadow between the trees that could’ve been a person, and it wavered a bit, but I couldn’t be sure. So I kept climbing.
There was no one up there. I saw an occasional boot track but couldn’t tell how fresh it was in this dry, sparse dirt. Like I had a couple weeks earlier, I continued down the other side, climbing over dozens of fallen trees until the effort was greater than the reward, where I turned back, still mystified about where the crowd had gone. Had they all parked at the trailhead and headed somewhere else, not using the trail at all? I wasn’t aware of any other destinations from that starting point, but I’d never actually checked.
Despite the nastiness of the trail on the back side of the crest, I like being back there, feeling like I’m really in the heart of the wilderness, on the other side of the watershed from the distant highway and the tiny pastures and farmsteads of the San Francisco River valley. Shortly after I turned and started back up the trail, I heard an awful racket in the tall firs to my east. It sounded like an animal in pain, a very loud sort of rasping croak. Then I saw some large birds bursting out of the foliage, flapping up into a dead tree ahead of me, keeping up their racket full-time. I couldn’t tell what they were but whipped out my camera and tried to zoom in before they flew away. They were really worked up about something!
Later research would reveal that they were Clark’s nutcrackers, a bird I first saw at the age of 12, on the rim of Oregon’s Crater Lake.
On the way back down, I stopped at the spring and waited to fill the dipper I’d brought along just in case. Earlier in the year, the water had been full of sediment, but now it was clear and delicious again.
Back down the steep, rocky trail into the canyon. Through the tangled, difficult stretch where fallen trees and small debris flows need to be negotiated. And finally to the trail fork, with still no sign of people. But just past the fork, I finally spotted people ahead. Not from the crowd at the trailhead – these were just starting into the back country, hiking toward me. It was two boys, one about 18, the other a few years younger, both carrying old-fashioned frame packs with sleeping bags and pads.
As we talked, the mystery was solved. They were part of a “family tradition” that maintained and used the old miner’s cabin, Skunk’s place, over in the big canyon to the south. The vehicles from Utah and Montana were part of their far-flung family. When I asked the condition of the trail, the older boy said they’d gone in with horses two years ago and cleared it. And the cabin was all fixed up and I was welcome to use it any time.
The boys were super polite, shy but friendly, and my former annoyance at their invasion during the pandemic faded away for the moment. Their elders had organized this trip and it wouldn’t do to challenge these kids. They were carrying fishing gear and said the trout should be biting over there, where a perennial stream cascades over a series of falls.
In fact their trail climbs 600′ out of this canyon to a saddle, and then down 1,400′ to the cabin in the bottom of the next canyon over, a much bigger and wilder canyon that can only be accessed from here. One online nature photographer who has rafted the Grand Canyon claims that this canyon in our local wilderness is its equal – it’s a mile deep and has towering cliffs and a series of waterfalls up to 200′ tall.
So the crowd of invaders from Arizona, Utah, and Montana maintain a cabin deep in our wilderness, and return here each Memorial Day weekend to hike or ride a rugged five miles in, with 2,600′ of accumulated elevation gain on the round trip. That’s quite a family! And screw the pandemic – in the culture we inherited from our European ancestors, clan loyalty is far more important than the health and safety of your neighbors.
Who knows how many strangers these travelers interacted with in their journeys to Skunk’s cabin? But as it turned out, they didn’t interfere at all with my day in church.
Monday, June 1st, 2020: Black Range, Hikes, Sawyers, Southwest New Mexico.
Is denial a river in Egypt?
We depend on news media for information about the world outside our neighborhoods. But news media are businesses within the capitalist consumer economy. News media reflect the dominant worldview of our society. The information they deliver is driven by their business agenda and prioritized by the dominant values of society – the values of elites: Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism, individualism, statism, imperialism, competition, etc.
This is okay with most of us, because we share that dominant worldview and we accept those dominant values. It’s what we were taught in the schools.
But is our worldview accurate? What might it be leaving out?
What about our history? Do we absorb the news in context of our history as brutal conquerors and enslavers? Do we assume that the past is past, problems are solved and errors forgiven? The Native Americans whose land our ancestors stole, upon whom they perpetrated genocide – all that’s in the past, we Anglos are the natives now. The fact that our great cities sit on the land of indigenous people and our children are consuming their resources – that’s just the way things are, you can’t turn back the clock. Besides, Native Americans weren’t that great – scientists say they drove Pleistocene megafauna to extinction. Anyone defending them is just naively romanticizing the noble savage, and this land is better off in our hands.
Lincoln freed the slaves, the civil rights movement of the 60s ended segregation, one day a year we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. – shouldn’t that be good enough?
In the media worldview, we live in a democracy, so when people seem to threaten that, we call them fascists. But how many of us are really aware that the U.S. maintains a worldwide military empire, with over 600 bases in foreign countries on every continent, and we’re actually still at war in Afghanistan? We don’t get to vote on any aspect of our military or how it is used, so from the point of view of our warriors and their victims, the argument of fascism vs. democracy is largely irrelevant – in a military sense, the U.S. is not a peaceful democracy, it’s truly a violent empire.
Nor do we get to vote on the U.S. economic and industrial empire, or on the implementation of new technologies that determine our future. A billionaire like Elon Musk can surround the Earth with tens of thousands of satellites, disrupting the entire planet’s night sky, without any public dialog, and without even making the news headlines. No wonder we’re so often shocked by the news – our main source of information leaves us clueless.
We have a justice system – everyone has the right to a trial by a jury of his or her peers. Really? How many of us are aware that local prosecutors actually decide the fate of the accused in most cases, single-handedly imposing punishment on people whose guilt is never proven? As our prison populations spiral out of control, are we aware of restorative alternatives to punishment and incarceration which were developed and successfully implemented by societies we’ve conquered and replaced?
Come on Max, be realistic. We have to deal with things as they are.
Sure, our society has problems. But they can all be solved by electing the right president, and implementing the right technologies. Space exploration will solve everything – as we know from Star Trek and Star Wars, in space all races can live together in harmony. Earth is obviously the source of all our problems. Screw the Earth – let’s colonize Mars! After all, colonialism has worked well for us Europeans so far. Our generation may have screwed things up, but our kids will do it right.
My generation, the generation that came of age in the 60s, was supposedly enlightened. Funny how as they aged, they gravitated toward more and more affluent, whites-only jobs and neighborhoods. Choosing a community of peers, they ended up in bubbles surrounded by like-minded people, unaware of how others were living, thinking, or feeling. Their kids went to private schools – one of them even chose a college formerly known as “White-Man College” for its near-complete lack of minority students. My friends seldom considered that they were helping to make our society more segregated than ever. As a result, their families are doing great – they’re completely isolated from people of color and poor neighborhoods. But that’s okay, because they have their trusted national media to keep them well informed.
So they believe in progress, and unless the news tells them otherwise, they think everything’s fine in the world. No conflict, no segregation, no discrimination, no poverty, no frustration, no suffering. My generation even elected a Black president! Sure, he was a half-white lawyer from the suburbs, not a son of poverty from the ghetto, but it was progress, anyway, right? That’s the important thing, we’re moving forward, away from that past where we made all those mistakes.
In the rural Midwest, I grew up with Black classmates, and I went to college amid the vast Black ghettos of Chicago’s South Side. Unlike many of my friends, as an artist and musician needing cheap studio space, I lived in dangerous slums and barrios among poor Blacks and Latinos most of my adult life, where I had Black colleagues, bandmates, friends, and roommates. My old hometown of Oakland prides itself on some of the most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the world, but much of it is also segregated, with a history of racism and racial violence. My current hometown in the rural Southwest has only a handful of Black folks, but unlike almost all of my friends, I live now in an integrated, relatively egalitarian community, in a neighborhood that’s half Latino.
In poor ethnic neighborhoods of West Coast cities, I’ve had police helicopters and SWAT teams surround my house multiple times. I was falsely arrested and spent a night in a jail cell with poor Blacks and Latinos. The cops have seldom helped me and often hurt me, and I reject all our institutions of “justice” and “law enforcement” as simply the destructive, coercive mechanisms of social control employed by the imperialist ruling class.
But I’m not immune from denial. It took two years of hard work to recover from my chronic foot injury, and another 18 months to build to my current level of fitness. Yet after my foot started to hurt again on Saturday, and I swore to take a break from hiking, I got up on Sunday and went out for a hike anyway.
I rationalized it because when I got up, my foot no longer hurt. And it felt fine for most of my hike. I hadn’t forgotten yesterday’s pain – I planned to take it easier than usual. This meant hiking closer to 10 miles rather than 15, and keeping my elevation gain closer to 3,000′ rather than 4,000′.
I was targeting the southern segment of the crest trail that normally takes me north to a 10,000′ peak. This southern segment sees less traffic, and those who hike it usually only go as far as the 9,600′ southern peak, which is 3-1/2 miles one-way. I figured I’d try the trail past the peak, although it traverses the heart of the 2013 wildfire burn area and there was no information on whether it’d been cleared of logs.
As it turned out, nobody else uses the trail beyond the peak. It’s unmaintained and abandoned. It’s overgrown and blocked by deadfall and blowdown, and the farther you go, the less evidence there is that a trail ever existed. I managed to get about a mile and a half beyond the peak, fixing landmarks in my mind and cutting arrows in the dirt to help me find the way back, before I gave up and turned back. But at least I was able to get a view of the southern part of the range as it trails off and subsides into the low desert.
This part of the mountains lies outside the protected wilderness area, and I’d seen old cowpies along the trail from the start. In fact, the abandoned segment beyond the peak is now used only by cattle. I glimpsed a lone bull in the forest above me when I sidetracked off the trail to climb the peak. And on the way back, I passed three cows grazing in lush grass at 9,000′ on a steep forested slope below the trail.
The New Mexico locust whose dangerous thorns I’d been contending with in other high-elevation burn scars were now blooming, and I’d been informed by a local botanist friend that the flowers were edible, so I sampled some and found them pretty good, with just enough sweetness on top of the sour base. Hopefully they’ll hold their blooms until the wild strawberries are ready and I can combine them.
It wasn’t until the last mile that my foot began to hurt, and when it did, it was so bad I couldn’t put weight on the ball of my foot and had to limp the rest of the way to the vehicle. There, I examined a historical plaque that explains the name of this high pass.
Like our news media, the sign leaves out most of the story. Lt. Emory was part of the Army of the West. This army was an early agent of the imperialism in which our white, Eurocentric society has replaced native peoples. The story is far too complex for most of us to keep in mind – first the Spanish came and conquered the Indians of the Western Hemisphere, then they established European colonies, then we Anglo-Americans conquered parts of their colonies along with what natives were left. And now we consider ourselves natives. What’s past is done, right?
Another aspect of the complexity we deny is that science accompanies our violent conquests – Emory represented science in the Army of the West, and we credit the scientific discovery of this place to that violent conquest. We deny how these things go hand in hand. No pleasant urban neighborhoods with their galleries, theaters, pubs and nightclubs, coffeehouses and bookstores, without the militarized police and the hidden military empire, without the violent conquests, the capitalist oppression, the consumerist exploitation of distant rural communities and habitats.
But you probably know by now what I see. I see that our society is perpetually in a state of collapse. Our cities are parasitic enclaves grafted unsustainably onto land stolen from indigenous peoples. Our police, our military, our presidents will fight their way to their own demise, and good riddance.
First Steps in the First Wilderness Part 11: Summer Solstice
Sunday, June 21st, 2020: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Southwest New Mexico.
The same day I was hit with the worst of my biannual back pain episodes, a lightning strike started a forest fire in one of my favorite hiking areas. While I was immobilized on pain meds, the fire grew to engulf the entire ridge, turning the beautiful north slope into a moonscape.
After two weeks the pain faded and I got back on my feet again, but, what with COVID-19, I wasn’t able to plan a solstice trip, or make any sort of plans for this special day. After another week of short walks and moderate strength training, I was anxious to find out if I’d lost any conditioning, so I returned to another one of my favorite trails, the ridge in the sky.
It was going to be a hot day and I hoped it would be cooler up there between 8,000′ and 10,000′. No such luck, but at the top, the trail passes through some shady groves of old-growth pine and fir, which provided some relief.
Despite the heat, the flowers were amazing, butterflies and other pollinators were everywhere, and it was great to be hiking again, on the longest day of the year. And I surprised myself by going up over the peak, down the back side, and returning the same way for 12-1/2 miles and 3,140′ of elevation. Not bad after 3 weeks off!
Monday, June 29th, 2020: Animals, Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Southwest New Mexico.
It’s been going on since early springtime, and I can’t keep quiet about it anymore.
There are more butterflies this year than ever before! I have no idea why. Are their predators in trouble? I don’t even know who their predators are.
First the small ones, yellow and white, along the wilderness trails. Then the bigger ones, in my yard at home. By now they’re darting and sailing back and forth all the time – I often mistake them for birds.
Landscape
I returned to my favorite local trail, the one with over 4,000′ of elevation gain that takes me to a peak with a view of the interior of the mountains. It’s more of a struggle each time, because more trees have fallen or been blown down across the trail.
Birds
Hectic time of year for birds, too! Turkey vultures and hawks circle overhead as mother quail shepherd their tiny young across the road. As I traverse stark burned slopes on the peak, the boomerang shapes of white-throated swifts rocket past my shoulder. And in the forest from canyon bottom to ridgetop, constant calls and song from a diverse community. Birds are less timid, often allowing me to walk right past them.
Flowers
In the lead-up to our monsoon, as the heat rises, the air dries out, and the creek dwindles, the first wave of flowers reaches its peak.
Butterflies
On the way up the mountain, I just enjoyed the butterflies. But on the way back, in the canyon bottom, I suddenly reached a large clump of Monarda where butterflies were converging from all directions, and I stopped in their midst to photograph them as they ignored me and went about their business.
