Nature
Monday, July 10th, 2023: Animals, Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Southwest New Mexico.
We’re having the kind of weather we have if the monsoon doesn’t start on time – highs in the mid-90s in town. In the past, it would drop into the 60s overnight, I’d run the swamp cooler to fill the house with that cool air, and the interior would never get above the mid-70s.
Now, it’s only dropping to the low 70s overnight. It’s too humid inside for the swamp cooler to work. The interior of my house gets up to 90 in the evening and never drops below 80. On today’s hike, I was really looking forward to getting above 8,000 feet.
But first, I had to chase these deer out of my backyard, where they threaten my apple and pear trees.
When I reached the pass at 8,200 feet, it was clear, sunny, still, and hot. The Rio Grande Valley to the east lay under heat haze. This is the old familiar trail that follows the crest to a 10,000 foot peak in 5-1/2 miles; I sweated during the long traverses and relished a light breeze when crossing saddles. Finally, after about three miles, I reached the relief of the shaded mixed-conifer forest.
I’d been missing birds on recent hikes. Sure, I’d always see jays, ravens, and vultures. But this has always been the best place to see birds, and today there were a lot of different kinds active on the crest, from flocks of bushtits in the understory to woodpeckers squabbling over tree trunks in the canopy.
After I crossed over the peak and started down through the alpine meadows of the back side, through the burn scar of last year’s mega-wildfire, I began encountering the pollinators. They seemed to be loving this hot, still weather, they were swarming tiny, dull-looking flowers we’d normally ignore, and in the windless quiet the buzzing of the bees could be heard from far away.
No one had been down the crest trail past the peak since my last hike here in October of last year. The trail, which had been cleared last year, was now almost completely obliterated, from post-fire erosion, blowdown, and overgrowth. I was only able to follow it because I know it so well.
As usual, I was hoping to continue the full nine miles to the junction saddle, but I was stopped at seven miles by blowdown in a spot where I knew the overgrowth would keep getting worse.
I was okay with turning back at this point; even truncated, this would be my most challenging hike since the first week of May, with 14 miles round-trip and over 3,200 feet of elevation gain. And I was mesmerized by the swarm of bees on a shrubby, dull-green annual that surrounded me on this hillside stopping point.
So I started paying more attention to flowers and pollinators, and all the way back up to the peak, I kept stopping to watch them at work. I literally had to tear myself away from each little patch of flowers along the trail.
Some of these photos are like those puzzle pictures that challenge you to find all the hidden objects. Can you find all the pollinators?
I’d been praying for rain all day, and storm clouds had gradually been gathering, finally producing thunder, breezes, cooler temps, and a few drops here and there. It was perfectly timed to keep me cool on the last three miles of exposed crest.
I drove through some heavy rain on the way home, and my house cooled down a few degrees more overnight. Hopefully we’ll get more monsoon weather this week!
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips, Rocks.
Day Four: Hike
Today was forecast to be hot, and despite the high wind forecast, the air was still and already warm in camp as I started the day. Tomorrow I needed to make contact with the folks who were traveling to the ceremony, and that would mean driving outside the mountains for a cell signal. But today was my free day, and I planned to hike.
Unfortunately, the flies and gnats were just as bad as last night.
Where should I go? On my last visit, almost 18 months ago, I’d done all the iconic hikes. There was one canyon I’d been wanting to explore, but the mouth of it was almost three miles away across gently undulating open desert with no chance of shade.
I finally decided to head up our main canyon, with the tentative goal of reaching its head on the crest, with a view east. I’d tried that once, 32 years ago, but had been stymied by a confusing maze of stone fins and pinnacles.
For the first mile and a half, my gaze was rooted to the sand of the big wash, where I was delighted at the bloom of wildflowers and puzzled by the vehicle tracks of trespassers during recent months. A big truck, some kind of UTV or ATV, and two or three dirt bikes. These people treat the whole desert as their God-given playground and can’t be bothered to walk anywhere; they consider it a failure if they have to get off their butts.
Before the trip, a friend had suggested I might find a decent bloom around the cave, but the flowers here in my home range were far more spectacular – and this was not even close to the best bloom I’d seen here. And that’s just the flowers – the rocks in this range are also more diverse and beautiful than those elsewhere in the desert. It’s wilder, richer, and more forbidding than other ranges I know.
Past the dry waterfall, I was approaching the old miner’s cabin, which used to be maintained by a family of gun nuts from Huntington Beach. The truck had to turn back early, but the dirt bikers and ATV rider drove up the banks to avoid boulders in the wash, trampling vegetation, until they reached the base of the old, deeply eroded road to the cabin. And that turned out to be just too rugged for them.
Fortunately the cabin is falling apart, the junk around it slowly rusting away.
Having reached the cabin, I remembered that an old, now-impassable road climbs behind it to mine works and a roofless drystone cabin farther up the canyon. I went a short way up that and discovered a developed mule trail with stone retaining walls branching off, appearing to lead into the next canyon south. This is a canyon I backpacked into and partially explored more than thirty years ago, but I remember nothing of its upper reaches. It’s hidden from below, which makes it doubly intriguing, so I made a snap decision to follow the old trail.
It was blocked in several places by big chollas, but it eventually led to a saddle overlooking the hidden canyon, and from there down into a side gully, where I stumbled upon a mine, almost completely hidden behind a thicket of catclaw acacia.
It turned out to be an unusually long tunnel for this range. It went almost straight back for more than 150 feet, and another man had explored it recently – I could tell because he’d broken a living branch of catclaw to reach it. Any tracks in this protected environment would last forever, and his were the only human tracks before I arrived.
I dug out and turned on my headlamp, and nearing the back, found bones, and then parts of animal skeletons – a spinal column, a collapsed rib cage, and what appeared to be a couple of skulls. And at the very end was a patch of damp mud.
The old trail had washed out around the mine entrance, but I could see some sort of manmade ledge farther down the gully toward the hidden canyon, so I climbed over the washout and kept going. A bend of the hidden canyon lay below me, and I thought I could discern a continuation of the trail across the slope above the bend, so I used that to reach a narrow stretch of canyon upstream. This canyon is exceptionally beautiful and decorated with spectacular rock, but it’s also full of long-established invasive tamarisk, in apparent equilibrium with native riparian vegetation.
Including honey mesquite! This is one of only two canyons in the range where I’ve found big stands, probably cultivated prehistorically by Native Americans. The other mesquite canyon also has spectacular rocks. I’d made the right choice in detouring over here.
I was amused to encounter a shrike who stood on a yucca blade only ten feet away from me, making continuous agitated calls while holding an insect in its beak.
I began encountering what would turn out to be a series of natural rock dams across the canyon bottom, some requiring technical bouldering moves to climb over. And suddenly I found myself at a fork in the canyon, where two branches of seemingly equal size converged. One featured a towering cliff and a narrows that looked potentially impassable, so that’s the one I tried.
I was able to get through the narrows, climbing more natural rock dams, and the canyon just kept getting more spectacular, until suddenly I spotted a pinyon pine ahead! This range is low enough that pines only survive on protected slopes at its highest elevations, so my heart always soars when I come to these trees that were so important to native people.
There were only a few in this stretch of canyon, but they beckoned me onward.
I next emerged into a basin where more drainages converged, and far above, I could see what appeared to be the crest, dotted with more pines. I wasn’t sure which route to take from here, so I climbed a rock formation a hundred feet or so above the wash, where I could get a panoramic view.
The main drainage came steeply down from a saddle that seemed to be on the crest, but I couldn’t tell if it would overlook the east side of the range or only the main canyon to my north. Also, the slopes of that drainage were really rocky and potentially hard to traverse. To the right was a slope that featured stretches of grassy ground, potentially easier to traverse, until the route vanished over a divide into a side drainage that seemed to lead to a higher saddle. I was sure that route would lead to the true crest, so that’s the one I would try.
To get there, I had to proceed up the main wash. But above it on the left was a sort of ramp that looked easier going, and after climbing it I discovered another big stand of mesquite. The mesquite here was really thriving – in fact all the vegetation here seemed to be doing better than that around the cave farther north.
Dropping back into the wash farther upstream, I reached a stretch of rugged ground congested with boulders, thorns, and cactus that took some getting through before reaching the grassy slope I hoped to take to the crest. This required a steep climb, but there were parts that almost hinted at a trail, and dramatic rock formations both near and far as landmarks to memorize for my return.
Wind had been rising as I climbed. The forecast finally seemed to materialize.
Up and up I climbed, over the divide into the next drainage. And there I began to find cairns. I believe these to be remnants of the old Sierra Club peakbagger group, and I dismantle them wherever it’s convenient – this is supposed to be a wilderness, not a recreational area. Still, it surprised me to find them in this obscure, hidden canyon that I hadn’t even explored until 35 years after first arriving. It suggests that even fewer Anglos know these mountains now than then, which has got to be a good thing.
Back and forth I meandered to avoid obstacles in the new drainage, steadily approaching what I really hoped would be the crest. As is typical, there were lots of fallen skeletons of big pinyon pine strewn across the slopes here.
Hours had passed since my planned turn-around time. The wind was howling as I reached a saddle on the crest, but I was ecstatic. I’d only been on this central stretch of crest once before, over 30 years ago, and never at this spot. I made my way higher and farther south to get a view of the iconic rock formations along the southern crest. Clouds were massing along with the wind and the temperature was dropping, which was fine with me.
I hated to turn back – I wanted to stay up there forever! That’s the way it always is. But the longer I waited, the colder my shower would be in camp that evening.
I had no trouble retracing my route down. And as usual, I paid more attention to the ground, finding a couple of old ram’s horns from mountain sheep, and a mushroom under a tiny nurse shrub.
It was when I reached the hidden canyon that I became entranced by the exotic rocks. The sky had grown overcast and mostly dark, and the wind bore directly down the canyon from the northeast. But in the lower stretch the sun came out again for a while.
The wind was so strong now, I was sure my tarp had blown away and been ripped to shreds in a catclaw. I’d forgotten to pack it away before leaving camp, and the little rocks I use to anchor the edges were surely inadequate. I feared I wouldn’t be able to sleep in that wind and would have to leave the mountains during the night.
But miraculously, my tarp was intact, and the wind died shortly after I finished my shower. The flies and gnats never returned, and I enjoyed a delicious dinner and a peaceful last night in my sacred mountains.
Since I’ve known these mountains by hiking them extensively for 35 years, I guessed that today’s hike only covered between 7 and 8 miles out and back, and when I plotted it on my mapping platform a week later, it turned out a bit under 8, with a little under 2,200 feet of accumulated elevation gain. But including many stops, it took 8-1/2 hours to complete.
It interests me to compare this with the hikes I do back home, which are all to some degree preparation for hiking in the desert. Two weeks earlier I’d hiked 18-1/2 miles near home in the same amount of time, with almost 60 percent more elevation gain, on maintained trails. The hardest hike I do near home, more than 16 miles out-and-back with over 5,000 feet of elevation gain, only takes a half hour longer.
Though much shorter, with much less elevation gain, today’s hike in my desert mountains felt harder than either of those, and as I discovered during the next week, it took a more serious toll on my body than any hike I’ve ever done near home – even the bushwhacks in severe weather. It was also more dangerous, but interestingly, I never stumbled or fell, which happens regularly on those hikes near home.
Numbers aside, it felt like one of the best ever, one I won’t forget. I wondered how much longer I’d be able to do this.
Monday, June 24th, 2024: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
I was fed up with this knee problem. I’d gotten used to my shoulders being in constant pain for five months, and after seven weeks of trying rest, ice, and compression, the knee wasn’t getting better either. So why not just go ahead and hike through the pain? I had plenty of pain meds left, might as well use them.
Sunday was forecast to be another hot day, and clear. I needed to find either a shaded canyon hike or a crest hike where elevation and breezes might keep me cool. Despite swearing never to drive that dangerous road again, I decided to tackle the crest hike in the east, where the road would take me to 8,200 feet and I would have the option of climbing an additional 1,500 to 2,000 feet higher depending on how bad the pain got. Like almost all my Sunday hikes, this one runs mostly inside the wilderness area.
As I should’ve expected, monsoon clouds were forming over the range, so it was actually cool when I got up there. I strapped on my compression brace, tighter than ever, in an attempt to mask the knee pain. I had to pee really bad, but as soon as I got out of sight and unzipped, I heard voices. I thought I was the only one who used this Forest Service road to access the trail, but when I turned, I saw a man and two women, youngish, dressed in what looked like cycling gear, leading two donkeys up the road.
“You caught me takin’ a piss! What are you doing with those donkeys?”
“Training ’em to race.”
I laughed. “Where do you race donkeys?”
“Mining towns, in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico.”
I was shaking my head. “Never heard of that.” One of the donkeys came over and nudged me, and I stroked its head and neck.
“He’s looking for carrots!” the youngest woman said.
Donkeys and burros are the same species, but it’s customary to call the domesticated variety donkeys and the feral ones burros. These were pale, as opposed to the brown feral burros I’m familiar with in the desert. At home, later, I looked up donkey racing and discovered that “pack burro racing” is indeed a thing – their trainers run through town with the animals on a leash. It’s another one of these ridiculous Anglo hobbies that accompany mining history and tourism. Thank god we don’t have it in my home town.
I expected to go slow to protect my knee, so I told them to go ahead. But they kept stopping and I kept catching up. Finally after a mile they said they were turning back and I should pass them. I recommended they go a few hundred yards farther for a spectacular view, but that was clearly of no interest to them. Privately, I wondered how walking a mile could possibly be adequate training for racing. Their whole vibe was a little weird, like they weren’t really comfortable around strangers.
I’d forgotten how amazing the flowers are here at this time of year – both perennials and annuals. They were mostly small flowers, and some quite unobtrusive, so I became obsessed with finding and photographing them all. It was actually good for my knee because I had to keep stopping for pictures.
By the time I reached the saddle where the trail switches from the east side to the west side, dark storm clouds were massing to the northwest, and I realized, happily, that I would likely get rain.
The next saddle was my first milestone, because I’d originally planned to turn back here, or if my knee was doing well, to take the bypass around the peak for some more mileage without the elevation gain. I definitely hadn’t planned on climbing the peak.
But I now realized that it isn’t elevation that’s hard on the knees, it’s the grade – the steepness. No part of this trail is nearly as steep as the trail I’d mistakenly tried a few days ago. So I decided to continue to the peak, which has grassy meadows and a remnant of old-growth fir forest that barely survived recent wildfires.
It was really dark by the time I got up there. I found fresh bear scat on the trail and heard a crashing sound in the forest below – either a limb or snag falling, or a bear tearing bark off to reach larvae.
At the peak, I decided to continue to the lower meadows on the back side, hoping to find wild iris. There had been a lot, but they’d all gone to seed.
Just as I started down, the rain caught me, and quickly became heavy enough to require my poncho. But as usual it lasted less than half an hour, and afterward, the whole landscape seemed to glow.
My knee was in bad shape, and I still had more than four miles to go, so I popped a pill.
Not only was the descent hard on my knee, taking close-ups of flowers and pollinators required contortions that triggered pain in my shoulders. My mother has been dealing with this for ten or fifteen years – she was too old for surgery – and she’s just learned not to raise or put any weight on that arm. That might be an option if both my shoulders weren’t equally bad.
Approaching the parking area in the saddle, I found Forest Service trucks and trailers surrounding my little vehicle. It turned out to be six or eight firefighters from northern California, called down for the wildfires east of here. They were just hanging out up here where it’s cool.
We discussed climate change and lookout towers. I mentioned how most of the old towers had been abandoned. “Yeah,” said their leader disgustedly, “They’re all gonna be replaced by cameras.”
“They’ll probably use AI,” I replied, and they all rolled their eyes. These young outdoorsmen clearly saw the downside of progress, and were not likely to be filling their homes with robots or joining Elon Musk in the Mars colony.
I drove through rain, and when I reached town I found the streets flooded, in the exact places where the city had spent millions recently to improve drainage. We’d clearly had a significant deluge, our first of the season, but the Apple weather app showed low current humidity and zero precip for the past 24 hours.
Sunday, July 21st, 2024: Hikes, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
I went for a short hike near town – the start of a longer hike I do regularly when I don’t have a hurt knee. This first stretch gently ascends a canyon bottom on a primitive road, finally becoming a foot trail nearly two miles up the canyon.
Returning down the road I encountered an older couple. The man looked like a 19th-century outlaw, with bright eyes, an impressive mustache, and a hat I envied. We agreed that the canyon was surprisingly dry considering the rain we’d had in the past week. That led to talk of climate change, and a world that’s going to hell in a handbasket. As locals, we agreed that we’re probably living in the best possible place – high in the mountains and far from the crowds. The man said “I’m just glad this is all happening at the end of my life – kids today are facing a bleak future.”
Not wanting to end on such a sour note, I replied “Well, the canyon’s full of beautiful flowers and butterflies today.”
The man smiled. “A friend told me he goes to the forest to lose his mind and find his soul.”
Enjoy the flowers and butterflies!
Monday, August 12th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance, Nature, Outdoor Life, Stories, Trouble.
Challenges
Three weeks with no hiking Dispatches! I hope that’s given some of you a chance to catch up?
The big news is that I’m writing songs. The last time I had a sustained burst of songwriting was thirty years ago – that’s why this is big news for me. Life got in the way, but I can already tell it was worth the wait. More on that in the next Dispatch.
A lot still stands in the way. I have more pain than ever, it’s out of control, disrupting my sleep, requiring too many meds. After working indoors all week, my body and soul need wilderness hikes on the weekend, but those are no longer possible due to a knee problem – with a two-month waiting list for treatment. Not only does my body require more maintenance than ever, but also my fire-damaged house, my overgrown yard, my dilapidated vehicles – especially in monsoon season with weeds exploding, animal pests invading, heat that requires hands-on management throughout the day due to a lack of effective insulation and cooling. And alongside all that I’m constantly managing my family situation back in Indiana, solving daily and weekly crises remotely, forced to make decisions for all of us, usually alone.
As painful as it may be for me, the inability to hike or do creative work is a first-world problem. What we call “the arts” have roots in traditional, indigenous ways of life, but our versions of these arts are so far removed, so decadent, that most of them have no place in a healthy, sustainable culture. A subsistence culture has no use for oil paintings, literary fiction, violin concertos, opera, or ballet. Songwriting, painting, and literary storytelling are things I do because I’ve been compelled to do them since childhood, and doing them is the most rewarding thing I know.
Maps and Burritos
Unable to hike on Sundays, I drive to somewhere even more remote than my hometown where I can spend time outdoors and get a midday meal. Since discovering a wooden relief map in this visitor center years ago, I’ve been wanting to return and photograph it. Unfortunately the plexiglass cover results in excessive glare.
I spent a few hours reading beside this creek.
No matter what else is on the menu – seafood, steak, burgers, Thai, sushi – if there’s a half decent burrito I’ll always order that. But it feels bizarre to be eating it at midday instead of after a long hike.
Storms are forming and rain is falling, but not enough. Still, our skies are as spectacular as ever.
