Southwest New Mexico
Monday, January 6th, 2020: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
Deep snow on the mountains means I can’t hike my usual trails that go higher than 8,000′. I needed to find something at lower elevation. I decided to hike a forest road that starts at 6,000′ and climbs to an 8,000′ peak. I’ve climbed this peak many times from the opposite direction, which is much easier, but I couldn’t reach that end because of snow on the road.
This road quickly climbs several hundred feet to provide a view to the west. Looking up toward the peak I was approaching, I saw two golden eagles. This is the fifth weekend in a row that I’ve seen golden eagles!
Midway up the road reaches the ponderosa pine forest, and traverses the shallow valley of a stream, which is dry most of the year. Then the road starts climbing again, and is very steep the rest of the way.
Unfortunately the peak is covered with towers which provide our local TV, radio, and cell phone service.
A hundred yards below the peak I encountered a big pickup truck with a young couple, coming up the road in the snow. They were the first people to drive up this road since the last snow. It’s barely driveable with 4WD.
We smiled and waved at each other, and hours later, near the bottom, they passed me on their way down. They were probably thinking, what a crazy guy to walk up this road instead of driving. I was thinking, what lazy people to drive up the road instead of walking.
Near the bottom, I turned back and saw the moon rising in the east.
Monday, January 13th, 2020: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
The snow would only allow me to climb 80 percent of the way to the crest. But my day was made early as I came upon a Northern pygmy owl in the canyon bottom.
First Steps in the First Wilderness Part 9: January
Monday, January 20th, 2020: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico, Whitewater.
Above 8,000′, the snow was too deep to hike my favorite trails. And my 4wd was in the shop so I couldn’t drive muddy and/or icy roads to most of the other trailheads. After trying and failing to drive an unfamiliar backroad an hour from home, I was forced to fall back on a low-elevation trail into a popular canyon, a trail much shorter than I usually hike on a Sunday.
But it was worth it! I’d forgotten how beautiful the landscape is from this trail. The side canyons had rushing water, and the main creek was raging with snowmelt.
After reaching the canyon bottom trail, working my way up along the raging creek, and fighting my way through clouds of leafhoppers that rose from trailside shrubs in the few sunny patches, I was finally stopped when the trail ended in an impassable rockslide. None of these trails has been maintained since the 2012 wildfire.
Monday, April 27th, 2020: Hikes, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Various, Wildfire.
Like every crisis in our alienated society, COVID-19 has revealed more of the social and ecological failures we live in everyday denial of. It was clear from the beginning that the virus became a pandemic due to our technologically-enhanced national and global mobility. The more people venture outside their local communities, the farther the virus spreads. But raised as individualists in our European-derived culture, we take our mobility for granted and resist any constraints on our ability to travel.
My weekend hikes have evolved to encompass a radius of a hundred miles from my home, but as the virus spread and voluntary travel restrictions were imposed, it became clear that the farthest of those hikes would take me out of my local service area and expose me to risk of interacting with people in other communities. So I dropped those destinations and stuck to hikes which, if anything went wrong, would limit my exposure to services and people in my local community.
I’m lucky to live in a small town which supports a vast rural region. For city people, the restrictions are much more limiting. Your local “community” is typically a tiny, densely populated enclave of strangers, completely surrounded by similar enclaves. If you want to get out into “nature” – a nearby park landscaped with non-native plants and infested with invasive species – you enter into competition with thousands of people from neighboring communities. Hence many city parks have been closed. And if you travel outside your enclave, you’re immediately at risk of spreading the virus. But that’s the price you pay for living in a city – an unhealthy environment at the best of times.
Thus one of the most profound failings of our alienated way of life is exposed – the meaninglessness of “communities” to modern, urbanized people. City people are lucky if they even know their next-door neighbors. The idea of living in a neighborhood has only intangible value to them. In a crisis, it’s every man for himself. He can’t be bothered to care about the health of the thousands of strangers surrounding him. He just desperately needs to “get out.”
Early spring is a transitional season for us. Our habitat can’t accurately be described using the four-season cliche; March and April are the dry and windy season. Vegetation doesn’t really start greening up and flowering broadly until May.
Despite the dry air, the winter’s heavy snows still cling to north slopes over 9,000′, blocking some of the trails I’d normally use this time of year. And snowmelt floods streams and rivers, blocking other trails.
Excluded from many of my favorite trails, I experiment with trails I’ve avoided in the past. But the drabness of vegetation this time of year offers only limited photo opportunities.
With all that in mind, here’s a gallery of highlights from “hiking in place.”
March
April
May
First Steps in the First Wilderness Part 10: May
Sunday, May 10th, 2020: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
The last time I’d done my favorite hike, at the end of March, there’d been patches of snow two feet deep above 9,000′ elevation. But since then, the entire West had been hammered by a heat wave for weeks, and almost all the snow had melted from our mountaintops.
The heat had finally subsided this weekend, and today the forecast in town, at 6,000′, was cloudy with a high of 79. As I drove north toward the mountains, the sky above was clear, with scattered clouds in the west. And when I left the highway to take the dirt road to the trailhead, I could see a small mass of cumulus clouds peeking from behind the canyon I would be hiking up. I was hoping for some weather, but didn’t really expect any, since no rain had been forecast.
The canyon bottom was sweltering, and sweat poured off me. The stream was almost dried up, but as I’d expected, the heavy snowmelt had resulted in a big hatch-out of flies and gnats, and they were swarming in my face. I’d picked up a cheap “head net” earlier in the week, and pulled it down over my hat to keep the bugs away. What a relief! The bugs had never been this bad before, but I’d spent years waving my hands in front of my face in early summer, trying to keep them away.
When I reached the first viewpoint on the trail, 1500 feet above the canyon bottom, I could see tendrils of rain trailing from heavier clouds in the west. A strong wind was rising and the temperature was dropping fast. Soon it had dropped almost 30 degrees and I pulled on my sweater.
Climbing higher, I finally heard some thunder, far off to the northwest. And when I reached the crest, I could see more dark clouds and rain along the skyline to the east, only a few miles away.
I’d gotten an early start and was hoping to continue following the trail down the other side of the mountain, a mile or so beyond where I usually stop. But it was slow going because it entered the burn area and many dead trees had fallen since the Forest Service had cleared the trail last year. After a half mile I had to turn back – just too many logs to climb over.
I’d descended almost 500′ in that half mile, and as I trudged back up to the saddle, it started to rain. Yay! I quickly unpacked my cheap poncho and pulled it over me and my pack. It wasn’t a hard rain, but it continued for about 15 minutes, so the poncho was well worth it.
I knew this hike would be a milestone for me – the first time in more than 40 years (since I was 26) that I’d climbed over 4,000′ in a day. I felt like I could’ve done even more if I’d had more time.
On the way back down, I was lucky to spot another painted redstart, a bird I’d first seen last weekend. It was much farther away this time, and moving fast, but I recognized it by the white bands on its wings and the white underside of its tail.
On the way back home, I could see rain falling south of town, and shortly after I got home, while I was eating leftovers for dinner, I could hear the rattle of rain on my metal porch roof. Apart from the snowmelt, it’s been a very dry spring, so this rain was really welcome!
