Southwest New Mexico
Monday, October 12th, 2020: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
Fickle GPS
Getting ready to return to the crest hike east of town, I was still looking for interesting ways to make it longer. And in fact, I discovered that the crowd-sourced trail websites had increased their distance data for that trail. Whereas the Forest Service has always listed the one-way distance to the fire lookout on the peak as 5 miles, the trail websites had previously shown it as 4.8. Now, this had been updated to 11 miles round-trip – quite a discrepancy!
In fact, I could see from the notes below that a recent hiker’s GPS had measured it at 11.6 miles round-trip – an even bigger discrepancy.
This confirmed my earlier suspicions about the unreliability of not only crowd-sourced data, but of GPS data itself, particularly in a forested landscape with steep terrain. These crowd-sourced websites base all their information on data uploaded by hikers from consumer-grade satellite receivers. Consumer GPS keeps getting better, but it still needs a connection to the satellite to record data, and this is rarely available in mature forest or narrow canyons.
In any event, I was happy to update the distances I log for my hikes, because the longer distances are consistent with the longer times it takes me to complete some of these hikes. But I’ll continue to be skeptical. While the vast majority of people are being conditioned to place more trust in the latest technologies, there are many instances where we’re actually settling for less and less accuracy as time goes by. Digitally-recorded and reproduced music is less faithful to our sensory experience than analog, and remote sensing is always less accurate than direct experience. Many Forest Service distances were originally measured using a calibrated wheel rolled along the trail by a hiker – the most accurate method possible – but we prefer the most expensive, resource-consumptive methods now, calling it progress. Progress requires spending billions of dollars and tons of fossil fuels to manufacture and launch satellites into orbit, and additional billions and tons of natural resources to manufacture and distribute digital devices that proliferate toxic materials throughout our habitats.
When I got to the high pass, I stepped out into gale-force winds blowing chilled air under clear skies. All through the hike I kept putting on and taking off my windbreaker jacket and shade hat – the latter kept getting blown off during windy stretches. The wind was so strong in places that it literally blew me off the trail.
Whereas in the past I’ve regularly encountered some pretty bizarre people on this popular trail – all of them from big cities – on this hike I met two groups who seemed both pleasant and completely sane. Even with a more accurate distance in mind, I still found ways to make the trail longer than usual – especially because with my new hiking super powers I was making much better time than in the past.
Even more than in the previous hike, I found myself focusing on the smaller and subtler ways in which plants respond to the coming of winter. My dad’s first job working as a chemist was in Eastman Kodak’s Chicago photo lab in late 1940s. They had recently introduced “Kodacolor” film, and my dad became a photography enthusiast, which continued sporadically the rest of his life.
Back then, he returned home to the hills and hollows of the upper Ohio River Valley for a series of photographs he entered in a local contest. One of his first iconic photos was naturally of fall color in the canyon of one of the tributaries to the mighty Ohio. Scenes like that formed my original paradigm of seasonal foliage. Of course, it’s an old tradition for European families to venture out in the autumn to parts of the countryside known for their fall foliage, and after my mom moved us to her family home in Indiana, we took fall road trips to Brown County, Indiana’s most famous place for fall color. Unlike the rest of the state, the native forests of Brown County had been saved from development because they were too hilly to be cleared for farmland by the European settlers who stole this land from Native Americans.
In the American West, with its vast evergreen forests, fall color is much more restricted and subtle, but connoisseurs, like the friends I mentioned above, still make trips to the high mountains to see golden swaths of aspen groves on slopes near tree line on alpine peaks.
Most of our local aspen groves have burned recently in massive wildfires, and are now returning as low thickets, mixed in with gambel oak and New Mexico locust. The tapestry of color is far less dramatic than that of our hardwood forests back east, but it can still be glorious in its own way.
And along the trail, I find the changes in even tiny plants fascinating. This brief cooling season makes some plants visible that I wouldn’t have even noticed when they were green.
When I reached breaks in forest, or badly burned slopes where I had a broad view, I could see entire slopes in the distance covered with golden or rust-colored oaks and aspens, and it was even more obvious than usual that these slopes had been fully carpeted by conifers before the fire, so that there was now total “stand replacement” of evergreens by deciduous trees and shrubs, interspersed with narrow strips of surviving pine and fir forest in steep drainages and on ridgetops.
I’d been sporadically reading about fire ecology and the history of Western forests, and it suddenly hit me hard, for the first time, that I and many others had been mistaken in our sorrow over these “catastrophic” wildfires and the loss of so much forest.
Our notion of historic landscapes of continuous evergreen forest, as far as the eye can see, is largely an artificial construction, our misperception based on the failed Euro-American practice of wildfire suppression, which continues unabated due to our overdevelopment of the urban-wildland interface. Before the European invasion and conquest of North America, indigenous peoples had tended forests in collaboration with their ecosystem partners, resulting in much more complex and patchy habitat everywhere, which in turn yields optimum ecological diversity and productivity.
Now, conservationists praise science for developing more sustainable forestry practices, whereas scientists and foresters have – typically – willfully ignored indigenous wisdom, and are, as usual, belatedly appropriating the lessons native people offered us more than a century ago. It’s just another instance of the implicit racism and imperialism that permeate the Eurocentric institutions of science and academia.
Monday, November 2nd, 2020: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
Chopping Locust
I was due to return to the trail that takes me deeper and deeper into our legendary wilderness, but just before I left home, I remembered the vicious thorns – mainly the New Mexico locust that was filling in the burn scar in the farther reaches of the crest of the range. I decided to stop by my burned house and pick up my Dad’s machete.
As far as I could tell, he’d never used it. I believe he bought it mail order, from one of his dozens of catalogs, after he moved from the Oregon coast to his hometown in southeast Ohio and became an invalid. I have no idea why he thought he needed a machete when he couldn’t even walk without a shopping cart to hold onto – my best guess is that since Fox News and Rush Limbaugh had convinced him that mobs of young black men were planning a home invasion, he wanted to cover all his bases. In case he ran out of ammo for his many guns, the machete might be his last resort.
After inheriting it, I’d used it for years to trim my privet hedge, until I developed rotator cuff tears in both shoulders and had to get an electric hedge trimmer. I’d kept it sharp, and cutting those damn locusts could be both fun and rewarding. I’d just have to make sure not to chop myself in the process – a machete is a wicked tool.
Once I’d hiked down into the canyon, I discovered that autumn was still going strong in the mountains. That’s the thing about mountains – the topography results in a range of elevations and habitats that are timed to go off in sequence across a period of many weeks, from low canyon bottoms to high peaks and ridges. With the plants themselves on different schedules, our fall color can extend from September to December.
The last time I’d been here, it was the sumac, the oaks, the poison ivy, the aspens, and various high-elevation shrubs. The aspens had mostly dropped their leaves by now, but the maples were just peaking. The weather was mostly clear and calm, one of those chilly fall days when it’s hot in the sun and cold in the shade, but the continuous climb on treacherous footing had me sweating all day long.
We’d had 3-4 inches of snow in town the past Tuesday, and a hike to 9,000′ on Thursday had me trudging through patches up to 6″ deep. So here, where the extensive mountain mass tended to attract more precip, I was expecting even more snow cover. But on the crest at 9,500′, there were only a few scattered patches in shaded spots behind fallen logs, and they would melt soon. Miles beyond, I could see a few actual snow fields on the north slopes of distant peaks, but they were all above 10,000′.
On the back side of the crest saddle, where the trail entered the thicket of aspen and locust saplings, I pulled the machete out of my pack and began my rogue trail work in earnest. There were a lot of thorns and it was a tough job. I was determined to get just as far as I’d hiked on my last visit, climbing over dozens of logs, straining my shoulder, and ending up with a bloody hand. The extra time meant I’d have to drive home in the dark – so be it, I’d be grateful the next time, and would be able to hike faster and farther without all those locusts to slow me down.
As I returned down the canyon in early evening, the maple habitat in the lower stretch was even more glorious than it’d been in the morning. Every stop delayed my drive home, but as usual, I couldn’t help stopping repeatedly to take it in.
Monday, November 30th, 2020: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
Ground-Truthing the Data
It was now the end of November. We were finally getting nightly freezes, into the 20s, but the sky was still mostly clear. This Sunday was expected to rise to the low 50s in town, but I knew that in the mountains, in shady canyons I’d freeze, whereas on a sunny ridge I’d be sweating.
I’d missed my midweek hike, so I was hoping for something long – 13-16 miles – with a lot of elevation gain. A return to the trail where I’d hacked all that locust would be perfect, because I could potentially add a mile or two to my previous one-way distance without all those thorns slowing me down. But when I checked the map, I could see that it still wouldn’t take me into significantly different terrain, or yield significantly new views. Once you get into the back country here, it’s all, unfortunately, much the same.
However, I couldn’t think of any more attractive options at this time, so I packed up and left town fairly early. It’s a one hour drive to the trailhead, so I had a lot of time to think, while gazing at the peaks I was slowly approaching. I began to consider the next trail to the south, the one I’d last hiked over a year ago, finally giving up on it because a jungly section in the canyon bottom took up so much time that you couldn’t reach interesting destinations on the upper trail.
My mind flipped back and forth between the options as I drove toward the mountains. My original destination would be a sure thing, but it’d only been a few weeks since I’d last been up there. Just before reaching the turnoff for the “jungly” trail, I made a snap decision and took it.
It’s a long drive on a couple of slow dirt roads through pinyon-juniper-oak foothills. I slowed to pass a father and son out hunting. When I finally got to the trailhead it was empty, but the log book showed regular visitors over the past couple of months, typically two or three parties per week. The most recent, a party of two, had claimed a 4-night hike, which was really encouraging. That indicated they’d hiked the entire trail, which meant it should be passable for me, despite the official trail condition report saying it was impassable beyond Windy Gap.
Like I said, I’d last hiked this over a year ago, but I’d hiked it three times so I retained a rough outline of it in memory. One thing about this trail is the scarcity of information online, which in turn indicates how little used it is, at least in the past decade of GPS data logging and sharing. Maybe people have been discouraged by the jungle in the canyon, or by the official claims of obstructions and poor tread. But I think another obstacle has been gross inaccuracy of GPS distance data for this trail, and the complete lack of online trip reports. This trail is an online mystery, despite leading to the most distinctive peak in the range.
I’d first heard of it back in 2008, at a party held by one of my neighbors. A couple hours after dark, her younger brother had shown up, saying he’d tried reaching the peak – supposedly a 9-mile one-way – with some younger friends, only to turn back when he realized it would take much longer than expected. He was a big guy, an athlete, but it was just too much for him. The others had continued, and he figured they might not get back until after midnight. He said it was a real killer, way too challenging for a day hike. But that was before the big wildfire.
As noted in other Dispatches, after a fire, these trails gradually turn into obstacle courses, first through erosion and then due to deadfall – the trunks of fire-killed trees – “logs” – fallen across the trail, sometimes up to three together, and as many as half a dozen every ten feet. It takes many years, sometimes decades, for all the fire-killed trunks to fall, and with each passing year, more fall. The Forest Service does very little trail clearing, mostly leaving it up to volunteers, and the volunteers are overwhelmed, so many trails are simply abandoned, depending on their popularity and other factors. High elevation trails are the hardest to clear because that’s where the continuous stands of big trees are.
Recently I’d been forced to come to grips with these abandoned trails – I just needed more distance than the cleared trails had to offer. The physical struggle to climb over, under, or around these obstacles was partly psychological. If you expect a good trail, you’re more likely to give up. But if you expect an obstacle course, you’re more likely to persevere.
Since the 2012 wildfire, I could only find one trip report for this trail – in 2017 – and two GPS data sets: one from 2017, charted on a site called HikeArizona, and the other anonymous, from AllTrails. The trip report, by a guy who hikes and blogs about New Mexico trails, only covered the early canyon-bottom section of the trail, since the guy lost the trail where it starts climbing the ridge. The HikeArizona route is a mystery – the only actual trip report on that site documented a young woman bushwhacking a completely different route, not shown, using 4wd roads to the south to access the peak from a different direction.
Another data set is embedded in Google Maps – strangely enough, because it’s the only trail mapped in this area, and Google Maps seldom shows forest trails. And it gets stranger: whereas the HikeArizona GPS route for this trail is wildly inaccurate, and the AllTrails GPS route omits most of the many switchbacks, the Google route is fairly accurate, but includes no distances.
The GPS distances shown on AllTrails and HikeArizona can’t be relied on, since they don’t include the switchbacks, but it’s also clear that they’re way off because even the easy parts of the trail take much longer to walk than they would if the logged distances were accurate. For example, the first real milestone on this trail, Windy Gap, the point where you get your first real view over into the next canyon, is logged by AllTrails and HikeArizona as 3.7 miles from the trailhead, but takes 2-1/2 hours to hike at top speed in the best conditions. And past Windy Gap, both crowdsourced sites deviate wildly from the actual route.
Once I got down into the canyon, I realized I’d forgotten how beautiful it is – much rockier than the canyon I usually hike to the north. That, in turn, makes it a more challenging hike and results in the narrow jungly section in the middle where fire-erosion debris and thickets make for slow going. Unlike in the canyon farther north, the stream here was running the entire distance, and with its many small waterfalls, made for a great soundtrack.
A mile or so in, I came to the first major obstruction, a huge pine trunk that I’d previously had to climb over – and somebody had cut a gap in it. Yay! Maybe a crew had been working on this trail, without yet entering it in the official list.
The farther you go, the more dramatic the canyon trail gets, as it climbs dozens of feet up and down to get around boulder falls, between overhanging cliffs. But more surprising at this time of year was the fall color! Peak color in this canyon seemed to be a month later than it’d been in the canyon to the north. The maples were hallucinatory, and in two days it would be December.
I didn’t find any more evidence of trail clearing, but the jungly section seemed much easier than before, just due to tread laid down by recent visitors. The only thing that really slowed me down was the need to stop and take off clothing as I climbed out of the canyon. I’d started in the 30s, but while climbing in sunlight, it felt like the 60s.
Each of these crest hikes, which have been partially cleared since the fire, features a prominent initial milestone: a high peak or saddle. The first time I hiked the trail, that was my destination. Subsequently, it became only the starting point for the additional mileage and elevation I was aiming for. Windy Gap was the first milestone on this hike. I’d made two forays beyond that last year, the first about a half mile, and the second to a second saddle nearly a mile beyond. Today I was hoping to use the second saddle as a starting point. Ignoring my previous experience with distances on this trail, I was relying on the GPS data, and hoping to reach the big peak, which the GPS data showed was only a little over 7 miles in. I’d been doing 15 mile round-trip hikes easily, so why not? The 360 degree views up there, at 10,658′, should be amazing!
I reached my previous milestone, the second saddle, by about 12:30. This was a little worrying. According to the GPS this would be only about 4 miles into the 7-mile hike. I should turn back at 1:30, which meant I had only an hour to do a further 6-mile round-trip on a trail the Forest Service claimed was impassable.
But I forged ahead, and soon discovered the trail was indeed abandoned. Confusingly, there was a handful of pink or orange ribbons, placed seemingly at random, that I used to confirm I was going in the right direction, but no actual trail work had been done, and even the ribbons soon disappeared.
I got around dozens of obstacles, and scratched my head a few times regarding which way to climb, but in general, I could always find some tread, even if it was no wider than an animal trail. There were definitely no human tracks, and it soon became evident that no humans had been this way in recent years. Not only were there no human prints in patches of bare dirt – only the occasional elk hoofprint – there were trees that had fallen long ago, with dense, rotten branches blocking the trail, that anyone passing would’ve had to break off. That party claiming the 4-night backpack had clearly been fantasizing.
I was climbing up the side of a broad bowl toward ridges that arced around the head of the canyon below, climbing toward high stands of aspen – some killed and fallen like matchsticks, others still thriving. The living aspens had been landmarks on previous hikes, especially when carrying their fall color, but all the foliage was gone now, at nearly 10,000′. Occasionally leaving my own cairns or rock arrows at questionable turns, I finally summitted a last group of switchbacks below the first ridgeline, and began a traverse that seemed endless, at a minimum 30% grade. It took me across talus slopes into the first big grove of fallen, bonelike aspens, where I encountered my most daunting obstacles.
Still, I kept going, nearly a mile on the long, steep traverse, until near the ridge top, I came to still more switchbacks. I checked my watch – I hadn’t even reached the midpoint of the arcing ridges, but I was well past my planned turnaround time to get back to the truck before dark. I could keep going, fighting the obstacles and scouting for trail, but that would force me into difficult route-finding in the dark through the jungle in the canyon bottom, which might add another half-hour to my return hike. And I now realized that the GPS data was so far off, it could take me another 3 hours to reach the peak. 7 miles to the peak! Hah! It was more like 7 miles to where I was now, and 10-11 miles to the peak.
This was no auspicious turnaround point. The trail wasn’t even level – I was just trying to maintain purchase on a steep slope, thousands of feet above the canyon, in a thicket of aspen and locust seedlings. But I figured I’d gone 7 miles and climbed well over 4,000′. My body was pretty thrashed from fighting the obstructions and the steep grades, and I had a 7-mile return hike with very steep descents and that rocky jungle/rollercoaster between cliffs in the canyon bottom. At least I had a clear satellite signal to log position on my own GPS message unit.
My legs were burning by the time I returned to the second saddle. Then I brought my knee up to straddle a big log in the trail, and screamed with pain. My inner thighs had caught fire with cramps, both of them, and I toppled to the ground on the other side of the big log. I tried to straighten my legs, but it only made it worse. I was screaming and rolling back and forth, there in the wilderness, high in the sky. I’d never felt such pain from cramps, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. I tried to get up to stretch, but the pain brought me back down. I tried to reach a leg up to stretch against the log, but every time I moved the cramps got worse.
Finally, lying on my stomach for I don’t know how many minutes, I was able to relax enough to carefully stand up. I began to hobble stiff-legged like Frankenstein, and gradually, with a hundred feet of walking across the saddle, the pain subsided. Then I did some stretching and drank some more water. I’d been drinking water regularly, but apparently not enough, and I was obviously short on electrolytes. Maybe I should start carrying some kind of electrolyte supplement in addition to water.
My legs recovered and I quickly descended into the canyon. Shortly after hitting the canyon bottom, with the sun beginning to set, I encountered another hiker just starting up the trail. It was a young guy carrying a smallish pack, but when I asked if he was doing an overnight, he said he just wanted to get somewhere with a view before dark, then he’d hike back out.
I told him he was shit out of luck, the sun would set before he’d reach the first saddle. I warned him not to get lost in the dark, but he said he had a couple of GPS units to keep him on the trail. Hah, good luck with that! But he was a nice guy and clearly wanted to chat. This was his first hike in the Gila – he’d just finished hiking in the San Mateos far to the northeast, in the recent burn scar. I recommended the next hike to the north, where the trail was much clearer and the accessible views better.
It’s interesting – before COVID the only other hikers I encountered on these trails were locals my age or older, but now, I seem to mainly run into twentysomethings from out of state. This guy was from Texas but clearly hadn’t grown up there – no accent.
I got through the jungle fairly easily, and reached the truck before dark, but as I started to drive out, a bright light flashed in my rearview mirror. Had the young guy given up and turned back right after meeting me? No, it was the full moon rising behind the mountains in the east, to light my way home.
Monday, December 7th, 2020: Hikes, Mogollon Crest, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
When I first moved here, I discovered right away that the Mogollon Mountains were the tallest nearby range, and there was a five-mile crest trail to the highest peak that looked like a walk in the park, with less than 2,000′ of cumulative elevation gain.
But I lost interest when I read the trip reports of other hikers. The entire distance, including the top of the peak, was densely forested, so there were no views anywhere.
That changed after the 2012 wildfire, because the trail now traversed the heart of the burn area, a “moonscape” in which all vegetation had been destroyed. I figured there might be some decent views up there now. The crest trail starts at a forest road in the far north and runs more than 24 miles one-way to the southernmost high peak, so it has a history of use by backpackers aiming to complete the entire route.
However, the crest trail wasn’t included on the most recent Forest Service maintenance log. And in May of this year, a hiker reported that he was only able to do 3 miles, after dealing with more than 100 deadfall logs across the trail.
So I forgot about it until Sunday morning, when I did another search and found 3 trip reports from August, September, and October. They all claimed the trail had been cleared over the summer. The report in mid-October said the trail was completely clear up to a half-mile north of the peak, where some moderate deadfall began.
Yeah, the drive to the trailhead would take at least two hours, to a place that’s only 30 miles from my house as the crow flies. But I’d done a couple of hikes in Arizona recently that required a two hour drive. It would limit my hiking time, but I’d get an early start and I’m a fast walker.
The final road to the trailhead is legendary – I’d driven the first few miles of it last winter, but the rest of it had been gated – it’s usually closed all winter. It climbs from the old mining ghost town – itself reached by a scary one-lane paved road – over a 9,000′ pass to the high plateau north of our huge wilderness area. I was all stoked to put in another 15-mile day at 10,000′ elevation, with forays onto branch trails, and it didn’t even occur to me until I reached the ghost town that the forest road was almost certainly closed. I wouldn’t even reach the damn trailhead!
My heart sank, but I decided to keep going, knowing there were a couple of earlier trailheads I could take instead, for an alternate hike into lower elevations.
I was a little surprised to find patches of snow on the road through the ghost town – it’s in a deep canyon that remains in shadow through the winter. The storm had hit last Tuesday night, and was limited to the highest mountains – we didn’t even get any clouds in town.
I drove through onto the rough, rocky forest road, and after the first few miles, was surprised to find the gate open. That’s where it gets steep, and I was not even sure my 2wd truck would make it, especially if I hit snow higher up.
But the truck did okay. The road lived up to its legend, climbing up above the world for some truly spectacular views, but the snow was limited to inch-deep, fairly level stretches near the high pass. I passed only one other vehicle, a new-model Subaru with Texas plates parked in a forested, primitive camping area at 9,000′.
A mile or so beyond that was a large, cleared ledge with a Forest Service restroom and an incredible view to the northwest. My trailhead was across the road at the foot of a densely forested slope blanketed with 2″ of snow. It really felt like the top of the world, and the temperature was close to freezing, but the sky was perfectly clear, and since I expected most of the hike to be exposed, I packed my long johns rather than pulling them on.
As soon as I started up the trail, I encountered recent deadfall. Another hiker had recently told me that our local volunteer trail group had tried to clear this end of the trail but had given up because more trees were falling every day, so that was another piece of second-hand info floating around in my mind. I climbed around the first deadfall, but obstacles continued throughout the intact forest that lined the early part of the trail.
After a quarter mile or so, I left the intact forest and entered the burn scar, and the deadfall got really bad. Had all these trees really fallen since mid-October, when the last trip report claimed it fully cleared? It was hard to believe.
I’d recently decided to just accept the obstacles as the new normal, so I persevered. I might not get any decent mileage or elevation, but I’d get a whole-body workout instead. Many logs leaned over the trail at chest-height or higher, and those I could sometimes grab and swing under, with care for the rotator cuff tears in both shoulders. Some could be straddled and rolled over, and some huge logs had a gap underneath that could be crawled through. Others were so broad they had to be climbed over or around, and many involved multiple criss-crossing trunks that required precarious rock-climbing moves with outstretched legs, over a distance of several yards. Of course, a few were simply insurmountable, and I had to find a detour around them.
In a few places I found sections of clear trail that lasted for up to a hundred feet, where I would practically run to make up time. Climbing steadily, the trail traversed from a north slope around to an east-facing slope, and the view east, over country I’d never seen, was welcome. Still, I was hoping to reach a saddle with views to both east and west, and that was slow coming.
As I worked my way hopefully up the long east-slope traverse toward the crest, I encountered more animal tracks in the snow, finally coming upon really fresh mountain lion tracks, maybe from last night or this morning. The lion had been coming down the trail from the opposite direction, and its tracks continued for more than a mile. I envied it the ability to walk under many of the fallen logs that I had to climb over or around.
The obstacles never ended, and although I can hike for hours up much steeper trails without getting fatigued, my whole body was getting worked a lot harder than usual. I wondered how much more of this I could endure.
Finally I reached the crest, a point where the trail crossed over from the east to the west slope. I could now see the interior of the wilderness to the west, the headwaters of the biggest canyon, and the western peak and ridge that I hike regularly, where I’d recently cleared thorny locust with my Dad’s machete. But there was still a maze of charred snags masking my trailside view.
This trail gradually climbed and traversed through more deadfall until I eventually came in view of the highest peak. There was a rocky outcrop where I could climb out above the snags and get an unobstructed panorama of the entire west of the range. What a relief to rise clear of all those dead tree trunks! The peak was close, but it was also clearly covered with snags. There would be no unobstructed view up there! And apparently there was no trail either – it would just be a scramble over fallen logs the whole way up.
I continued to a saddle about a mile short of the peak, and there, at an elevation of almost 10,400′, I met my nemesis. On most of this winding trail, visibility had been limited to a few dozen feet, but facing me ahead was a long, straight uphill section that was a continuous maze of dense deadfall. I’d finally had enough of this, especially since the big peak wasn’t offering the payoff of a decent view.
Reflecting on the multiple recent trip reports that claimed this trail cleared, what amazed me most was that all those snags could’ve fallen on this 4 miles of trail in only a month and a half. The number of fallen trees I’d encountered in that distance may have been as high as 2,000. Yes, we’d had high west winds in November – that’s apparently what had brought them down – but the deadfall was nearly continuous along the whole trail, including forested sections, north, east, south, and west slopes.
After my leg cramp scare last week, I’d been drinking water more regularly, and I’d brought an electrolyte supplement I could add halfway through. I didn’t linger in that saddle because for once, with a two-hour return drive facing me, half of it on that difficult one-lane forest road, I was actually anxious to just get this damn hike over with. And I knew the hike back, battling all that deadfall over again, would really wear me out.
So I took it a little easier on the way down, stopping regularly to try and identify landmarks on the unfamiliar horizon. During the final traverse, a mile or so from the end, I noticed an out-of-place color on the trail ahead. Other hikers, here at the end of the day!
A man stood up and waved, a woman rising behind him. They were carrying medium-sized overnight packs, and appeared to be in their mid-to-late 30s. The woman was beautiful, but the man took over the conversation so I had to keep my attention on him.
They were clearly urban professionals, from San Antonio. I’ve gotten used to most of our visitors being from Texas – they’re always anxious to escape their state, and to them, New Mexico seems like paradise. They’d apparently just driven straight here, and were hoping to spend at least a couple nights out, maybe reaching the end of the 24-mile trail. I knew they wouldn’t make it, and I hadn’t seen any promising campsites in my 4-mile jaunt. They wouldn’t even make it as far as I had, in the time remaining tonight.
I told them the deadfall was bad but didn’t try to discourage them. I was just amazed that anyone would even try backpacking on this trail, in this condition. They’d find out for themselves.
Despite the late hour, it seemed the man could’ve stood there chatting with me forever, but his less enthusiastic companion was getting cold and wanted to keep moving, so he reluctantly bid me farewell and hurried to catch up with her.
I felt sorry for that young couple, forced to clear out a tiny campsite in the maze of charred deadfall somewhere short of the crest, on a night with temps well below freezing. I’ve been there many times myself, you just add to your store of experience. You can imagine my relief when I reached the truck, in plenty of time to enjoy the last light on the peaks and canyon walls, in plenty of time to reach the highway before full dark.
Subtracting stops, it’d taken me 5-1/2 hours to hike that 8 mile round-trip. Compare that with two months ago, when twice as far on clear trail took only a half hour longer. I wouldn’t be exploring this trail again without confirming it was clear!
Monday, March 1st, 2021: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Last night, I’d tried to come up with a plan for today’s hike and failed. The snow on all our regional mountains was melting fast, but I knew from my midweek hike that it was still deep on north slopes. There were few trails within a 2-hour drive that had southern exposure, and I’d done two of them, with the corresponding 4-hour round-trip drives, in the past two weeks. I didn’t want to make another long drive.
I got up this morning with little hope or motivation, and considered taking a break from my Sunday hikes. It’d been over three months since I’d taken a break and it wouldn’t hurt my conditioning
Then during breakfast, scanning the list of hikes I’ve compiled, I suddenly realized that the Little Dry Creek trail climbs south-facing slopes. I hadn’t thought of it at first because it’s not one of my favorites hikes, and anyway, I’d already done it three weeks ago. I don’t like to duplicate hikes that frequently…but what the hell. It would get me out into nature.
After an hour’s drive, I arrived at the extremely remote trailhead, parked, shouldered my pack, and started laboriously picking my way up the difficult early stretch lined with big loose rocks. After a half mile or so it climbs above the canyon bottom and you get a view of the peaks ahead. And I suddenly had a brainstorm.
Last fall, after finally getting close to the 10,000′ crest, I’d tracked down a recent online trip log for this trail. My destination here has always been the 10,663′ summit of Sacaton, one of the iconic peaks of this range. But the trail is just too long and blocked with too much deadfall from the 2012 wildfire.
The online trip log was from a young Arizona woman, a “peakbagger”, who left the trail after the first mile and bushwhacked up the right-hand ridge. That ridge eventually connects to the Sacaton massif, so she took it all the way, traversing all the intermediate peaks. I couldn’t recall her exact route, but I knew it connected with an old mine road not far from this canyon bottom. She took the mine road a short distance then bushwhacked up to the main ridge. What the hell, I thought. I’ll try to replicate her route, and see how far I can get.
The whole peakbagger thing is a turn-off for me – mountains are sacred, and the idea of “bagging” them to add to your life list is another sad byproduct of our hypercompetitive European culture. But before reading the young woman’s account and scanning her photos, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to bushwhack in these mountains with their loose, crumbly volcanic rock, especially through burn scars blocked by mazes of deadfall and choked with thickets that I believed to be virtually impassable. I admired her toughness, but I figured if she could do it, I probably could too.
Heading deeper into the canyon, with progressive vantage points out, I saw the right-hand ridge started low, only a few hundred feet above the creek, and there seemed to be a gap, a side drainage, before it connected to the high ridge. A mile up the trail, I found where the side drainage joined the creek. It was dry and narrow, but I turned off and started climbing. This must be where she left the trail…and if I followed this side canyon to its head, maybe I’d connect with the old mine road.
As I’d expected, bushwhacking was incredibly hard. The right-hand slope was in shade and covered with snow, so I climbed the sunny, snow-bare left slope. But it was steep and alternated between loose rock and dense shrubs: oak, manzanita, mountain mahogany, and occasionally thorny catclaw. I had to cut my own switchbacks, slipping and sliding the whole way, scratching my hands and clothes.
Eventually I climbed high enough to see the head of the canyon. Its sides were completely choked with chaparral, as was the continuation of the ridge above. But now that I could see the destination, I had to keep going.
High above the head of the canyon, rounding a rocky corner, I suddenly came upon a cleared patch and an apparently bottomless hole – a mine pit. I remembered there was an old mine farther up the main canyon. I must be near the road. I thought I could see another cleared spot a few hundred yards ahead.
Heading that way, I ended up on an old trail, which took me to the mine road. I kept following it around the foot of the high ridge, and eventually came to a junction. The main road from below continued higher, through pine forest, and I could see it climbing around a small peak ahead. It was trending away from the main ridge, but I figured it would circle back and probably get me higher and farther along.
Traversing below the little peak I came upon a big gash in the mountainside, with a pile of rock obscuring a mine entrance. I set my pack down and climbed over the rock pile. There was a heavy steel door, partly open. I squeezed past it and walked into the mine, but it quickly became too dark, so I went back out and put on my headlamp.
I love being underground! And the colors of rock in this mine, while subtle, were really pretty. It had several junctions and branches, and whoever worked it had left some valuable equipment back there. Some of the lumber looked very recent.
The first branch led to a chamber, partly blocked by an air compressor, where there was a steel platform over a vertical shaft with cables leading down out of sight. It was so deep my headlamp wouldn’t penetrate it. Beyond this chamber, a rockfall blocked the tunnel, but I could see it led farther into the mountain.
Back in the light of day, I continued up the road, around the little conical peak. Eventually I came to a broad saddle where I could see east into another big canyon system directly below Sacaton. And forming a gate across this canyon were the two most spectacular rock formations I’d ever seen in this area. They both had arches like the sandstone canyons of southeast Utah. Could there really be sandstone in these volcanic mountains, or was it an anomalous volcanic formation?
The ridge leading to Sacaton was my destination, and the rock formations didn’t lead there, but I figured I’d head in that direction and see how close I could get before climbing higher. First I had to traverse another steep slope of loose rock and dense chaparral. After a few hundred yards fighting my way through that, I came to a deep canyon, forested on this side, with patches of deep snow. To get a better view of the rock formations I’d have to cross this canyon. I could see a large clearing, like a saddle, on the opposite side. I descended a few hundred feet in snow to a stream running across bare rock, then fought my up through the shrubs on the opposite slope, finally reaching the clearing. Now I could see that a much deeper and wider side canyon separated me from the rock formations. But from the clearing I was in, a ridge led upward toward the main ridge and the foot of the 10,000′ peak that began the Sacaton massif. From below, I couldn’t tell if this was a good route, but I’d give it a shot.
Here the real work began. Climbing this ridge was some of the hardest bushwhacking I’ve ever done. I began to doubt that the young woman had really completed this hike in one day. Yeah, there were a few small patches of bare ground, and a few sporadic stretches of bunchgrass between thickets, but most of the way I had to stop and scout gaps in the vegetation, zigzagging constantly back and forth, finding dead ends, turning back and trying other routes. It was incredibly slow, but I kept trying.
This outlying ridge climbed in steps of a few hundred feet at a time. Each time I crested a step I stopped and tried to scout ahead. Eventually I reached a forested stretch below the top. Here it was much easier, and I found a game trail. I continued for a quarter mile or so, and reached a little peak before the saddle just below the high peak.
I stood there in about 10″ of snow and checked my watch. It’d taken me four hours to get this far, and I figured I was only about a third of the way. The peak above required another 1,500′ climb that would take me at least another hour, and past that were three or four miles and probably another 2,000′ of up and down climbing, most of it on loose rock through dense scrub. How could that girl have done this all in a day? It seemed a near-mythical feat.
But on the way down, I discovered something. I got so tired of rerouting around masses of shrubs that I decided to just force my way straight through them. It was murder on my expensive REI and Patagonia outerwear, but it turned out to be doable, and a little faster than zigzagging through the maze. The shrubs had interlacing branches, and I still had to zigzag between the cores of individual shrubs, but the outer branches in the gaps between them gave way to brute force.
Unfortunately, because the descent of the ridge went a little faster than the ascent, I overshot the clearing where I’d climbed out of the side canyon. By over a hundred yards, but I didn’t know that yet.
When bushwhacking like this, I always stop every few hundred yards, look back, and memorize landmarks so I can retrace my route. I’d memorized the shape of the snow slope I’d descended across this side canyon, but now that I’d overshot, it didn’t have that shape. I couldn’t tell if it was the same one – I didn’t know if I’d gone too far, or not far enough. And I was in the midst of a seemingly endless thicket.
I fought my way down into the side canyon. I figured I’d climb the stream bed to the nearest snow patch, and if I couldn’t find my footprints, I’d turn and go downstream until I found the right place.
The upstream patch was the right one. My footprints were right there. I followed them up out of the canyon, onto the slope that traversed back to the mine road. I took the road to the trail that led to the bottomless pit, and then began bushwhacking back down the side of the shallow canyon that led to Little Dry Creek. Downclimbing here was much harder than ascending. I stumbled, slipped, and slid constantly in the loose dirt and rocks, thrown off balance as invisible branches and roots grabbed my ankles, in between fighting through thorny thickets. It got steeper and harder toward the bottom, to the point where it was downright scary. But, obviously, I made it.
It’d taken me 3-1/2 hours to reach the high ridge, and 3-1/4 hours to get back down. When I got home and checked the Arizona peakbagger’s data online, I discovered she’d taken an almost completely different route. Instead of the logical path up the side canyon, she’d cut off the main trail earlier and climbed straight up the right slope to the peak of that low ridge. There, she’d hit the mine road, and used it much farther than I had, which enabled her to go much faster during that stretch.
Then, just past the mine entrance, she’d again climbed straight up the little conical peak, and from there, continued following the ridgeline all the way to Sacaton. She said the bushwhacking wasn’t bad, but I could see it was. Apparently peakbaggers are just habituated to forcing their way through thickets. Their goal is to bag as many peaks as possible in their lifetime, and most peaks don’t have trails.
I could also see that the end point of my hike was actually the halfway point for her hike. By reaching Sacaton, she’d logged over 16 miles round-trip. So my total distance was about 8 miles, and after subtracting the time I’d spent exploring the mine, it took me almost 7 hours – more than twice as long as it would take me on clear ground. She’d also saved time on the way back by leaving the high ridge and dropping from the head of Little Dry Creek back into the main canyon, where she reconnected with the trail so she wouldn’t have to bushwhack back.
I was proud of how hard I’d worked, but it’s not the kind of hike I’d choose to do again. I’m in great shape, but hiking in steep loose rock is the hardest thing possible on my vulnerable foot. I could go faster on a healthy foot, but would I even want to?
