Southeast Arizona
Monday, January 27th, 2025: Animals, Greasewoods, Hikes, Nature, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
After my return from back east with increasingly crippling knee pain, my doctor had prescribed something that sounded familiar. Later, after looking it up, I realized it was an anti-inflammatory (NSAID) he’d ordered for my hip pain back in 2008, when I’d tried every NSAID on the market, and every one had caused stomach cramps so bad I had to reject them all, adding that entire class of medicines to my growing list of drug allergies.
But in desperation, I took a dose Saturday after breakfast, and then, immediately after taking it, discovered it’s taboo for patients allergic to the antibiotic sulfa. I’ve always been told I almost died of anaphylactic shock after being given sulfa at age 2.
To my considerable relief, I didn’t die. I didn’t develop stomach cramps, and three hours after taking the drug, my knee pain disappeared completely for the first time since early May 2024.
Okay, I thought. Let’s put it to the test. There’s a small mountain range over in Arizona that I’ve wanted to explore for five years. It lies directly across a lonely highway from the much bigger and much taller mountain range I’ve climbed dozens of times. It lies within the same national forest, but it’s neither federal wilderness nor wilderness study area, and as far as I could tell it’s all cattle range.
The map shows no hiking trails, but the mountains, rising from 4,600 to 6,900 feet in elevation, are traversed by a sparse network of dirt roads, only a few of which seemed to be maintained. Virtually no information about this little range is available online – hours from the nearest city, it seems to be ignored by hikers, mountain bikers, campers, and recreationists in general.
Recalling my history of conflicts with livestock, you might assume I would join the crowd and likewise ignore this unpopular rangeland. But the northern part of the range has one irresistible attraction: it looks very similar to my spiritual home, those sacred mountains in the Mojave Desert. It virtually screams “DROP ACID AND HIKE ME!”
So on Sunday morning, after taking a second dose of the new drug, I packed for an overnight trip across the state line, where for the first time since last August, I would try to hike more than a mile. My optimistic plan was to walk one of the abandoned roads from an interior basin up to a pass where I could survey the possibility of someday climbing to the crest. As usual in a situation like this, I really had no idea what to expect. I might run into an aggressive bull, or a locked gate with a No Trespassing sign, or a sandy road my truck couldn’t handle. My knee might betray me. In those eventualities, there were other less interesting options nearby.
It was another day without clouds, temperatures forecast to reach the 50s. Under full sun it would feel much warmer, if not for the steady west wind I found to be blowing all day. The ranch road in was very well-maintained, but my eyes were constantly drawn to the fantastic rock formations it twisted between, and I stopped every hundred yards or so for pictures. It was all even better than I’d expected – after cresting a low rise, you wind down into a hidden basin surrounded by low hills to the south and spectacular mountains, cliffs, and pinnacles in the west and north.
The ranch house lay just out of sight at the north end of the basin, but the road I wanted turned off south. The basin is dotted with huge spreading trees which I was surprised to identify as Emory oaks – we have much smaller ones around home – and in less than a quarter mile the road turned bad and I pulled off to park in a clearing near several of these majestic trees. At the edge of that lovely basin, in this landscape dominated by stone in endless organic forms, I was already in heaven and I hadn’t even started hiking.
The map shows a powerline following the road, and once there, I realized it’s actually the opposite – the road I planned to hike is the powerline utility road. It’s a minor powerline serving a ranch on the west side of the range, so since the powerline was laid, the road hasn’t been maintained, and coming from the east, I didn’t see any vehicle tracks until I approached the pass much later.
My knee seemed fine, and I didn’t anticipate any sustained grades to threaten it, but on every single decline, I practiced a duckwalk I’d found in a YouTube video by a physical therapist that was recommended to relieve knee pain. I did that all day, on what was probably a hundred or more short descents.
Cattle had used the road, but only rarely, and the most recent cowpies were a couple weeks old. I spotted a herd lounging a half mile north near a corral and water tank. Another hike I’d considered follows a dirt road that branches south, offering a possible route to the summit of the range. But when I reached that branch, I could see that the southern part of the range doesn’t feature those spectacular rock formations, so I kept going on my powerline road, forcing myself to move at a leisurely pace and take shorter steps than my body seemed to want to.
Up and down across side drainages, the road gradually took me higher above the basin, yielding better and better views. I found the fairly recent track of a single hiker who must’ve been about my size. I came upon modest ranch infrastructure, and mused enviously that this must be one of the prettiest ranches in all Arizona.
Eventually I could see the powerline heading up to the pass, the hills closed in at each side, and I began to wonder if my knee would really hold out that far. The past six months had been hell in so many ways. Taking care of my mother had distracted me some from the pain and the inability to hike, but my soul had been grieving, and I’d often wondered if I would ever be able to hike again. At times, my future seemed utterly hopeless.
In this basin dominated by oaks, I came upon the occasional juniper and was surprised to encounter small manzanitas. Back home, manzanita only seems to grow above 8,000 feet, but here – and in another range to the south – at similar latitudes, I’ve found it between 5,000 and 6,000 feet. Why the difference?
After more than two miles, my knee still seemed fine – another surprise, since for months, every time I’d walked a mile, I’d ended up in severe pain. The road became steeper and more deeply eroded as it climbed to the pass, but I kept moving carefully upward, admiring the steep, rocky slope on my right, behind which the northern crest was hidden, about a thousand feet higher.
That wind was howling down from the pass, and no matter how tightly I cinched my hat, it still blew off from time to time. But now I was sure I was going to make it, and since one of my favorite experiences is to crest a pass for the first time and see over into the next watershed, discovering completely new territory, I was really stoked. I’d been eyeballing possible routes to the crest on the east side, ever since beginning my hike, and now I would learn whether a better route exists on the west side, taking off from this road.
Wow! That wind was just blasting through! The west side of the pass descends at a much gentler grade, with the less interesting southern mountains on your left, but on your right, there’s more spectacular rock, and what appears to be a straightforward route upward to the crest.
It was no place to linger in this wind, but I began to believe I might return someday.
Of course, the trail back threatened to be much harder on my knee, since it was mostly downhill. But I kept carefully duckwalking down every incline, and it seemed to work. The low angle light from the western sun made everything in the landscape stand out now – my reward for the climb to the pass. And gradually, I realized I was experiencing a miracle – just as my mother has recently been able to stand up and walk after being confined to a wheelchair since September, I was now hiking miles without pain for the first time since early May.
I don’t buy the old myth, perpetuated by Western pundits from Aristotle to the new age self-help gurus of the 80s, that human life should be a quest for individual happiness. Happiness – a steady state of comfort and carefree living – has always been a meaningless concept to me. My curiosity drives me to take the kind of chances that result in moments of joy – like this day of pain-free hiking through a beautiful landscape – between long stretches of hard work and suffering. Giving up the extremes in favor of the safe and predictable seems like a poor trade-off.
My lower legs were now aching – anti-inflammatories do nothing for lactic acid. Charting my route later, at home, I would find I’d hiked over seven miles with an elevation gain of 1,000 feet. I can’t really describe how ecstatic I was by the time I reached the truck. In all those seven miles the only litter I’d seen was a single smashed beverage can. Without that, it would’ve been too perfect.
Driving out between the rock formations, I passed a late-model utility vehicle parked below some boulders and pinnacles, and realized this area is even more spectacular than the most famous bouldering destination in California, yet the online silence suggests it’s either undiscovered or ignored. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I’d reserved a room in my new favorite motel south of the range. And after a burrito and a peaceful night reminiscing about my hike, I emerged before dawn to find thousands of sandhill cranes flying directly overhead, moving north from the small lakes that dot the valley to the south. The parade lasted for at least 90 minutes – another miracle to top off yesterday’s.
Monday, February 3rd, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Horseshoe, Southeast Arizona.
This Sunday was forecast to be unseasonably warm, reaching 70 degrees at home. Still looking to test my newly medicated knee on a mid-distance hike with elevation gain between 1,000 and 2,000 feet, I had my heart set on a trail west of here to a little 7,500′ peak that had been recommended for its views. But I’m trying to get pictures of rocks for my mother, and when I dug up some pics from that hike online, I could see it was all forest and no rocks.
So despite the warm weather I resigned myself to hiking lower elevation areas along the Arizona border, where rocks abound. I wanted to avoid livestock if possible, and the maps showed a trail through a wilderness study area, up an exposed, rocky canyon that had intrigued me, from a distance, for years.
But when I reached the turnoff to the access road, I found it closed, with a locked gate, guarding a small settlement of what appeared to be scruffy retirees and desert rats. I guess remoteness explains why they get away with closing access to a trail on public land.
Of course I always expect things like this when exploring new areas. My backup plan was to check out a canyon on the east side of the sky island mountain range, popular with birders, that I’d hiked so many times before. Most of my hikes had focused on the high central area, accessed via the northeast basin. One of those previous hikes had reached and traversed the head of this eastern canyon, which was enough to make me curious about the trail up the canyon below, accessed via a forest road entering the east side of the range
It’s a long canyon. My mapping platform shows the access road ending 5-1/2 miles in, with the trail continuing 6-1/2 miles to the saddle I’d reached before. But the old Forest Service map shows the access road continuing another 4 miles to the wilderness boundary, where the trail proper begins. Who to believe?
The most complete and up-to-date trail guide for this range says the access road was destroyed in the catastrophic floods after the 2011 mega-wildfire and is “not passable by vehicle for a number of miles”, and the trail up the canyon to the saddle I’d reached from the other side has “not been maintained for a very long time and conditions are poor to nonexistent”. I assumed today would be a repeat of my explorations in a similarly described canyon northwest of here, where the road had been apocalyptically washed out for miles and I had a very difficult scramble to even reach the trail – something my knee definitely wasn’t ready for today.
But I was in the vicinity and it would only take a half hour to check this out, after which I could drive to the interior basin to re-do an easy but forested trail there.
What I found was a rough ranch road that led to a corral and water tank at the mouth of the canyon. After closing the gate behind me, I was only able to drive a few hundred yards before hitting the sandy crossing of a big wash where my 2wd truck would surely bog down, so I parked in a clearing, loaded up, and starting hiking the road. At 1,400 feet lower than home, it was already warm enough that I had to unbutton my shirt.
This turned out to be a very wide canyon between rocky ridges, with a broad floodplain. The floodplain was lined partly with grasses and annuals, and partly with open oak woodland that became dense as it extended occasionally up gently slanting cuts through the rocky ridge on the south side.
A few hundred yards beyond the wash crossing, I found two pickups parked beside the road, one with a Wyoming plate. Not knowing what to expect, I have to admit it was a little reassuring to know other hikers were up ahead – instead of, for example, gun nuts on ATVs.
The road was dusty, and walking it under full sunlight quickly became a trudge – not the hike I’d wanted for today. But this was a pretty canyon I felt like I needed to explore, and as usual I wasn’t paying enough attention to distances on the map. I was hoping I would reach the end of the road in an hour or so and still be able to enjoy some roadless hiking in a wild canyon beyond.
I had my eye out for cattle and soon spotted a bull resting under an oak on the opposite slope. And a quarter mile later where the road wound through oak forest, I came upon another bull, standing just off the road. He was watching me but didn’t seem concerned, so I continued past. Maybe this canyon sees enough recreational use that the bulls are more accustomed to strangers than in the more remote areas I usually target.
The road crossed the wash again, near groves of big oaks that featured really pretty campsites. So far, the road had been easily passable by high-clearance 4wd vehicles, and I was thinking this would be a great place to camp – just outside of bear habitat, but with access to the higher mountains.
I went through another gate and back across the wash, and soon met the other hikers – a party of six, three couples roughly my age, all birders with field glasses hanging on their chests. They were engaged in conversation and barely acknowledged me as we passed.
I saw some bluebirds crossing from oak to oak, and spooked a whitetail doe that ran up the south slope.
A little ways farther up the road I came to a huge water tank about 50 feet in diameter with a solar pump. There had been plastic pipe running beside the road all the way, feeding occasional small water troughs, and it continued past here. This was by far the biggest ranch operation I’d seen in this range – my earlier thought of camping was fading fast.
The canyon narrowed, the road began making tighter turns, and I came to a right-angle bend, the forested intersection with a side canyon on the right, where a rocky side road branched off. I continued on the main road and found that the birders had turned back here. But I continued upcanyon for more than a mile, to another crossing where the road climbed a steep bank and the rancher had built a long drystone retaining wall hoping to control erosion. Here, a side road climbed steeply left into oak forest where I could see a freestanding fireplace and chimney and hiked up to investigate.
The map showed this to be the start of a trail up a small peak, but all I could find were meandering cattle trails. There was no cabin foundation around the fireplace, but the chimney showed a fringe of rusted flashing from a metal roof. Hard to say what happened here.
Back on the main road, after another quarter mile I heard mooing and spotted a herd of cattle ahead in an oak grove south of the road. I could see a corral ahead, and standing in front of it facing me down, another bull. A bull’s first duty is to protect his cows, so I turned back in disgust.
I knew I hadn’t gone more than three miles yet, so the best thing I could do now would be to go back and explore that road up the side canyon.
After returning a mile-and-a-half around the big bend, I found the side road was only rocky for a short distance, then became another dirt road up a floodplain. I could see the side canyon opened out and became relatively vast. But while stopping to pee, I heard a dog bark, and looking back, saw a mountain biker stopping under oaks at the entrance to the side road. His dog ran up to meet me, and the biker passed me shortly after, again roughly my age. I realized to my chagrin that, rather than a wild canyon devastated by catastrophic floods and abandoned by hikers, this was actually a combination working ranch and recreation park for retirees.
But in less than a half mile the road disappeared under a debris flow of white rocks from the historic floods. I couldn’t find where the biker had gone, but I continued working my way upstream across the rocks, until I got really frustrated by the oaks in the canyon bottom blocking my view of the landscape. So I carefully climbed the east slope to a high bench with an expansive view. And the first thing I saw was another herd of cattle, facing me from the corresponding bench across a deep ravine. This was clearly their habitat, not mine.
But it was a really pretty canyon, like a vast inner world hidden from the outside of the range.
I hadn’t gotten much elevation today, but I’d walked almost nine miles, and my knee was complaining despite the meds. During the past week I’d tried alternating oral Celebrex and Voltaren gel. The Voltaren failed to ease my pain, and its complicated application is completely incompatible with hiking or camping.
Environmentalists and conservationists have long accepted that responsible ranching is better for habitat and wildlife than urban sprawl. I don’t know how responsible the ranchers are where I hike, but I’m learning that hiking in this rangeland is complicated. I’ve hiked in remote, forested rangeland where cattle graze where they please and seldom if ever see a human, and that’s where I’ve found the most pristine habitat and encountered the most aggressive bulls. I’ve hiked in remote, heavily overgrazed grass-and-scrubland where the livestock likewise rarely see a human and are inclined to be defensive. And I’ve hiked in places like today’s canyon, where ranching and recreation peacefully coexist, but which are much less interesting to me.
Normally when I make the minimum hour-and-a-half drive to this range, I hike until evening, enjoy dinner at the cafe, and spend the night in the motel. But today’s walk returned me to the truck a little after 4pm, so I just drove home and saved some money. I will soon spend it on an overnight bag anyway, since my old one is decomposing into toxic microplastics.
Monday, February 10th, 2025: Basin, Chiricahuas, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
This one’s for those of you who are tired of hearing about my knee…and for those, including me, who’ve been wondering if I’m ever going to do another spectacular hike. In fact, the last spectacular hike I did was the one that damaged my knee, in early May of 2024.
I deliberated far too long over where to go this Sunday. I was still deliberating on Sunday morning, when purely by chance I re-read the description of a trail in the mountain range I hiked last Sunday, a trail I’d always assumed would be boring.
In the middle of a paragraph describing the beginning of the trail, the author of the online guide mentions that if you leave the trail at the first creek crossing and bushwhack two miles up the side canyon, you might be able to reach a waterfall. He added, “Note that it can be quite a rugged off-trail hike to get to the waterfall, especially after flooding has rearranged the area significantly and brought a lot of debris into the canyon.”
In this dry winter I didn’t expect there to be much, if any, flow over the falls. But this hike seemed the best idea I’d had yet.
I’d been planning on doing the smart thing – an easy hike on a well-maintained trail with moderate distance and elevation gain to keep my knee pain under control until I see the doc in a couple weeks. But there are so few easy hikes around here that result in entertaining stories and pictures! A canyon bushwhack would probably be really hard on my knee, but it would force me to go slow, and I imagined I could turn back if it got too gnarly.
It was forecast to be yet another unseasonably warm day, reaching the mid-70s at the foot of the mountains. On the highway south, two young whitetail bucks darted out in front of me, and I just managed to drive between them and the rest of the herd, which I glimpsed in the rearview mirror crossing behind me in a long line. It was pure luck that I didn’t hit one head-on like I did in 2022, resulting in $3,000 worth of damage to my Sidekick, which was virtually totaled. Of course I’m driving my pickup now, which has a steel grille, but this little incident reminded me why I should not drive the Sidekick until the armored bumper arrives in May.
Fifteen minutes later I was driving down out of the mountains into the big basin and saw the range of my destination spread out along the horizon, some 50 miles away. By then, I was constantly coming up with ideas for the new song I’m working on, capturing them while driving as video notes on my camera. I have a theory that road trips in basin-and-range landscapes are best for stimulating creativity – whereas massive, iconic mountain ranges like the Rockies or the Alps enclose and hem us in, vast basins scattered with smaller, widely separated ranges allow the mind and imagination to wander freely.
The trailhead, at just over 6,200 feet, lies in dense oak woodland along the winding, rocky road that leads over the crest of the range. It’s not a popular trail and I left my little truck alone in the small clearing just off the road. It only took me a few minutes to reach the creek, which to my surprise was flowing and clear. I realized this canyon gets a lot of shade in winter; there must still be snow melting up on the crest.
I’d gotten a late start and it was already in the mid-60s here, so I was comfortable in my long-sleeved shirt. Initially, I found the oak forest free of undergrowth but lined with embedded rocks, and for a short distance I could follow a vague trail that appeared to have been used mostly by the occasional enterprising bull. I also noticed partial tracks of another recent hiker that I continued to find farther upstream, until the going became too rough for my predecessor.
I was spending most of my time on the north bank of the creek and shooting pictures toward the southern glare, so for the first time, I started experimenting with the exposure dial, hoping to lighten the dark areas in Photoshop later while avoiding washed out areas now.
I was surprised to come upon an old wickiup frame above the creek with a stone campfire windbreak, apparently built long ago by someone experimenting with the old ways. It’s great other civilized people are doing this, but when it’s only a one-time thing, we should return the site to its natural state instead of leaving ruins like this.
The forested lower canyon widened out, big ponderosa pines appeared, and the cattle trail led away from the creek. I entered patches of burn scar, and expanses of exposed rock where algae was choking the creek.
From here on, deadfall, flood debris, and thickets of thorny locust and other shrubs made the canyon bottom and neighboring slopes increasingly difficult, slow, and often painful to navigate. I looked for cattle trails, but they always led upslope away from the creek. The creek itself was becoming so choked with debris that following it was often impossible.
The ridges above were getting taller, the canyon darker, and tall firs began to join the pines in the canyon bottom. Under their shade, I was encouraged to see dense stands of fir seedlings that had clearly sprouted within the past year or two. I found minimal cairns left long ago by some hiker – hardly necessary, since you couldn’t get lost in this narrow canyon with increasingly steep sides.
And despite the warm weather, in one shady stretch the creek was frozen solid!
As the canyon narrowed, the ridges above literally towered above me so that I was in shade much of time, and big firs – many of them three feet in diameter – began to outnumber the pines. The creekbed was dry for long stretches but always reappeared farther up. My toil up the canyon became truly epic – the creekbed was almost everywhere jammed with fallen logs, there was no floodplain, and the steep slopes to each side consisted of loose rock – talus – sometimes exposed, and sometimes covered by dense thickets of thorny locust and stiff-branched scrub oak. I stumbled often and fell many times, but was always able to catch myself without injury.
Climbing above thickets on the north bank, I ended up high in a hell of talus and scrub, climbing up a rock-lined ravine that actually required bouldering moves. In the end, I forced my way through stiff brush, and half-sliding down half-buried talus to the creek, I realized it had taken me a half hour to go only 50 horizontal feet. The whole time, I was trying not to think about how hard it would be going back.
Staying near the creek now, I clambered over sharp boulders and fought my way through more deadfall and thickets, past more snow patches and frozen creek. Suddenly, I realized I was surrounded by white aspen seedlings, standing like ghosts in the deep shadow of the crest above. I love aspens, but I hadn’t expected to reach their habitat on this hike – from my glance at the topo map that morning I figured I would only be climbing a thousand feet or so above the oak zone.
The air temperature in the shadows was now below 60, but I was working so hard I still didn’t need a sweater. Would I ever make it to the waterfall?
The sky, impossibly far above and mostly hidden by cliffs or canopy, now appeared white beneath a thin cloud layer, and the canyon bottom became even darker, with only occasional rays of sunlight penetrating. I was forced to climb higher above the creek, and kept peering ahead through the big firs for an end to my quest.
Suddenly, through a gap in the black tree trunks, far in the distance I spotted scraps of brilliant white. I approached slowly and carefully across the steep talus, made slippery by a layer of fir needles, until a frozen waterfall, fifty feet tall, began to reveal itself, gradually as if to increase the suspense, around a bend in the canyon wall.
I’ll warn you the pictures don’t do it justice. Maybe I was more appreciative after the ordeal I’d endured to get there – to me, it was one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever hiked to, and made all the suffering worthwhile. We’re all jaded by lifelong exposure to photos and video of the so-called wonders of the world, including waterfalls hundreds of feet tall or wide. I probably could’ve taken better pictures, but the space I had was cramped, the dark cliff totally dominated it, and the contrast between white sky and shadowed waterfall made photography a challenge that overwhelmed my limited skills.
And I was finally getting chilly!
I lingered in this cold, dark, beautiful place long enough to log a waypoint with my GPS message device. I was surprised to be able to connect with a satellite, down in that dark canyon. But when I checked the coordinates against the topo map back home, I found the satellite had recorded my location one third of a mile off – the cliffs and solid canopy of firs had apparently deflected and/or reflected the signal more than I would think possible. GPS users, be forwarned!
On the way back down, I tried to find better routes, sticking to the creek as closely as possible. The slopes above may appear more attractive but can quickly lead you astray. And eventually, I found more cairns and remnants of old trail blazed by other hikers – evidence I’d missed on the way up.
Those remnants of trail still led me astray as I approached the trailhead. And a sharp branch finally tore a big hole in my hiking pants. More than any bushwhack I’ve ever done, this truly was an obstacle course requiring full concentration at all times, where I never had the luxury of reflection or daydreaming.
It’d taken me more than four hours to bushwhack the four miles up that canyon and back. But when I reached the original trail at its modest creek crossing, I figured I still had an hour left. My knee would surely hate me for it, but I was so elated at reaching the waterfall that I continued up the trail. The online guide had claimed that in less than a mile you would reach a ridgetop with awesome views. Even walking slowly to protect my knee, I figured I could do that, and return, in an hour.
It was an often steep but smooth and well-maintained dirt trail, and it seemed to climb on forever. But after winding out and back into deep ravines amid dense oak forest, with the sun setting behind the crest, I finally reached the awesome views. But the sun had completely set by then, and the landscape was too dark to photograph well.
And I realized I would now have to hurry back down the trail, to reach the cafe before closing. When I plotted my route at home later, I found I’d only gone 5.6 miles total, but gained an accumulated 2,141 vertical feet – far more than was wise with this knee injury.
Nothing that lots of pain meds can’t fix – temporarily, at least. I hope you enjoy the epic even a fraction as much as I enjoyed the hike!
Sunday, April 13th, 2025: Hikes, San Francisco Mountains - AZ, Southeast Arizona.
The vast wilderness area north of my hometown encompasses canyons and mountains that rise to a nearly 11,000 foot crest in the west. That’s where most of my all-day wilderness hikes have taken place, accessed via the highway that leads west out of town and then north past the wall of mountains rising on your right.
But I’ve become more and more curious about the lower mountains that rise to the left of that highway, along our border with Arizona. Most of them lack wilderness protection and are grazed by cattle from bottom to top. But they do host an old network of unmaintained trails, and the area is so far from cities that these trails are seldom used by humans.
There’s one small mountain group, at the center of a broad network of intersecting trails, that I’ve been especially curious about because although it’s easy to find on the map, I’ve never been able to identify it from the highway, and it’s really hard to get to. First you have to ford a river, then you need to drive almost 15 miles uphill on increasingly bad ranch roads. The overall distance from town is less than 80 miles, but I figured it would take at least 2-1/2 hours one-way – more than I can justify for an all-day hike.
But now that I’m doing short hikes, it suddenly seemed doable.
In this severe drought, the river was dry, so that was no problem. The main ranch road climbed to a mesa, where immediately to my right appeared a spectacular canyon with sheer volcanic walls.
A little farther upstream, the road crossed the dry wash above the canyon and climbed to a higher mesa, from which I could see the ranch house in the valley to my left. And I could finally see the mountains I was heading for: a higher conical peak at left and a lower rounded peak at right, connected by a low ridge.
The road was graded all the way to the Arizona border, where I found a crude gate. On the other side the road was just a trail over volcanic rocks. I opened the gate and waited for several cows to usher their new calves out of my way.
The road past the gate turned out to be the rockiest I’ve ever driven. No way would I have been able to drive it before my recent suspension lift. Mile after mile, it just kept getting worse: big, sharp, loose volcanic rocks, with chunks of bedrock sticking up a foot high in places. My maximum ground clearance is now a little over 11 inches, so I had to pick my lines carefully. I couldn’t go more than 5 miles per hour in most stretches, and I often had to slow to walking pace.
The suspension upgrade hasn’t improved the ride quality at all, which is kind of what I expected. The farther I crawled over these rocks the less sense it made to drive rather than walk – but the trailhead was still miles away, and I wanted to at least reach the lower of the two peaks, which would be over a mile from the trailhead.
When I figured I was a half mile from the trailhead, I found a place to pull off the road. That turned out to be fortunate, because beyond here, the track got even worse, climbing at a perilous grade on even bigger loose rocks, and there were no more places to turn around before the end.
I’d been expecting a hot day, but it turned out to be very windy. It was hard walking on those loose, sharp rocks, and the track got continuously steeper, until it topped out on a shoulder of the rounded mountain, with the trailhead just ahead.
Almost as soon as I started up the trail, I had one of the worst allergy attacks I’ve ever had. I’d packed Zyrtec that morning, but foolishly left it in the Sidekick, which was now a half hour back down that hill of loose rock. So for the next couple of hours, I used up the bandannas I carry in my pack, sneezing constantly, so violently I had to stop walking to hold my balance, my nasal membranes burning, a mucus factory working overtime.
At the same time, clouds were moving over and the wind was increasing, so I had to pull on my windbreaker and cinch my hat down tightly.
Along the way, I distracted myself by examining the spectacular views north, and as I crested the first peak, northwest. The top had burned patchily in past fires, but still hosted tall ponderosas, and eventually I got a narrow view of the taller, pointed peak a mile south. That’s where I stopped to turn back, figuring I’d gone at least a couple miles.
On the way back, despite my constant, violent sneezing, I managed to clamber off-trail several times to shoot panoramic photos over the low country between here and the higher mountains to the north. All that wild country was beckoning me, and hopefully I’ll be able to hike it someday.
Past the trailhead, I began picking my way back down that steep slope of loose rock, and immediately realized it was too dangerous to ever drive in my vehicle. Regardless of ground clearance, if I lost traction and slipped, I was bound to damage something underneath on either a loose rock or a sharp outcrop of bedrock. I don’t want to think about how long it would take to get a tow out here – I might have to pay Matt’s Off-Road Recovery to drive over from southwest Utah, and I’m not confident that even Matt could make it up this road.
But after reaching the Sidekick and bouncing back down the road at little more than walking pace, I began to get better and better views east toward our high mountains. I’d taken a Zyrtec and a pain pill – usually very effective at drying my membranes.
I kept wondering what was triggering my allergy. Both oaks and pines can bloom in spring, and both were all around, stirred up by the fierce wind. I’d had a bad attack in town the other day, but nothing like this.
At home, I had to take a second Zyrtec – not usually recommended – and a second pain pill, but despite running my air purifier on high and flushing my sinuses with the neti pot, I had yet another bad attack within a couple hours. Can’t remember anything like this before!
Monday, April 21st, 2025: Black Hills, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
It’s a remote two-lane blacktop through vast, lonely, dry ranchlands punctuated by stark buttes and small mountain ranges. Most who drive it are commuting to or from the giant mine, isolated on another road that branches off north. Preoccupied with concerns of job and family, with little thought to the barren country they routinely race past.
For humans, this dry country is defined by the river that allows farming on its occasionally broad floodplains. But to shortcut a bend in the river, the highway rises onto a plateau, and near the eastern end of this plateau, the road passes below a distinctive peak surrounded by sheer bastions of rimrock. That peak had always beckoned me, but until now it seemed too short a hike to justify the hour-and-a-half drive.
From the highway, the rimrock looks unclimbable, so I researched it online. As I look for more obscure hiking areas, what I’m finding is that my only predecessors in these overlooked places are the “peakbaggers” – the geeky, competitive subculture that cares more about numbers and life lists than nature, beauty, or even athletic challenge. The number that matters to peakbaggers is topographical prominence: the height of a peak relative to the lowest contour line that completely encircles it. The goal of a peakbagger is to climb the most peaks with the most prominence, verify their ascents, and share them with their community for bragging rights.
The vast majority of peaks don’t have trails to the top, so unlike regular hikers, peakbaggers spend most of their time bushwhacking rather than following trails. But since prominence is their goal rather than elevation or distance, peakbaggers typically avoid wilderness areas within sprawling mountain ranges, where tall peaks are connected by tall ridges, drastically reducing their prominence. So a broad distinction between hikers and peakbaggers is that the former use trails to hike or backpack long distances across varied terrain, while the latter drive to the base of an isolated peak, race up it, log a GPS coordinate, and race back down.
My recent experience reinforces this distinction. Hikers are simply not discovering many of the places I’m hiking these days, because they’re not maintained or known as hiking areas. They lack trail networks. The only people who are hiking them are the peakbaggers.
In this case, their GPS tracks had shown me the route around that sheer rimrock.
Despite being right off the paved highway, this is such an overlooked area that the maps don’t even show the high-clearance 4wd track that accesses the route. It climbs up a shallow outlying ridge and dead-ends at a hilltop clearing. A short distance above I could see a fence traversing the slope toward a ravine that divided me from the rimrock peak, and I started by following that fenceline toward the ravine.
Another clear day, with less wind, and mild temps. Lots of cattle sign, but nothing recent. I love this habitat along the state border, combining species and genera familiar from the Mojave, with Sonoran plants like ocotillo and honey mesquite. And the rocks here have a subtle variety and beauty it’s easy to miss while driving past. In fact, the entire landscape becomes more beautiful the more you focus on the subtle contrasts.
The head of the ravine is a small basin on the back side of the mountain, where minor draws converge from the rimrock above. My route would ascend a hump between two of these draws, punctuated by rock formations that mostly hid the peak I was aiming for.
Like most of our volcanic terrain, it was slow walking, picking my way between sharp rocks, cacti, and yucca, but it wasn’t annoyingly slow, and the weather was perfect. At the head of the hump, I emerged onto a small ledge, and beyond that, the real climb began – up and across the steep slope below the rimrock, toward what I assumed would be a gap through which I could reach the actual peak.
I’d been sick the whole night before with what I’d assumed was food poisoning. I’d felt better in the morning but still wasn’t sure I was up to this climb. I was ready to give up at any point, but I took it slow, and as I rounded the slope, it gradually became clear that the rimrock ended in a sort of cove between here and the peak. The peak itself rose out of the end of the ridge formed by the rimrock.
The gap in the rimrock turned out to be a narrow ramp, and at the top I emerged onto a narrow, juniper-dotted mesa, with the peak at its far end.
The peak, only a couple hundred feet above this mesa, is guarded by bare rock walls, but I could now see what appeared to be a climbable gap. The final slope was the steepest I’d faced yet, but it was lined with cool, spherical rock nodules or concretions, and climbing straight up, before I knew it I had reached the gap and was levering myself over the final boulders to the very top.
This was a real 360 degree peak – not like one of those rounded, forested mountaintops that dominate our larger ranges. The top, an irregular platform of blocky boulders, was roughly 25 by 50 feet, with two separate federal benchmarks, and a sheer drop on all sides except the gap I’d climbed through.
From up there, I really fell in love with the subtle patterns on the landscape: landforms, rock outcrops, bedrock transitions, and vegetation. Impossible to convey in a photograph. I wanted to stay for hours just soaking it all in. But I was trying to regain muscle mass, I’d done three full workouts during the week, and if I left now, my lunch would still be 3 hours late.
My knee must be improving, because despite the steepness I made it back down to the mesa quickly and safely. From there it would be a piece of cake. And not a single cow or bull, as far as the eye could see. This was quickly becoming my favorite short hike in our area!
As usual, on the way back I was paying more attention to the details. The lichen here is fantastic, and the ocotillos more than made up for the early-season lack of wildflowers.
Following the ravine and fenceline back to my vehicle, I took a shortcut that led me across a slope of dense, sharp volcanic cobbles – just enough to keep it from being a walk in the park.
I’d planned this trip assuming I would get a hearty lunch at the cafe in the Mormon farming village on the edge of the floodplain – but it was closed for Easter!
And when I finally got home in late afternoon, and warmed up a batch of leftover Mexican food, I discovered it wasn’t food poisoning after all – I had a case of stomach flu, and would start the week sick, unable to eat, so weak I could barely stand. Gotta take the bad with the good…
