Southeast Arizona
Monday, April 28th, 2025: Chiricahuas, Greenhouse, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
Over to Arizona again, this time to climb the first couple miles of my favorite long hike in the range of canyons. Clear skies, temps in the mid-70s, and bone dry everywhere.
There’s a 1.5 mile forest road leading to the trailhead. Most people park at the entrance and walk, because the road is completely lined with big loose rocks that would likely destroy their vehicles.
The road is gated to keep cattle out of the wilderness, but some fool – probably an ignorant city dweller – had left it open. Because I wanted to hike the trail not the road, I drove all the way to the trailhead, at less than 5 mph over those rocks.
Again, it recalled my long-standing ride quality quandary. Shortly after buying this vehicle, on a 2019 camping and hiking trip with a friend, I’d literally become a nervous wreck trying to keep up with his new Toyota FJ on rocky backcountry roads. He rocketed ahead of me going 45-50 mph, while I was getting shaken to pieces doing 12 mph.
I ended up spending $1,000 on new shocks, with no change to the ride. Eventually, I did this entire suspension upgrade, and now, if anything, it rides even rougher.
After buying a pair of noise-canceling headphones, I learned that what stresses me out is not the ride, but the noise of the vehicle slamming or rattling like a machine gun over every tiny imperfection in the surface.
And after scouring the forums for this popular vehicle, I’ve concluded that ride quality is complex and highly subjective. Some people say this vehicle rides rough, while others with the same model claim it’s not a problem.
Eventually, I recalled field trips I made back in the 90s and early 00s with a scientist friend who drove old trucks owned by the Department of Fish and Game. Off the highway, he used to drive the rest of us nuts by never exceeding 15 mph – he said he was extending the life of the vehicle by reducing wear on the suspension. Conclusion: there’s no objective standard for ride quality, nor is there a proper speed for driving rough roads.
The trail starts out climbing the upper valley of a creek, through pine forest burned at low intensity in the 2011 wildfire. I found old cattle sign here, unfortunately showing that the gate had been open for weeks, if not months. Cattle were likely all over the wilderness by now and would be impossible to eradicate.
A half mile into the wilderness, the trail begins switchbacking up to the dry waterfall, which is over the ridge at my left, in the next drainage south. With my bad knee, I hadn’t been able to hike this trail in over a year, but someone had cleared it since the last monsoon. I did find stretches of trail, and nearby ground, that had been turned over by an animal looking for insect larvae, and since I found no bear sign, concluded it must’ve been coatis.
Surprisingly, there remained an algae-choked trickle of water over the falls.
One attraction of this climb is the views it reveals over the inner basin of the mountains. The next stage, the climb to a saddle overlooking the upper, hanging canyon of the creek, involves a series of short, steep switchbacks, each one with a better view.
At the top, my hat was blown off by a torrent of wind down the hanging canyon. It would’ve been a great place to hang out otherwise. But it was past noon and I was getting hungry – part of the plan was to get a late lunch in the cafe at the entrance to the mountains.
After descending all the switchbacks into the final creek valley, I came upon a hiker just starting up the trail. He said he’s from Alaska – a snowbird – and lives here seasonally. We discussed my knees, the weather, and the drought, and he asked me about the condition of the Emory oaks, which I hadn’t really focused on.
On the drive out, I noticed the leaves on the oaks were mostly dead. Unlike most deciduous trees, Emory oaks drop and regrow their leaves in late winter and early spring. I’d noticed them changing but hadn’t looked for drought effects.
In the desert, I’m used to the foliage of shrubs drying up as a reaction to extreme drought. What freaks humans out is seldom a disaster for resilient wildlife and habitats.
I avidly attacked an excellent burger in the cafe, but I’d just gotten over a week-long bacterial infection and my stomach wasn’t prepared. By the time I started the drive home I had terrible stomach cramps that lasted for hours.
Then on the drive north to the dry lake, I entered a dust storm. The interstate remained open to the turnoff for my hometown, but it was closed past there, so on the final leg of my drive, climbing into the mountains, I was joined by an endless parade of big rigs and city drivers, all of whom were angry at being detoured hours out of their way. The only thing that kept me relatively calm was the pain meds I’d taken for knee and shoulder.
Monday, May 5th, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Monument, Nature, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
Not sure what it is that keeps making me want to venture far afield these days. I’m gradually increasing the distance and elevation of my Sunday hikes, but there are plenty of those near town.
The hikes take up less than half a day, so I spend more time driving than hiking. But I don’t mind the highway drives – they clear my head and allow my thoughts to wander freely.
I usually plan to grab an after-hike meal at some acceptable cafe near the destination. Since I get tired of cooking for myself, that’s an incentive in itself. But the main attraction may just be to escape from the stress that can overwhelm me at home. Driving two hours away seems like a mini-vacation.
For this Sunday, I picked an area based on a Mexican restaurant, then studied the map for nearby hikes. The most convenient was a small trail network in a National Historic Site that preserves the ruins of a pioneer-era fort. It’s hidden in foothills between two mountain ranges – the big one I hiked last week, and a much smaller one I’ve wanted to hike but can’t because most of it’s fenced and gated behind private land.
The access road continues over a pass toward my second option, a National Monument on the west side of the big mountain range. In almost 20 years, I’d never explored either of these places – they’d been just too far for my typical all-day hike. The Historic Site turned out to feature some pretty mid-elevation Sonoran habitat, but the trails didn’t look as attractive as what I expected in the Monument, so I filed this area away for future reference and kept driving over the pass.
The country on the southwest side of the pass is rich-looking high-desert rangeland around 5,000 feet in elevation. It feels protected by the mountains to north and east, and remote, although the Monument is served by a roughly paved two-lane highway.
Halfway there I saw an isolated grove of tall conifers just off the highway. I immediately knew it was a cemetery – white colonists of European ancestry identify evergreens with eternal life, and will plant them if suitable habitat is not available. These trees appeared to be Arizona cypress, relocated outside their natural montane habitat. The sight evoked a wave of youthful memories; high school lovers are attracted to cemeteries for both privacy and the romantic pastoral setting, and the first night I spent with my high school sweetheart was in a tiny hilltop cemetery far out in the country, under a grove of pines much like this. Guess you could call us proto-Goths.
Back home, I actually found a web page about this cemetery, which belongs to a ranching family that has been prominent here since pioneer days. Two children of the founder were the first buried there, in 1885.
It’s a small Monument, roughly five miles square, encompassing some of the spectacular rock formations on the west side of the range. I normally avoid National Park Service properties, disagreeing with Ken Burns and the whole “American’s Best Idea” philosophy. The NPS view is that nature is best developed and managed for tourism, but the habitats they manage were actually stolen from native people who used them for subsistence in harmony with native ecosystems.
The tourists who visit national parks subsist on anonymous commodity food and other resources from distant habitats that have been destroyed by industrial agriculture. So National Parks are an integral part of the industrial society that destroys natural habitats and enriches elites.
Another reason I avoid NPS properties is the crowds. I normally encounter other hikers on roughly one out of ten hikes, but today I passed ten other hikers in less than half a day. And this is a remote Monument with much less traffic than most.
The weather was perfect – temps fluctuating between the 70s and 60s, depending on cloud cover and wind, which increased throughout the day.
Getting a late start, I took the first available trail, which started up a canyon bottom through the shade of a riparian forest of tall ponderosa pines, Arizona cypress, and big oaks – white or Emory. Unlike the narrow, overgrown, often abandoned trails I normally hike, this was a wide, laboriously built and heavily trafficked tourist trail. It soon climbed above the canyon bottom and I got my first views of the famous rock formations atop the opposite slope.
After a mile and a half I came to a junction with a branch that headed toward a side canyon. As developed as the first trail had been, this junction was even more impressive, with trail signs in massive stone foundations and dry-stone steps and retaining walls leading up the new trail. Frequent park visitors take features like this for granted, but to me they speak strongly of imperial power and entitlement, like the pyramids of Egypt and Central America. I assumed they had been built by the young men of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
Turning into the side canyon, the trail took me directly under spectacular rock formations that were often obscured by forest.
In less than a mile, the trail crossed the head of the canyon and began to climb switchbacks toward the crest. And approaching the crest, the trail became a series of stone steps, constructed with enormous effort by those young men, a hundred years ago. The final climb through the rimrock formations was like something out of the Lord of the Rings movies.
Storm clouds were rapidly covering the sky, and I had to pull on my shell in the sudden cold.
The trail topped out on a rolling plateau where fanciful outcrops rose sporadically out of pine and oak forest. I figured I’d gone about three miles, which, doubled, would be the maximum I wanted to put on my recovering knee – so I turned back, hoping for rain along the way.
As usual, I was paying more attention to my immediate surroundings on the way back. I realized that this would be a perfect place to drop acid – one of the two best I’ve ever seen, along with Arches in Utah.
I noticed how bedrock features had been used or even reshaped by trail builders, and marveled at long drystone retaining walls that had been built below steep sections. Crossing a talus slope, I estimated that many of the stones that had been moved and meticulously placed weighed over three hundred pounds. That long-ago CCC effort was truly like the building of the pyramids! As a kid, I’d taken park features like this for granted, but now I could only see them as reflections of imperial might, the will of the nation imposed on the landscape “for all time”.
I prefer to live lightly on the land, hoping to “leave no trace”.
The final group of fellow hikers that I passed was a family of three with a dog – on leash. Reviewing the NPS trail guide later, I noticed that dogs are not allowed on this trail. That family was training their preteen son to disregard both laws and the common good. Best to start them early, I guess.
On the drive to town for my Mexican meal, I could see rain falling over the pass, and ahead, dust storms had been stirred up by high wind. My little vehicle, taller now with the suspension lift, was hard to keep on the road.
It was even harder crossing the playa the next day, when the wind suddenly carried a dust storm across the freeway, briefly eliminating visibility and driving some vehicles off onto the shoulder. By the time I reached town, I had just missed our first rain in months.
Monday, May 19th, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Nature, Plants, Snowshed, Southeast Arizona.
Gradually increasing my distance and elevation, the challenge was finding a hike with the right combination, plus a destination that made it interesting. For this Sunday, I picked a steep hike to a “pine park” – a shallow, grassy basin in the sky surrounded by tall ponderosa pines. This destination had the added bonus of a short extension into the next watershed, overlooking a spectacular canyon.
It’s a two-hour drive, and along the way, I found the desert willows were blooming beside the big arroyos.
Over the years, I’ve gradually become more sensitive to species differences in the trees I hike past, and curious about their names. I’d picked up a field guide to trees a few weeks ago, and brought it along. It turns out I didn’t have the time to stop and identify trees along the trail, so I photographed their identifying features, and made the identifications from the photos later, at home.
Dangerous winds had been forecast all over the region, and my hat blew off as soon as I got out of the vehicle. The trail begins in a sycamore-shaded canyon bottom, bores through a long tunnel of scrub, then climbs steep switchbacks on loose rocks past alligator junipers and various oaks and pines.
At the base of a talus slope. the switchbacks end and the trail begins a steep traverse across the upper slopes of the watershed, through mixed conifer forest that now includes Douglas-fir. Eventually it joins another trail that leads through giant boulders to the pine park. Considering how parched the land is now, I was surprised to find wildflowers at the entrance to the park, in a narrow corridor lined with aspen seedlings.
I continued into the next watershed for the big view. Wind was howling through, so this lofty perch was no place to linger.
I rested in the relatively protected pine park for a half hour or so. But I was hungry, the hike was taking longer than expected due to the steep climb, and my lunch was waiting at the cafe below.
On the way up, I’d been surprised to see no tracks – either of humans or animals – on this well-known trail. But I had seen horse sign from last year, and on the way down, I noticed how the horses had damaged the trail, destroying tread on traverses of steep slopes.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2025: Hikes, Horse Ridge, Nature, Southeast Arizona, Whites, Wildfire.
On the eve of my birthday, driving north to some old favorite country I hadn’t seen in almost two years. Alpine habitat that would be cooler now that our weather at home is finally seasonably hot. An escape from problems at home.
Needing a hike, planning another steep descent – this time into the remote, rugged, lonely country around a small river, a region that keeps drawing me. Passed roadside javelinas in their usual spot, a lone yearling doe on the shoulder, then in the high country of tall ponderosa, dark Doug-fir, grassy meadows and bright aspen, two dozen cow elk grazing in a likewise familiar roadside place. When you inhabit a wild landscape for almost a generation, you’re gifted with wisdom in the form of nature’s patterns.
Finding the trailhead unoccupied and the trailhead log unused since last fall, I set out on a trail invisible under a layer of pine needles. Woodpeckers cried and darted through the trees ahead. In openings in the pines the dirt of the trail showed the bootprints of one recent hiker, bigger than me, wearing fairly new boots. The trail climbed in and out of the burn scar of the 2011 megafire, gaining 400 vertical feet to a saddle where I suddenly crossed to the watershed of the remote river.
The sky had been cloudless during the drive north, but here in the mountains scattered clouds were forming. The other hiker’s tracks stopped at the saddle, so my trail was virgin ahead. Birdsong provided my soundtrack as I traversed down from 8,500 feet on a steep, rocky trail, first flushing a swallowtail butterfly out of the brush, then coming upon bigger and bigger patches of wildflowers and more pollinators. In a drought, the higher elevations always host pockets of fertility.
It was windy over here and I had to cinch my hat down – the dropoff was precipitous. At a patch of bare white bedrock, I saw a little saddle below me and realized I was at the head of the ridge the trail would descend. Descending it through forest that began to host pinyon and alligator juniper, I got my first views of the long, narrow ridge below – named for a horse, it did look like a horse’s back, ending in neck and head.
During the descent, I’d had a higher ridge, in shadow, at my right, but suddenly I reached a point where I could see past it, southwestward, to a towering, distinctive rock formation. And trying to get pictures of it with clouds in the background, I rediscovered clouds, which had been missing from my desperately dry region since last summer.
Clouds are the source of rain – not El Nino or the other global meteorological phenomena favored by scientists and TV weather people. Clouds are sacred beings we ignore at our peril. Here, their shade cooled me after stretches of exposure to sunlight.
And reaching the more level lower part of the ridge, I was continuously exposed, crossing big exposures of the fractured bedrock – volcanic comglomerate – I’d seen recently, east of this broad, rumpled valley. Here I found abundant but old sign of cattle, horses, and elk. And hazardous footing on occasional slopes of loose rock.
The bare rock ridge narrowed to just a few yards at a low saddle. Climbing past it, I noticed smaller birds – ravens? – harrying a hawk ahead. I’d stopped a lot and was worried about reaching my lodging for the night before closing time, so I stopped short of where I’d planned to turn back. Just at the base of the rise that formed the top of the horse’s head. I didn’t mind stopping – this had been a spectacular hike in spectacular weather. It’d taken me two hours and fifteen minutes to go just under three miles, downhill.
I spent even more time in the shade on the way back, and the wind was rising, too. I wasn’t looking forward to the ascent, but it turned out to be fine, taking less time than the descent.
I’d reserved a room within the burn area of a large wildfire that had only been controlled within the past week, so I was anxious to see the damage. They’d stopped it precisely at the highway, and from what I could see it appeared to be a low-intensity surface fire.
Both elk and mule deer were out in the riparian meadows that evening. I wondered what had happened to the bighorn sheep whose habitat is totally within the burn area – presumably they’d sheltered in the river canyon, below its walls of sheer basalt.
Friday, August 22nd, 2025: Baldy, Hikes, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
My doctor had unlocked the knee-immobilizer brace three weeks ago, recommending I take it easy for a couple weeks, then start doing occasional short hikes. But I re-injured it somehow a week later and iced it for another week. And now, on this road trip, with one of my favorite trails nearby, I decided to finally try it out.
It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful hike anywhere. There are two routes to the peak, converging up neighboring canyons, with a “crossover” trail between them at bottom. I’ve been hiking parts of it for many years. Four years ago I finally did the full 18-mile loop, at the peak of a wet monsoon, finding a hallucinatory diversity of fungi. And two years ago I hiked the best part of it in snow, which if anything made it even more spectacular.
But today I could only do the first mile, and I was hoping that would get me to a view of the unique, iconic sandstone formations up on the ridge.
This is the most popular trail on the plateau, and even on a weekday the parking lot was nearly full. But everyone was spread out and I was alone almost all of the time. I did meet a man my age on the way back, starting a final hike before surgery.
Halfway in, the trail leaves the tiny river and begins climbing. To protect my knee, I followed an informal trail that led directly up the valley toward the interior meadows. It was these meadows that finally freed my mind of the anxiety that had driven me here. I was at peace, just looking and breathing, if only temporarily.
