Chiricahuas
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!
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.
