Whites
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.
Monday, October 6th, 2025: Hikes, Red Hill, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
I started out planning to traverse the exposed slope of a spectacular rocky canyon not far from town. But I got a late start, and as I approached the turnoff, I realized doing that hike now would push my lunch back until mid-afternoon. So I decided to keep driving north and have lunch in the alpine village across the Arizona border, then do a hike from the volcanic plateau in the afternoon.
Once the highway entered the mountains, I began to pass big burly pickup trucks, hauling heavy-duty full-length trailers, each carrying a side-by-side 4-seater UTV. One after another after another, dozens of them heading south, to the point where I was laughing hysterically each time I met one on this road where I used to drive a half hour at a time without meeting another vehicle.
All the pickups were different makes and colors – it was no kind of organized convoy – what the hell are these guys doing moving all these UTVs south in the fall? It is hunting season – maybe they live in the south, and are returning from hunts in the north, all at once on Sunday.
But after my long drive north through those dark forested mountains, cresting one pass after another, the village grill turned out to be closed, with no explanation. I could turn back, to less interesting options a half hour down the road. Or I could drive 40 minutes farther up onto the plateau, to the lodge that claims to open at noon but rarely sticks to a schedule.
I decided on the latter – any excuse to visit that plateau. Reaching 9,000 feet, with some aspens flaming red, I began to pass road cyclists struggling through the thin air in their garish skin-tight nylon outfits. A sight I hadn’t seen here before.
More cyclists were waiting on the veranda and inside the lodge, where I was the first diner at 12:15. As usual, the laid-back staff was multi-tasking – taking orders, cooking, cleaning rooms, doing paperwork – but my burger, served a half hour later, met my needs. While waiting and eating, I watched and overheard the cyclists – half young and half my age or older. Some were from Minneapolis – rich doctors, as is common in this expensive pastime. The clacking sound of their cleated shoes on the wood floor preceded them, and when I looked up, the first thing I noticed was that they walked bent sharply forward at the waist like “dunking birds”, from riding bent over for hours on stiff old joints. Impressively, they were making a loop of almost 300 miles and god knows how many thousands of feet in elevation, beginning and ending in Safford, and crossing all those high mountain passes in between. Impressive if you call operating an expensive machine on paved highways an achievement.
The trails along this eastern rim of the plateau all head down into the “lost world” – the broad, wild canyon of a tiny river, a hard-to-reach area known to few outsiders. I’d hiked the upper half of a nearby trail last spring, and wanted to get another taste of this unique habitat.
The trailhead, accessed by a long, meandering track through parklike ponderosa pine forest, was only occupied by a quad bike when I arrived. The trailhead log was such a bizarre jumble of dates that I couldn’t even tell what year they referred to. Air temperature was in the mid-60s in the forest, but I found that walking kept me plenty warm even in shorts. The first half mile emerged into and led gradually upwards through burn scar to the western rim of the big valley at 8,300 feet.
My topo map showed the trail dropping a few hundred feet onto a long east-trending ridge, similar to my previous hike here. I’d previewed it without zooming in, and the landmark where I planned to turn back appeared as a sharp bend south.
As before, the trail started in forest and became rockier and more exposed as it descended onto the ridge. On an open saddle, I had spectacular views up and down the big, wild valley, but I could also see the massive die-off in progress in the ponderosa pine forest, similar to what I’ve seen elsewhere in my corner of the Southwest, new in the past season.
From here the trail followed the ridge top, like a gentle roller-coaster over thin soil and a lot of bare rock. The trail and the “meadows” around were choked with cosmos, my old nemesis – an annual with tiny daisy-like flowers that produces burs that stick to and are carried widely by clothes and animal fur. On my way up one of these gentle rises I suddenly faced a tall, slender man in garish, skin-tight nylon running down the trail toward me.
He stopped and asked me if I’d “seen anything”. I smiled and said I’d only gone a mile so far, and he exclaimed, “Wildlife! Have you seen any wildlife?”
I laughed and said it was mid-afternoon, so the animals were all sleeping. He said he was not familiar with this habitat, he lives in Durango, Colorado. I asked him what kind of wildlife he was expecting, and he said “Oles!”, the way Cockneys pronounce “Holes” without the “H”. There followed a long, frustrating exchange, which ended in him spelling “W – O – L – F” twice before I realized he had the remnants of, perhaps, a German accent, and had trouble with our consonant “W”.
I explained that people here hike all their lives without seeing a wolf, and described the megafauna he did have a chance of spotting – if he ever decided to live here year-round. He said he’d just arrived from the nearest county seat – a tiny village – over in New Mexico, where he’d explored a certain obscure, almost totally unknown creek it had taken me almost 20 years to find on maps, and which I was still only dreaming about exploring. We had an enthusiastic conversation, but it was only later that I regretted not questioning about his travels.
After the first mile the little-used trail mostly disappeared, and I found my route mainly by means of sporadic sawn logs and vague corridors through rocks, cosmos, and brush. Then I came upon an obvious switchback, which had not appeared on the map, where the trail clearly began a steep descent onto a lower ridge marked with a big cairn. I didn’t think I’d gone far enough, and the paper map I had didn’t show enough detail. I descended a few hundred yards, captured my position on GPS, and decided to head back.
Returning, I had all that pine mortality in my face. I’d never seen anything like it. But with my knee brace, hiking uphill was easier, especially on the hated volcanic cobbles.
The sun was setting rapidly – it’s October – and the final descent from the rim to the trailhead seemed to take forever, as I pondered what this solo Germanic trail runner from Colorado was doing, accessing this trail on a “redneck” quad bike. Even less likely, how had he learned about this obscure trail all the way from Colorado, when it had taken me almost 20 years to learn about it from 2-1/2 hours away? And strangest of all, how had he learned about that creek, that only runs a few miles from an extremely remote dirt ranch road, through a box canyon that few have heard of and no one can access without prior arrangement at a remote, obscure Buddhist retreat? Box canyon and creek show up on no guidebooks and virtually no information is available online. Was he confused, talking about something completely different? The bigger the data, the less we know…
Monday, March 23rd, 2026: Grant, Hikes, P Bar, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
On this last day of the March heat wave, the high in town was forecast to hit 88. I’d abused my body the day before, making some long-delayed repairs to my house, so I was starting this hiking day with pain in my foot, knee, back, and shoulder. I was determined to head for high elevations, where it would be cooler, but with most of my body hurting, it would have to be more of a road trip, combining an easy hike with a lunch destination.
I decided to go all the way to the remote lodge isolated at the southeastern corner of Arizona’s 9,000-foot volcanic plateau, where it would be at least 15 degrees cooler. I started late so I would get there shortly after their noon opening hour, but after 2-1/2 hours of driving to that silent, empty meadow in the sky, I was the only customer, and no one responded to my shouts through the kitchen door.
After waiting ten minutes, I went around back, and finally roused the lady who’d served me during my first visit, seven years ago. She said she was willing to make me lunch, but it would take her ten minutes to get the kitchen turned on.
In the end I waited a total of 45 minutes, but there was no place I would rather be, and the burger was excellent as usual. It was closing time when I left, and I remained the day’s only customer.
Lots of trails start near the lodge, but most of them are either steep descents into the river valley on the east, or networks of level trails for cross-country ski use in winter. I decided to take a trail I’d done a very short hike on once before, because it leads across a forested plateau to a “lake” before dropping off toward the deep eastern valley.
From the trailhead, it climbs 300 vertical feet through spruce-aspen forest in long, gentle switchbacks. The plateau forest saw a patchy burn in the 2011 wildfire and is crisscrossed with deadfall, more of which had fallen across the trail since I’d been here last, but I also found a lot of pine and fir seedlings.
The lake, which I hadn’t reached before, appeared to be a natural basin filled with snowmelt. According to my maps, the trail I was on continues for another mile on the plateau, then descends into a long canyon toward the eastern valley. But just past the lake, I found a sign directing me onto a branch trail claiming to lead to the next big canyon to the south. My maps showed this trail dead-ending in a few hundred yards, so I decided to check it out.
Crossing the basin, the branch trail entered a very dark forest, where it began descending into a narrow canyon, eventually emerging into a “moonscape” burn scar where forest had been killed off on all the surrounding slopes.
I wanted to go easy on my knee, but the canyon I started down was “blind” – it made a curve to the right as it descended, and I wanted to get around that curve to see where it went next.
I ended up with a narrow view out this canyon and over the big eastern valley, to the skyline of the mountains on the other side, 15 miles away. I figured I’d gone at least two miles, and it was getting cloudier and cooler – the perfect time to head back.
The trail I’d ended up on is one of half a dozen routes from the alpine plateau to the river. The longest drops almost 5,000 feet in over 14 miles. It would be cool to park at the bottom, climb to the top, spend the night at the lodge, then descend the next day, maybe by a different route. But from my house, it takes three hours to drive to the bottom of that remote valley – considerably longer than to drive all the way around it to the lodge!
After driving 2-1/2 hours to the alpine plateau and the remote lodge, then spending almost two hours at lunch, plus another three hours of hiking, I wasn’t excited about driving the 2-1/2 hours back home that night. Instead, I stopped at the motel in the county seat north of us, blissed out on pain meds, warmed a can of chili in the microwave, listened to music on my boombox, and finished reading a book.
