Regions
Friday, November 29th, 2024: 2019 Trips, 2024 Trips, Gila, Regions, Road Trips.
I found myself alone again on Thanksgiving. Last year I was lucky enough to be invited over by neighbors. But it’s been eight years since I was able to spend the holiday with family, and 16 years since I was last invited to spend it with friends. So despite many memories of convivial Thanksgivings in the past, it’s become a lonely day I no longer look forward to.
But I’d been shut up in the house, sick, for the past ten days, and I just had to get away. In a few days, I expected to be moving back east, for weeks or even months. Saying goodbye to my beloved wild mountains, to live in a place that’s flat as far as the eye can see, in the midst of a vast city surrounded by plowed fields.
So I headed north, hoping to find access to a couple of hikes I’ve been dreaming about. I can no longer hike, and travel means I can’t recover from my knee injury, but at least I can dream.
The next couple of days were forecast to be cool and cloudy, and clouds gathered and dissipated above me as I drove north.
The first hike I wanted to check out climbs a 9,800 foot peak 14 miles east of the village where I was staying. This is one of many peaks of roughly 10,000 foot elevation that rise at random from the very remote high country at the north end of our national forest. This peak features a fire lookout accessible from the north via a long and winding dirt road, but the ascent via trail, from the west, would total 15.4 miles out-and-back, with 4,000 feet of elevation gain. If I ever recover from my knee injury, that would be perfect.
I’d tried to reach the trailhead last winter, but was stopped by an icy road. The backcountry dirt road, serving remote ranches, descends into a broad sandy wash, then climbs steeply over a low saddle forested with juniper and pinyon. Today the surfaces were dry and cold, and on the other side of the saddle, I discovered a spectacular new world.
This new world is the canyon of a tiny river with a romantic name. The map had made me curious, but the reality exceeded expectations. This turned out to be one of the prettiest river canyons in our area – adding to the myriad reasons why I love living where I do. Even after 18 years, I can still drive a couple hours and be surprised, and I’ve only scratched the surface.
After continuing up the canyon and across the river, the road climbs more than a thousand feet up the opposite side, to a beautiful plateau forested with ponderosa pine. Driving up the plateau, I got occasional glimpses through the trees of the mountain above with its dusting of snow. This is a classic conical mountain with ridges and canyons fanning out on all sides. Eventually the road dropped into a shallow canyon that separated the plateau from the slopes of the mountain. According to my map, I would soon hit a side road leading to the trailhead.
The side road I found had a barbed wire gate made with tree branches and was clearly seldom used. The map gives this trail a number, and an online search leads to a Forest Service trailhead page, but there’s absolutely no other information online, which is what I prefer. Closing the gate behind me, I drove across a steep slope into a narrow canyon under big ponderosas, reaching the next turnoff in a few hundred yards. This led up a steep grade on a very rough and rocky track. The track continued over the crest of a ridge, but I parked at the top, figuring the trailhead was only a few hundred yards farther.
I was wrong. I ended up walking almost a half mile down into a canyon in near-freezing temperatures, wearing only a light sweater, while still trying to get over my lingering cold. The road was so rocky it was questionable if I could have driven it, and I never did reach the trailhead. The walk out and back, less than a mile, hurt my knee so bad that I would have trouble standing, sitting, or using stairs for days. But at least I got a feel for the country – as wild as I’ve ever seen.
That river canyon was definitely the highlight of my morning exploration, and the clouds and shadows made it even more beautiful on the drive back. I will return!
After lunch in my room, I set out to find another trail I’d been unable to reach last winter – this time, about ten miles west of the village. This is a trail that forms the top bar of a “T”, with another trail I hiked a couple years ago coming up from the south to form the stem. That earlier hike was 15.5 miles out-and-back, and the stem of the T had been abandoned for so long it became my greatest routefinding challenge ever.
But the landscape around the remote junction had been really pretty, so I’d always dreamed about hiking the bar of the T. It’s an east-to-west traverse across the southern slope of another 9,800 foot peak that has dense fir-and-aspen forest on top. The trail starts at 6,600 feet in the east and ends at 8,000 feet on the peak road in the west, traversing 11.2 miles with almost 5,000 feet of elevation gain in the process, so it’s a little too far for an out-and-back day hike.
But today’s challenge turned out to be the approach road. This is a dirt road that gets very muddy after any precipitation. There are actually two parallel roads that start at the same place on the highway, separate, then rejoin 3 miles later. I took the left-hand road that climbs a low ridge, figuring I might return on the other road. The left-hand road turned out to be one of the two gnarliest back roads I’ve ever driven in this area, at the very limit of what my 4wd Sidekick can currently handle. Big trucks had driven it in the mud, digging holes up to a foot deep, and the rocky part really had me worried since my tires are nearly bald.
On my way up the ridge, I spooked a half dozen deer, then immediately after that, 8 or 10 elk crossed in the opposite direction, and finally, another half dozen deer crossed back, farther ahead. It was like one of those documentaries about the Serengeti!
But I made it to the trailhead, such as it was (no sign or kiosk), and now I know it’s reachable. It just takes forever to get there – 45 minutes to go 4.5 miles on that dirt road.
The old road continued past the clearing where I parked, but had been thoroughly washed out. I climbed across the washout and continued on the old road, a few hundred yards to where the trail proper starts. I still want to hike it some day.
I can’t overemphasize how remote this country is. It’s all cattle country, but it shows how much natural beauty and ecological diversity can survive when the cattle outnumber the human visitors. That’s why I ended up in this area instead of other places I looked at, like the Eastern Sierra, Flagstaff, Prescott, or Santa Fe. Wild habitat is far more important to me than urban amenities, but I seem to have found the best mix of both available anywhere in the Southwestern U.S.
I tried the other road on the way back, and barely made it. At the halfway point, the other road plunges down the bank of a 20-foot-deep creekbed, which would definitely wash out in our monsoon. Just as I prepared to drive down that bank, a big redtail hawk launched off a branch at my right and flew left down the creekbed carrying an adult Abert’s squirrel suspended from its claws. Second time I’ve come upon a hawk carrying a squirrel.
And on the drive back to the village, the sky created the perfect ending for my day of exploration!
Sunday, June 1st, 2025: 2025 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
Turns out my knee problem was misdiagnosed, last summer, as merely inflammation – a closer look at the MRI shows an actual tear in the tendon that’s never been allowed to heal. My only chance of healing is to wear a knee immobilizer brace for at least three months, and give up hiking for six months.
I already gave up hiking for six months, from fall through winter, while I was traveling. But wearing this brace is going to be harder. I’m still partly in denial, partly in shock. I don’t even want to imagine what it’s going to be like.
I asked the doc what about driving, and he said I could take it off, since driving mostly uses the ankles. So I did another road trip, over to the magical “pine park” in the sky that I discovered last summer. This is a lush meadow right below the 9,000 foot crest of the range, accessed via a very rocky track, surrounded by tall pines and Doug-fir. It’s a dark place at the foot of a dramatic peak, and I hadn’t really explored it last summer. I guessed there had been a campground below the meadow that was abandoned after the big wildfire in 2011. I’d seen rough tracks leading from the meadow down into the darkness of the forest, but those tracks looked too sketchy for my vehicle at the time.
Now, with my lifted suspension, I started following one of the tracks down into the darkness, and immediately came upon some cast-concrete picnic tables and the foundations of cabins. The farther I went, the more of these I glimpsed through the trees, farther down the dark slope. Apparently, before the campground, there had been something like a scout camp up here, with a dozen or so cabins.
There turned out to be a network of dirt tracks winding among the tall conifers, leading to more and more campsites. Two or three had been used in recent years, but none had been used much, because the vast majority of campers here use trailers, and there’s no way you could get a camping trailer down to the park now. Some of the campsites had been buried under deadfall. It felt like I’d stumbled upon the ruins of a lost civilization of campers – both spooky and idyllic.
At the farthest end of the old campground, I found myself driving up a rise, and came to a dead end in a little clearing on a knoll. I had a spectacular view of the west side of the crest, darkening under a rain cloud that was moving up from the south. As I was taking photos, sparse raindrops began to fall.
I’m only now discovering how rugged the west side of this range is. It gets few visitors compared to the more easily accessible east side. There’s an old network of trails, but they’re all abandoned and blocked by deadfall and regrowth. Of course, that makes the whole area really attractive to me – if I’m ever able to hike again.
Above the tall trees, I’d glimpsed the south slope of the peak above the park – rimrock at the top and a broad talus slope below – but to get a full view of it I needed to pull on the brace and carefully traverse a grassy slope over deadfall and embedded rocks. I almost lost my balance a couple times, but it was worth it.
Unable to hike, I still need to get out into nature. So expect a lot of road trips for the rest of the year.
The rain was just a brief tease, as usual this time of year. But the clouds on the way back down from the crest remained spectacular.
I had a burrito in the cafe as usual, and on the way back, stopped in the pass guarded by granite cliffs and boulders.
Sunday, June 15th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Since 2020, when we lost our local restaurants to COVID, I’ve been preparing all my meals at home. Imagine that, you city folks. Imagine being single and actually preparing every damn meal, every day. Yes, I can do it, and do it healthy. But although I now walk with one knee immobilized, and can’t hike, doc says I can still drive. So I try to get away on Sundays to someplace with both wild nature and a decent restaurant. One restaurant meal a week, prepared by somebody other than me, seems like a huge luxury.
This Sunday I learned that a cafe I like over in Arizona would close on Monday for lengthy renovation. It was forecast to be our hottest day yet, the air conditioning in my 30-year-old Japanese vehicle struggles to keep up, and the destination is lower elevation and would be hotter than home. But I was desperate, and driving our lonely highways helps clear my mind.
When I arrived, setting my watch back an hour, I discovered that all the indoor seating was taken – for the first time ever – so I had to sit outside, where it was nearing 100 degrees and a sycamore offered only spotty shade.
But they had a special brunch menu, and I ordered grilled trout with scrambled eggs and a regional IPA, at about half the price you’d pay in the city. The Canadian Grand Prix was just starting – a guilty pleasure – and I followed it on my iPad via the cafe’s sluggish wifi. Still hungry and wanting to hang out till the end of the race, I next ordered pancakes and an espresso.
Expecting the heat, I’d brought my old Yucatan hammock, and after the extended brunch, I drove up the canyon, nearly empty of tourists during summer, to a secret place, tucked away on a dead-end forest road too rocky for cars. I strung up the hammock in the sometime shade of a cloud and spent a couple hours reading, sweating, and drinking ice water I’d prepared at home and carried in my ancient mini-cooler.
Most of the southeast corner of Arizona lacks cell phone coverage, but as I drove away from the mountains, I began to get text messages on my flip phone from our electric utility. An outage had begun at my address at 2 pm and power was initially predicted to be restored after 5, possibly before my return. I wondered if I would lose the precious leftovers I had stored in the freezer. The closer I got to home, the more texts I received, delaying the resumption of service. No problem – I’m always prepared for camping, and I had canned chili and soup I could warm up on the old gas range without opening the fridge.
I was more concerned about the wildfire. It had started Friday in habitat I hike regularly, fifteen miles north of home, and by this morning it had grown over 12,000 acres, with zero containment. Nearing town, I could see the smoke obscuring most of the range just north of town.
Two blocks from my house, I passed the utility crews, blocking a side street with crane trucks and repairmen hard at work atop two power poles. Confirming my power was still out, I walked next door to check on my older neighbor.
In homage to Cormac McCarthy’s epic Western novel Blood Meridian, I call my neighbor The Judge – he retired a few years ago from a popular judicial career in the state of Texas. Similar to McCarthy’s judge, my neighbor is a large, nearly bald man, but the only other shared characteristic is his encyclopedic knowledge and storytelling acumen. In fact, people like my neighbor have shown me where McCarthy got many of the characters in his Western novels. Rural Texas and New Mexico really are full of eccentric, erudite, and interminable storytellers.
The Judge’s house was hotter than mine, and as we sweated and discussed the power outage, he recalled an episode featuring his former El Paso neighbor, a recent immigrant from Mexico. At home one hot summer day, the power had gone out, and with air conditioning disabled, everyone in the neighborhood escaped outdoors with cans of cold beer while crews worked to replace a blown transformer.
As soon as power was restored, the neighbor’s house began to pop and crackle, with lights flashing on and off, and the new transformer was quickly fried. It turned out the neighbor had hired an electrician from across the river in Juarez, and none of his house had been wired in compliance with the North American electrical code.
The El Paso neighbor was partners with his brother in a chain of botanicas north of the border. The brother, profiting from the superstitions of his fellow immigrants, became rich enough to buy a big ranch in Mexico and stock it with exotic wildlife from Africa.
The brother bred horses as food for his African cats, and one day, he drove out on the range, forgetting there was a leg of horsemeat in the back seat of his convertible. A lion smelled it, tore through the car’s soft top, and proceeded to eat the hacendado.
The Judge assured me he initially deemed this a tall tale, but was surprised to confirm it later on Wikipedia. Anyone wondering what inspired the cheetah scene in McCarthy’s movie The Counselor might likewise be surprised to learn that the truth is both stranger and more satisfying than Cormac’s fiction.
I returned next door to shower off the day’s sweat, but before turning on the water, I heard my fridge powering on – electricity had been restored. After my modem completed its lengthy startup procedure, I checked the satellite data on CalTopo, and saw that the fire had reached the eastern highway, with a hot spot on the far side. This would give it access to the vast Black Range, which had already lost most of its forest in two mega-wildfires since I moved here. Old burn scars can provide plenty of fuel for new fires.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2025: 2025 Trips, Gila, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Wildfire.
Yes, I realize that on the national and global scale, the news is terrifying. But in remote southwest New Mexico, we have worries that may never make the national, let alone the global, news – and we hope to keep it that way.
During the nineteen years I’ve lived here, we’ve had three large wildfires in the mountains just north of town, which rise to 9,000 feet in elevation and are covered with mixed conifer forest dominated by ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir. Strangely, the fires have been separated by exactly five years: in 2015, 2020, and now 2025. Each fire has started within fifteen miles of my home, growing to consume habitat I hike regularly, destroying places that are special to me.
But the fire that started just over a week ago has become by far the biggest – and in fact, the most dangerous in the entire country during this period. Firefighters and equipment have been moved in from all over the U.S. Thousands of people have been evacuated from nearby rural communities. In town, we’ve watched the apocalyptic smoke column towering above our skyline, the helicopters and jet tankers shuttling back and forth from the Forest Service fire station at our county airport. Our phones have buzzed with evacuation alerts, and the latest evacuation zone was created only two miles from my mom’s assisted living facility. The fire’s most active front is burning toward town in fire-adapted forest that has never burned within historic times, and is currently the driest vegetation in the U.S.
Calling my mom’s privately-owned facility to ask about their evacuation plan, I was told by the owner that they don’t have one – families are responsible for moving their loved ones to safety. Slowed by my knee-immobilizer brace, I made a rough inventory of valuables in my house, and shifted empty boxes up from the basement to carry irreplaceable documents and artwork.
With the “incident team” growing to over 1,400 people, the fire still showed zero containment after the first week. But on Friday, they finally claimed 11 percent containment, and the incident commander said that they’d bulldozed lines around the entire perimeter and were planning to restore power and begin allowing some of the evacuated back to their homes. They described a huge effort to protect structures throughout the vast area, and continued to claim that no structures had been damaged.
Friday afternoon, I drove my mom to the edge of town to see the smoke column. I figured, and hoped, that she might never have the chance to see something like this again. I wouldn’t have considered showing it to her a few weeks earlier, but her chronic anxiety has subsided, and she appreciated the opportunity to experience this awesome vision of nature’s power.
Throughout the week, I followed the fire’s advance online – hour by hour – via several apps, discussed it with neighbors, and attended community meetings. By the following weekend, the danger was reduced, but the fire was now burning through some of my favorite places, destroying more of our last remaining old-growth alpine habitat. I was a wreck.
There was a place northwest of town where I’d always wanted to picnic or camp, a ledge in ponderosa forest atop a ridge a thousand feet tall, overlooking the north end of our wilderness. I’d just learned that a brew pub had recently opened in the village nearby. Unlike the two existing restaurants, it stayed open Sunday evenings, and I wanted to check it out.
I arrived at noon and was the third customer. The owner, a big bearded guy, latched on to me and told me his story. I was shocked to discover he had ten beers on tap, but only one was an ale. Every other craft beer joint – and I’ve been in hundreds – carries an equal number of ales and lagers. His explanation was that he’s burnt out on ales, implying that what the customers want is irrelevant.
But it got worse. He said his menu consists of Italian dishes – rather than pub favorites or Mexican food (which the village lacks and needs). Not because he’s Italian (he’s not), but because nobody else here serves Italian food. Such is colonial culture on Turtle Island.
I had a salad, it was bland, and with no ales on offer, I won’t be returning.
My destination is a short drive up a dirt forest road from a pass on a remote stretch of highway – there’s no signage, and even after studying the map you’d never know it was there. With a high of 85 in town, up there at 8,300 feet it was in the 70s and breezy.
I unfolded my camp chair in a patch of shade on the rim and drank ice water out of my mini-cooler for a couple of hours. With the aid of field glasses and a BLM topo map, I challenged myself to identify all the peaks on the horizon, while admiring the occasional passing butterfly.
On the drive back, I mentally compared the pub owner with a motel owner in an alpine resort an hour further northwest. She runs scent diffusers in all the rooms, despite visitor complaints, because she likes the smell and doesn’t care what customers want. This is what you get off the beaten path – eccentrically selfish business owners.
I wasn’t looking forward to the return to town, where I would get the day’s first view of the current fire. It’s burning down an outlying finger of the crest of the range, about nine miles from the center of town now and still approaching. The forest ahead of it is what I was describing earlier – unburned in historical memory, and drier than anyplace else in the U.S. It’s also roadless, so it can only be fought with air drops, which are only marginally effective.
We’re expecting monsoon rain this week, but thunderstorms include outflow winds which could push the fire in new directions.
Monday, July 7th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Rocks, Sky Islands.
Two months ago I visited this national monument to hike. Today I came just to drive around and look, and hopefully find someplace in the shade to string my hammock. Our monsoon started early, a couple of weeks ago, but as the old timers predict, a monsoon that starts early is likely to fizzle out. So we’re back to scattered, teasing clouds and hot days.
The high was forecast to be 90 at home, and the monument ranges from nearly a thousand feet lower to nearly a thousand feet higher. In my experience, public lands include lots of informal places to pull off the road and hang out, and the official map shows three picnic areas at the monument’s highest elevations, where I would surely find trees and shade.
The paved highway to the monument sees only sparse traffic, is laid out like a rollercoaster, and is minimally maintained, so that if you drive at the posted speed limit of 65 mph, you’re likely to be pitched off violently by one of many crudely patched potholes. Fine with me – helps to keep the riffraff out of this beautiful landscape.
As before, the gatehouse at the monument’s entrance was unoccupied, so admission was free. This is one of the smaller holdings in the National Park Service empire, encompassing two short canyons lined with a bewildering, seemingly infinite profusion of rock cliffs and towers. From the old stone Visitor Center at the confluence of the canyons, the narrow paved road leads up the northern canyon under some of the most spectacular rock formations on earth.
Surprisingly, there are only three or four widely-separated turnoffs, each is only big enough for one vehicle, and all are overhung by sycamores or Arizona cypress, so none of them offers a view of the rock formations. But I did enjoy the familiar dark, somber quality of dense, pure cypress stands in the upper canyon.
After less than three miles of this, the road suddenly crosses into the next watershed, and begins climbing to the crest through an old, high-intensity burn scar with expansive views east – which you can’t really enjoy because there’s a sheer drop-off and no places to pull off the road.
And suddenly you’re at the monument’s 6,900-foot crest – which itself tops out 3,000 feet below the crest of the range, which you can barely glimpse, five miles away to the south. From here, a small network of crest roads leads to the three picnic areas. Each features a single picnic table, surrounded by parking for up to twenty vehicles. Strange.
There are wind-stunted trees, but virtually no level ground. No one was using the single picnic tables, but I could find no secluded place to string my hammock. I stopped first at the famous canyon overlook, but there were no immediate views – you had to hike down a trail. People would drive up, park, get out, glance around in frustration, get back in, and drive away.
Wearing my knee immobilizer, I carefully lowered myself down a series of rock ledges to get a view over the big southern canyon and its maze of rock formations. It was even more pleasant up here than I’d expected – barely 80 degrees and breezy – and the clouds were glorious. That plus the relative solitude made up for the monumental effort of clambering around with one leg rigid.
From there, I drove to the other two picnic sites, both empty. Beautiful up here, and with elaborate hiking trails constructed with monumental effort by the long-lost Civilian Conservation Corps. Trails that were empty on this summer weekend. And no place for me to hang out.
As I drove back down the northern canyon, passing no other traffic, I realized I’d seen only about a dozen visiting vehicles during the two hours I’d been inside the monument. Sure, it was a hot summer day – peak season is probably spring and fall. But even stranger, I’d seen no park staff – not even a single official vehicle. Everything within the monument boundaries was spotlessly clean and well-maintained – where was the staff on this weekend day?
A now-unfathomable level of effort was put into building recreational facilities here, nearly a century ago. It remains a spectacular place for short hikes on high-traffic trails, if that’s your thing. But it’s no place for a picnic, and there’s only one small campground in the canyon bottom. Maybe the lack of places to hang out reduces the need for staffing and maintenance.
On the drive back to town, clouds all over the landscape were trying to become storms, and mostly failing. I did get a few drops on the windshield once.
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