Sky Islands
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.
Sunday, August 10th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
Our heat wave was forecast to taper off in a few days, with the monsoon clouds returning. And doc says I can start doing short hikes, also in a few days.
But meanwhile, I needed a Sunday road trip, and the area that intrigued me the most is low elevation and was likely to be pushing 100 degrees.
I studied the maps over and over, and finally realized that at the west end of that area, there’s a 6,500 foot peak with a road traversing it. I’d never considered exploring it because the top is covered with communications towers, and I hate towers on mountaintops. But it’s also surrounded by spectacular desert terrain and other mountains and buttes with colorful rocks, and the vegetation around there is a delightful mix of Sonoran and Mojave genera, so why not give it a shot?
After crossing the mountains south of town, I discovered the vast southern plains were blanketed with a mysterious, low-lying haze. It wasn’t windy, so I wondered if it might be humidity.
Then when I turned north, I was surprised to see some monsoon activity far ahead. I drove through the Mormon farming village, crossed our iconic river (muddy and barely visible amid its broad, dense canopy), and enjoyed an interval of rain before reaching the alluvial mesas and the turnoff for the “backcountry byway”.
Backcountry byways are dirt and gravel roads graded and maintained for recreation on BLM land. The map shows that this one crosses the iconic river, way the hell in the middle of nowhere as it makes its big bend west, so that was something else to look forward to.
The monsoon clouds spreading from the north were intermittently cooling off the air, enhancing the landscape, and making photography a challenge in their shadows. I had a great view of the mountain with the towers, which I’d never identified before.
After less than a mile on the byway, I pulled over to deflate my tires. Regular cars use this road, but regular cars have soft suspensions.
At the river, I could hear folks making noise down in the picnic area, but couldn’t see them for the trees. Despite the humongous copper mine to the north, this landscape is pretty miraculous, with a legendary river hidden in a narrow canyon in the midst of harsh and colorful desert.
Past the river, the road gets rougher and cuts back into a long valley toward the foot of the mountain. I came upon a big late-model pickup driving less than 10 mph on a straight, wide, recently-graded stretch. I followed them for almost a mile as they continued to drive in the middle of the road, blocking me. Finally we came to a wide enough spot I could squeeze past them.
And at the head of the valley, the road gets narrower and begins climbing the shoulder of a long outlying ridge.
When the road crested the shoulder, I stopped to check my map, and discovered that the road to the summit starts here. Communications tower access roads are notoriously poorly maintained, and I had to shift into low range 4wd just to get up the turnoff.
This road, accessing the summit from the northwest, climbs over a thousand feet in two miles, so the views northeast are pretty spectacular. But it’s also very narrow, rocky, and steep, so I had to pay close attention. There are no wide spots, so I kept wondering what I would do if I encountered another vehicle.
I considered that unlikely, but just as I came to the only wide spot before the crest, I saw a side-by-side heading down toward me. What are the chances? And what would we have done if we’d encountered each other a few minutes earlier or later?
Fortunately, they said there was no one behind them.
When I reached the crest, I got a view to the southwest. But the road became even rougher. I began to realize this was probably the gnarliest road I’d ever driven – but after driving that road to the crest of our eastern range a couple weeks ago, I was fairly calm. Guess I’m getting used to this.
I stopped in the saddle below the summit, at nearly 6,400 feet. The temperature was perfect, with a little breeze, and I had a snack – with many stops for photos, it’d taken me almost an hour to drive the two miles, and I was very late for lunch.
Here, as on the lower slopes, I found widespread tree mortality, presumably from our long, severe drought. But I also saw some happy seedlings of both pinyon pine and juniper, so all is not lost. And cliff swallows constantly swooped past me.
I had no interest in driving to the top, with its forest of towers, and this narrow, rocky ridge was no place to linger.
The road south brought me into the head of a canyon which was very dark under the spreading thunderhead. I’d wondered if the southeast road might be better than the northwest one, but now I discovered it’s much worse – lined with sharp rocks, ledges, and deep ruts. But after a few rains, it’s also lined with very pretty flowers.
It traverses down another long ridge, and from what I could see of the next stretch of road far below, it seemed like an easier surface.
My view from above turned out to be an illusion. This descent was lined with volcanic cobbles literally from top to bottom. In the past I would’ve been a nervous wreck, but the flowers were so good I took it all in stride.
It had taken me two hours to drive five miles. This end of the road connects with an unlikely highway, a high-speed thoroughfare in the middle of nowhere that connects the giant mine with the city that supplies it, far away in the big river valley. That was my route back to the farming village, where I slowly carved my way through a very late lunch of lemonade, chips and salsa, and red enchiladas.
And after that, an hour-long drive home – discovering on the approach to our southern mountains that the haze was indeed due to wind. A wind so strong it slowed me down on the plain and tried to push me off the highway in the mountains. But those clouds had really cooled off our heat wave!
Completing the Circumnavigation
Monday, March 2nd, 2026: 2026 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
All the treatments that were supposed to be helping my shoulder pain were just making it worse. I had to be in the city Tuesday morning for an MRI, but driving is another thing that hurts the shoulder, and I didn’t want to get up early, rush the three-hour drive, and then drive right back for an entire day of pain and discomfort.
Meanwhile, I needed to get out in nature on Sunday, as a replacement for my usual hike. So after studying the map and driving times, I decided to break the city drive up into stages. The first stage would be exploring the southern end of the sky island that I’ve hiked so many times from the north.
The northeast part, where I’ve hiked all the trails many times, is world-famous for its big interior basin surrounded by spectacular cliffs, caves, and waterfalls. The northwest part has thousands of anthropomorphic stone pinnacles protected in a national monument. I’d already hiked into the southeastern and western parts of the range, slightly less spectacular but still beautiful. What I hadn’t seen, because it’s the farthest from home, is the interior basin at the southwest end of the range, where the map shows half a dozen trails leading to canyons, ridges, caverns, and rock formations with intriguing names.
We’re in the middle of a late-winter heat wave. The high in the 4,000-foot basins was forecast to exceed 90. I set off in late morning under mostly clear skies with scattered high, thin clouds. Even from 25 miles away, I was surprised to see snow remaining on north slopes above 8,000 feet. I stopped in the mouth of the northeast canyon for lunch, took a pain pill, then headed south toward Mexico.
It was only then that I suddenly felt a weight metaphorically lift from my sore shoulder. On the open road with virtually no traffic, exploring new territory, facing a couple of days with no obligations, my mind and heart returned to the days of my youth, when carefree road trips with friends and lovers regularly set us free from the stresses of city life: finding work, submitting to authorities, struggling to pay rent and bills, getting abused and ripped off by those worse off than us.
The remote region along the border features vast high-desert basins with cattle ranches dating back 150 years, where Geronimo surrendered in 1886 and smugglers and illegal immigrants now stream north in the dark of night. I’d driven this highway once, more than twenty years ago, but now I studied the south end of the sky island with eyes newly informed by my intimate knowledge of the rest of the range. From the highway, it looked only slightly less rugged than the cliffs of the northeast.
I was looking for a dirt ranch road that leads to the interior basin. The road I found was as wide as a boulevard, smooth-graded, and absolutely straight for miles.
Then it made a dogleg past a big ranch compound, dipped across a dry creekbed – where it clearly washes out in any decent rain – and entered what I believed was my planned destination, the interior basin. Except that the beautiful, rocky hills surrounding it were not the high mountains shown on my map.
Later, I realized that the big valley I reached first drains a completely separate watershed, and the road I took north from the highway mainly accesses that first valley, which is spectacular in its own right, and features intriguing trails I hadn’t even considered. Thus, I ended up discovering two spectacular interior basins for the price of one.
Here, the road got narrower and rougher and meandered back and forth, up and down at an elevation of about 5,500 feet past those beautiful rocky peaks that loomed 2,000 feet higher. And eventually, at the north end of this first basin, the road crested in a saddle.
Imagine my excitement when I reached that pass and first glimpsed the forested crest of the range on the other side! I could even identify the 9,400-foot peak with the old fire lookout that I’d climbed in December, from a canyon on the west side. But the road snaked down a shallow north slope where forest mostly blocked my view.
I’d never adequately studied the topo map, and was surprised to find that this second interior basin actually drains west. Where the road passed above gullies, they all held rushing creeks, which surprised me after such a dry winter. I should’ve realized that in the current heat wave, this represented the spring runoff from rapidly melting snow on the crest.
Nearing the bottom of the basin, I passed a big fenced meadow which I knew would feature the ruins of a 19-century Army post. Neither of these big interior basins is occupied now – they appear totally wild from the road. But although the surrounding slopes are designated wilderness, the basins themselves are grazed by small, widely separated herds of cattle.
At the mouth of the interior basin, my road joined the main road that accesses the basin from the west. On that road, I crossed the big creek and headed up its canyon to see how far I would get. All six of the trailheads I was looking for are accessed from this road, but I knew that catastrophic flooding after the 2011 wildfire had destroyed the upper end of the road, and I hadn’t been able to find out exactly where the road is closed.
On this beautiful Sunday afternoon, with temperatures here much more pleasant than in the low valleys and towns outside the mountains, I’d passed only two vehicles in the past hour. I could see one party in the campground above the creek crossing, and I passed another party at the crossing of a tributary creek coming down from the north. So much water here on the south side of the range – far more than I’d seen in the north!
I passed a big sign saying “Beware of Bears!”, an abandoned ranger station, then a debris flow where flooding had filled a former lake with white rocks. And finally, as the canyon narrowed below rimrock high above, I saw concrete barriers blocking the road ahead.
A small city SUV was parked in front of the barriers, and as I passed it to turn around, I saw a guy sitting behind the vehicle, reading a book. I turned around, parked at a discreet distance, and walked over with the map I’d printed out, showing the roads and trailheads.
He said he’d hiked the canyon trail from here a couple of times, describing it to me, and I said this was my first visit here, mentioning I’d climbed the peak above from the west side a couple months ago. He appeared be in his 30s, and I noticed he was reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov. I realized the temperature was perfect – it felt like the high 60s here in the shade of the creekside oaks and sycamores, which in contrast to 90 in the nearest towns felt like heaven.
But this guy was literally sitting in the road, wedged between the tailgate of his vehicle and the ugly concrete barriers. I wondered why he hadn’t parked somewhere off the road – there were a couple of informal campsites in the oaks above where I’d turned around. I asked how long he was staying and he said he would camp in this canyon for a few days.
Then some kind of rock-crawling side-by-side ute carrying a couple of middle-aged women growled up, followed by a pickup with teenagers riding in the bed, and this choice of peaceful sites for reading European literary classics seemed even less wise.
I’d passed a couple of side roads that my map shows as access to other trailheads, but the online trail guide says these roads are washed out and may be impassable. It was all so beautiful and intriguing, it was hard to leave, but I wasn’t prepared for camping in bear habitat and wanted to reach town before dark, so I returned west on the main road down the canyon.
The creek was running all the way out of the range. And for the first time, I got a close look at a small but impressively rugged freestanding range to the southwest. This range is mostly surrounded by private land and has no roads or trails, which makes it all the more intriguing.
Finally I reached the long, mostly straight paved highway up the big agricultural basin between sky islands, leading to the sleepy, half-dead town on the interstate and the end of my day of exploration.
Bears or not, if I’m ever able to hike again, I’m going to have to find a way to explore the south end of that sky island – now that I know it’s beautiful on all sides, and much less traveled away from the famous north end.
