Monday, September 16th, 2019
Monday, May 27th, 2019: 2012 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
A Test
During the past five years, my body seemed to be failing and accumulating injuries and disabilities. I could’ve easily assumed this was irreversible – the new normal.
But I was lucky in that I’d stopped pursuing a career and had few responsibilities except to myself. I had as much time as I needed. I kept experimenting and working harder and harder to stay in shape. I’d spent the past six months in training, working on my strength and flexibility to get around the rotator cuff tears in both shoulders, very gradually increasing my hiking distance and elevation until I even passed the point I was at when things started falling apart. The only question was, could I hike off-trail in the desert mountains I loved, with all the steep slopes of loose rock? I’d already learned that loose rock was the ultimate challenge for my chronically injured foot.
So in addition to the meeting, this trip was a test for my body. And ironically, after more than 15 years, I’d finally acquired a 4wd vehicle, and this would be the first test of that, too.
The first thing I discovered was that I had to re-learn hiking out there. Since my foot injury, I’d lost my confidence and had to regain it, going slower and more deliberately, more mindfully, especially downhill. But I did OK, doing rugged hikes easily and even some construction work that required moves I couldn’t have done a few months ago.
And so did my vehicle. I ended up on old abandoned mine roads, where the Sidekick kept crawling through deep sandy washes, rocking back and forth 60+ degrees between deep ruts on its truck frame, and climbing straight up loose shaley slopes, to many places my 2wd, low-clearance truck would never have reached. The Sidekick never had a problem, nor did my body. We both passed the test.
Hitting the Road
Arrival
The main reason for this trip was a long-planned meeting between those who love our mountains. But the hot days of summer were coming, and since there’s no natural shade at our campsite, I’d designed a shade canopy that I hauled out, in pieces, on top of my new vehicle to assemble onsite.
Second Day
Meeting Day
After the many months and numerous communications required to plan and schedule our meeting, it ended up being pushed back to a date that was closer to the heat of summer than some of us were comfortable with. But as the date approached, the forecast was for a cooling trend, and in the event, temperatures were mild for the entire week I camped in the desert. In fact, I was too cold the first night sleeping out, and had to progressively swath myself in all the layers I’d brought, because my warm-season sleeping bag wasn’t enough.
Wind out there can be fierce, but the day of the meeting was calm. And the day after, we even got rained on briefly, which is a very rare treat. We were so blessed by the weather, the rocks, the plants, the animals, and the people!
The Day After
After most of the others left, a remaining friend and I hiked over to explore a corner of the mountains I’d never seen. We were amazed at the vitality of both flora and fauna after a wet winter. More jackrabbits, cottontails, birds and reptiles than we’d encountered in a long time. And around camp, with the blooming desert willows, there was a constant swarm of hummingbirds.
We could see a storm moving over from the west, and as we crested a ridge, rain began to fall lightly, and strong gusts of wind threatened to blow us down.
On the Road Again
Different Desert
In search of prehistoric rock writings I hadn’t seen before, I headed to a different part of the desert, a part I’d only visited briefly before and wanted to explore thoroughly in future trips.
Climbing
After rain drove me out of my solo campsite after dark, it soon stopped, encouraging me to wait it out. It ended up raining four separate times in six hours, but only for 10-20 minutes at a time. The last time it rained, I simply wrapped my sleeping bag in my plastic tarp. After the rain stopped, I slept well for the rest of the night, and in the morning, started hiking up the mountain behind camp.
Protected: Old Woman Mountains Conservation Meeting
Wednesday, May 29th, 2019: Uncategorized.
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First Steps in the First Wilderness Part 4: June
Monday, June 10th, 2019: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
When I returned, in pursuit of my first big hike after a few weeks off training, it was the height of springtime in the mountains. In my part of the world, late spring is our hottest and driest season, and it was forecast to reach 90 degrees today. It did get plenty hot out there, but as they say, and believe me it’s true, it’s a dry heat! And last winter’s snows ensured that the creek was running, the riparian corridor was a jungle, the wildflowers were rampant, the flies were annoying, and the birds were ecstatic!
Not to mention the wild strawberries that I feasted on for extra energy, and the poison ivy that crowded the trail in the canyon bottom. I tried to be careful, but I fear another nasty rash may show up on various inconvenient areas of my body in the week to come…
Thursday, June 20th, 2019: 2019 Trips, Escudillo, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Southeast Arizona, Whites, Wildfire.
Climbing the Soup Bowl
For more than a decade, I’ve been driving past this mountain on my way west from my New Mexico home. When I’m westbound, it’s mostly hidden behind lower hills, and I only glimpse it over my right shoulder. When I’m driving eastward, on my way home, I first spot its distinctive steep-sided, flat-topped elephant shape far in the distance, across the high grasslands, standing off by itself, isolated from the rest of its volcanic range. I’m especially attracted to high plateaus, and I always wondered what it would be like to climb to the top.
During those early years, its steep slopes were draped in dense conifer forest, slashed here and there by the avalanche scars of black volcanic talus. Then, eight years ago, the state’s largest wildfire, started by careless campers, swept across from the main bulk of the range and destroyed virtually all the mountain’s forest. I was sickened, but as more of our southwestern mountains were deforested by wildfire, I got used to hiking in burn scars, and came to view it as a chance to learn about ecological adaptation. So I figured I’d eventually end up hiking this one.
The Spanish called it the Soup Bowl because its top features large bowl-like meadows above 10,000′ elevation. It’s actually the state’s third-highest mountain. Since the fire, the dead high-elevation forests all over this vast range have been filled in by virulent green thickets of ferns, aspens, and Gambel oak.
The local offices of the Forest Service make little attempt to keep their public information up to date, so I was unaware until I reached it that the fire lookout tower on the peak had been damaged and abandoned after the fire. But the trail has been cleared by the incredible effort of sawing through thousands of downed trees.
The first part of the trail, to the first bowl at 10,000′, was tightly hemmed in by aspen: mature stands unaffected by fire, and the young thickets that often replace burned conifer forest. It wasn’t until I’d climbed past the first grassy bowl, “Tool Box Meadow,” that I encountered the white skeleton forests of burned Engelmann spruce, and heard their eerie wailing. There was a constant gale-force wind blowing across the top of the mountain, and it triggered resonant frequencies in the high skeletal branches of the tall spruce snags. At first I thought it was a flock of birds crying off in the distance, then it moved closer and sounded more like a crowd of women wailing hysterically in pain and despair. It was my constant companion for the rest of my visit to the top of the Soup Bowl, and the longer it lasted, the more I wanted to get out of that place.
Although the abandoned lookout tower had been fenced off, other hikers had found a way under the fence, and I followed, intending to climb to the balcony for a better view. But the higher I climbed, the more the steel tower vibrated in the wind, and the harder I had to hold on to keep from getting blown off the steep stairs. That, plus the wailing forest below, really freaked me out, and when I was about two-thirds of the way up, I noticed the top of the stairs were blocked by a locked trap door, gave up and carefully climbed back down.
Adding to the weirdness on the mountain top was an abundance of trash from recent hikers along the trail, all of which I gathered and packed out. I’ve never seen anything like this on a trail in New Mexico, even near town. I get the feeling that in general, Arizonans may be more likely to trash their habitats than New Mexicans.
Saturday, June 22nd, 2019: 2019 Trips, Mogollon Rim, Regions, Road Trips.
Hard Lessons in the Interior
The next agenda item on my trip was to penetrate the interior of the mountains, a vast area with no paved roads and some of the worst devastation from the 2011 wildfire. It’s the watershed of the Black River, which is apparently famous among trout fishermen, and I knew that in the middle of it was an unlikely bridge over the river, by which I hoped to reach my next destination, a remote alpine lodge at the south end of the mountains. Along the way I’d get a feel for the landscape and the condition of the forest.
I’d spent a couple of nights in a resort village tucked away on the north side of the range, and I was relieved to be getting away, because hundreds of motorcyclists were converging on the village for the weekend, in convoys of a dozen or more that thundered through the alpine forest, dominating the sensory environment for miles around.
It was a long, slow drive on a rough road, winding along ridges, down into shallow, well-watered canyons, and finally to the rim of the canyon of the Black River itself, which is about 800 feet deep here. Ever since I spotted this place on a map, I figured it must be one of the most remote locations in the state. You do encounter little traffic on these back roads, but whenever you pass a turnoff, you can generally expect to see a group of big RVs and/or horse trailers parked back in the woods. Along the river beside the bridge were several parked vehicles, presumably for fishermen.
Across the river, the road rises steeply, and continues rising, higher and higher and higher, surmounting ridge after ridge until you can hardly believe there could be more. This is the edge of the Bear Wallow Wilderness, where the fire originally started. The climb from the Black River to this high country is 2,500′.
Near the top, I decided to take a side trip in search of a short hike. The side road I chose wasn’t bad compared to our desert roads, but my little vehicle has such a stiff suspension I felt like I was riding in a jackhammer – even the smallest rock in the road launched me into the air with calamitous thuds and rattles. I doggedly followed the road to its end, Gobbler Point, where there was a trailhead that was completely blocked by a couple of big trucks with horse trailers. And on the way back, I leaned over in my seat to reach for my camera, and instantly felt like I was being sliced in half at the waist. My dreaded back condition had been triggered, I’d be crippled for who knows how long, and my vacation was essentially ruined.
I carry pain meds for just this kind of situation. Fortunately my vehicle has seats with good lumbar support, and I was able to drive to a pulloff where I took a couple of pills and very carefully laid down on the pine needles to do my spinal twist stretch. It didn’t help much, so I got a beer out of the cooler and had some lunch, trying not to think of what lay ahead of me. The lodge I’d made reservations at is truly in the middle of nowhere, with no services to speak of, and no cell phone reception. I’d be pretty much on my own for the next couple of days, while dealing with paralyzing levels of pain.
The road seemed even longer on the way out. When I finally made it to the lodge, I was dismayed to find a big biker rally in progress. The entire front of the lodge was teeming with bikers guzzling beer and scarfing down barbecue. I was pale, my entire body tense with pain, when I carefully stepped out of my vehicle and edged through the mass of bikers and up the steps, walking like I was balancing a crate of eggs on my head. Taking my time and pretending to be normal, I checked in and somehow managed to carry my stuff up the inside stairs to my room on the second floor. It turned out to be tiny, with no space to lay out my stuff, most of the room hogged by the small iron bed. And of course there was no seating with adequate lumbar support, so it was either stand up, or carefully lie down on the over-soft mattress. I realized that sleeping on the soft mattress in my previous lodging had actually triggered the episode of back pain. It had been six months since my last episode, and I’d gotten careless, spending a lot of time lying on my back, which I knew I shouldn’t have done. I truly am vulnerable!
My back was even worse now, so I took another pill and crawled stiffly into bed. It was early afternoon, and I was hoping to feel good enough in a few hours to go downstairs for dinner. But the meds hardly helped. The entire lodge complex seemed to be operated by a single person, a small but rugged-looking woman about my age, and I realized that if I was going to eat anything, it would have to be with her help. But there were no phones in the room, so I’d have to get myself downstairs somehow to talk to her.
It took a while. Even the slightest wrong move could literally bring me to my knees on the floor, and that happened several times. I had to walk like I was on eggshells, but holding myself together also had a tendency to trigger an excruciating spasm. Eventually, pale and distracted, I found myself in the dining room, where three tables were already occupied. I fumblingly tried to explain the situation to my host, and she said she used to have back trouble herself and would be happy to bring something to my room.
But of course, there was no place to eat in my room. I found a card table and a folding chair on the landing at the top of the stairs, and rediscovered that folding chairs have great lumbar support, so that’s where I ate, with the host lady marching up to check on me every five minutes or so.
Back in my room for the night, I spent hours trying to find a position that minimized the pain and allowed me to sleep, but eventually I did.
