Monday, July 31st, 2023
Monday, July 3rd, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
I’d waited six weeks to be able to do a real hike – probably the longest hiatus ever. Sure, I’d walked over 50 miles during that interlude, but mostly on level terrain in the Midwest and the canyons of Utah. For my return to serious hiking, I didn’t want to overdo it at first, but I also wanted something interesting.
Since last winter, I’d been trying to find a way to the crest of the northern part of the long north-south mountain range east of here. I’d avoided that area in past years because the west side of the range consists of dozens of long east-west ridges divided by deep, narrow canyons. It’s anomalous topography; most ranges in the West are block-faulted (tilted), with a steep face on one side and a gentle rise on the other. The west side of this range is elevated and almost level, more like a high tableland cut over time by myriad parallel streams.
The canyons are generally too narrow to support roads, but a few of the east-west ridges are relatively flat on top – finger-like mesas – and dirt forest roads have been graded up these, occasionally all the way to the 10,000 foot crest. Hence most of the west side – the only side accessible to me – was left out of the wilderness area, and is still grazed by cattle.
The plus side of these roads is that theoretically, they offer access to high-elevation trails. But this range has also been deforested by two successive mega-wildfires, and I’m discovering, hike by hike, that the trails I hoped to follow to the crest have mostly been obliterated by erosion, deadfall, shrubby regrowth, and general disuse. Their remoteness has always made them less popular, hence they’ve been omitted from recent trail work. Like most trails in this new fire regime, they’re listed as “Open” on the Forest Service trail guide, but they’re essentially abandoned and increasingly impassable.
Today’s goal was an area near the high point of the range, where one of these “mesa” roads leads to the junction of two creeks, with trails leading up each of them to the crest trail, so that I could potentially do a loop, ascending one canyon, hiking a little over a mile on the crest trail, then descending the other canyon. It would be a total of 13 miles and 2,700 feet of elevation gain – an easy day hike by the numbers. But I had no idea what condition I would find the road or the trails in, and unusually, there was no recent information online. The last trip report dated from 2011, before the first big wildfire.
I’d tried to take this road in early April, but it starts with a river crossing that had been flooded then from snowmelt. Today I found the channel only about six inches deep, but past the crossing, the road becomes surprisingly rough and rocky as it climbs steeply to the mesa. My 4wd Sidekick needs work so I was driving my little 2wd truck, and I was really worried about how it would do on this unfamiliar road.
About 8 miles up the gently rolling mesa, the road begins traversing steeply down into the narrow canyon on its right, and here’s where the drive became really exciting. It’s a narrow high-clearance section over jagged bedrock – with a virtually sheer drop-off, hundreds of feet to the canyon bottom, at right – and the farther down I went, the more worried I was about my little truck being able to climb back out of it. Finally I reached the fork that led down to the creek, and a hundred feet down that I came to a steep section of white clay with deep erosional ruts I knew the truck couldn’t handle. But when I tried to back up the shallower slope to the landing at the fork, I immediately lost traction – the driving wheels are in the back while most of the weight is in the front.
I’ve been in this situation many times, and after blowing tires repeatedly on rough roads, I recently installed all-terrain tires, so with a little tricky maneuvering I managed to get back to the landing, where I parked, shouldered my backpack, and set out walking down the steep forest road.
I’d awakened this morning with a profound sense of impending doom, something that occurs regularly as part of my anxiety syndrome, and worrying about my truck and the road put me in a pretty black mood, but I expected the hike to cure that. I wasn’t sure of the elevation here – probably in the low 7,000s – but I was surrounded with beautiful, intact alpine mixed-conifer forest. I’d packed for weather in the 90s, but here and now it was in the high 60s and often shaded by drifting, partial cloud cover.
However, I’d been immediately swarmed by little flies when I first got out of the vehicle, and before I’d walked a hundred yards I had to dig out my head net. It was going to be one of those days.
The road wound down through the forest onto the floodplain of an intermittent stream, where it got sandy and passed the ruins of a cabin and corral. Shortly after that, I came to a five-foot-deep sheer washout. Nobody was driving past that anymore.
After scrambling over a long debris field and rejoining another section of the old road, I came to the junction of the two creeks. What was left of the old road continued up the left branch, so I began searching for the trail that led up the right branch. I’d read that there was a trail sign here, but there was nothing remaining of it or the trail – apparently victims of catastrophic post-fire flooding.
Exploring along the left creek, I eventually noticed a shallow dip in its bank, with a matching vague dip in the opposite bank. I crossed and headed up the far bank, where I found no trail, but continuing across a meadow, noticed the slightest sign of an old road cresting a rise, overgrown and littered with boulders. This beginning would set the tone for the rest of my hike.
This narrow side canyon had mostly intact forest in its lower part, but it had experienced serious flooding and erosion. Instead of a trail, I found remnants of an old road, most of which had been washed out, so that my hike alternated between stretches of climbing over and around deadfall on a gentle slope, and picking my way across debris flows and logjams in the creekbed. I found signs of cattle but they looked to be about a decade old. The creek was almost completely dry, but flies continued to swarm me.
It was slow going, and I soon gave up any hope of the 13-mile loop. I was looking for the first milestone, where the canyon would veer left and another “trail” would head straight over a low saddle. On the way, the slope at my right became a burn scar. I finally reached the left turn in the canyon, and saw the low saddle ahead, but I was bushwhacking at this point – I could see no trails anywhere. Then, squinting through charred snags in the canyon bottom, I thought I noticed a wooden sign on a dead tree trunk.
Like the abandoned cabins I occasionally find, this trail sign with no trails was a poignant reminder of how temporary our so-called “Anthropocene” really is. Everything we build is a future ruin.
A little more scouting revealed the scattered remains of a sign for the trail up the canyon. But before proceeding, I wanted to climb to the low saddle, hoping for a view into the next watershed. So I started bushwhacking up the drainage. It was a short climb, and in the saddle I found an actual trail and a cairn on the edge of the burn scar. This trail descends about five miles to a valley filled with spectacular white rock pinnacles I hiked to a few years ago.
Returning from the saddle, I found the remains of the old trail leading back down to within a hundred feet of the junction sign in the canyon bottom. It was so overgrown I hadn’t noticed it from below. Now I needed to find a way up the canyon.
The left slope was very steep and eroded, so I started bushwhacking up the right slope, where I soon found what appeared to be an old cattle trail, blocked often by deadfall. This trail, deeply pockmarked in loose dirt, climbed high above the creekbed, which was now flowing intermittently. In places, it even looked like the remains of a human trail, but I hadn’t seen human footprints anywhere all day, not even on the road.
The cattle trail descended to the creek, which was flowing over bedrock, and the intact forest ended. From here on it was all burn scar and dense regrowth, much of it thorny locust.
Rain clouds were massing over the head of the canyon as I picked my way up the creekbed, looking for more old cattle trails I could use to bypass debris piles and logjams. I often found one that would then disappear in a thicket of thorns or a mass of blowdown, but the deeply eroded creekbed had become impassable with flood debris and the right bank was too steep, so I had to keep fighting my way up the slightly more accessible left bank.
Eventually, after pushing through an especially nasty thicket of locust, I came upon what appeared to be a remnant of the old hiking trail. Now it was getting really dark, I heard thunder to the north, and before long it began raining. The old trail was often interrupted by erosion, deadfall, or blowdown, but it was still much better than fighting through thorns, and although thunder continued, the rain slackened by the time I reached a big level area at the head of the canyon.
Here, the map showed the trail veering left toward another low saddle. But the remnant of trail ended, so I simply headed off in what I thought was the right direction through low undergrowth and a maze of charred, fallen tree trunks. The level area continued for hundreds of yards. I finally saw the low saddle off to the left. The map showed the trail making a sharp right just below the saddle, then traversing the slope of the ridge that had been on my right while crossing the level area. This ridge would’ve been my route to the crest of the range, if I’d been able to make good time on an actual trail instead of routefinding and bushwhacking all day.
But at several points on this hike I’d thought to myself, this is just my kind of trail! My favorite kind of hiking is without a trail at all, but it’s hard to do that in densely vegetated habitat. A trail on the map suggests that there is a way to reach some interesting destination. And an abandoned trail makes finding that route a challenge – and potentially an adventure.
I could find no trace of the old trail anywhere below the saddle or on the slopes below the ridge. The ridge itself bore stands of intact forest but the forested slopes consisted of the earthen mounds and pits left by the roots of fallen trees, so traversing them was like walking across moguls on a ski run. I kept studying the topo map I’d brought, trying to guess where I was, but it was fairly low resolution – I was never sure exactly where I was on the slope.
Finally I reached the top of the ridge, where I faced a seemingly endless thicket of locust and ferns. It’d continued raining lightly on and off, and just as I started through the thicket the temperature dropped and thunder crashed nearby. I was on an exposed ridge in a thunderstorm, just inviting a lightning strike, but there was nothing to be done about it.
It was almost time for me to be turning back. I estimated I’d covered less than a third of the planned loop, and I hadn’t reached anything of interest that I could consider a satisfactory destination. But as the thicket got thicker, I found myself approaching some white rock outcrops, and behind them I sensed the saddle where my route would cross into the next watershed and begin its ascent to the crest.
Thunder crashing behind me, I pushed through the last of the thicket and found myself on a pretty little forested ledge surrounded by boulders, with a view of the crest in the east. I knew I was finally above 8,000 feet, but would later learn it was closer to 9,000. I’d found my destination, at the most dramatic moment of the day!
The storm was moving away by the time I left my little ledge and began retracing my route. After I traversed the level area below the ridge and rejoined the old trail, I found it easier to follow it and cattle trails all the way down the overgrown burn scar of the upper canyon. Easier to follow, but painful – an entire day of sidehilling in loose dirt in my more flexible dry-weather boots had been really hard on my problem foot, and I vowed yet again to add foot exercises to my weekly regimen.
The sky was clearing and the whole landscape was now so vivid I felt like I was tripping on acid.
The lower canyon was a different story. Although it was wider and often had an actual floodplain, it had been so torn up by flooding that I seemed to spend most of my time climbing through debris. Finally in the worst pile of logs and boulders I lost my balance and fell, bashing my elbow on a hidden rock. It was a pretty minor cut but surprisingly produced the most blood I’ve shed in these past five years of serious hiking. Especially considering that everyone warns me not to hike alone, and a friend fell off a cliff and died while hiking solo.
My anxiety returned and increased the closer I got to my vehicle. I mentally ran through the scenarios. If the truck wouldn’t make it, could I back it down to a wide spot? Walking up the ridge looking for a signal for my phone, or walking the nine miles to the nearest cabin, some of it in the dark, to call for rescue. Doubting whether AAA would send a tow truck out that marginal road. Spending the night in the truck – since I’d recently switched vehicles, I wasn’t carrying a sleeping bag.
But thanks to the new tires, the truck made it up the road – with a lot of hard bouncing.
Friday, July 7th, 2023: Stories, Travel.
Emotional Rollercoaster
My visits with family in Indianapolis are always emotional rollercoasters. We grew up in the farming country south of there, and visiting always reconnects me, not just with family baggage, but with those childhood roots, and the memories flood back, both bad and good.
I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, I saw a lot of the city on this trip, and I had a lot of time to think about what I’d seen. My observations should resonate with anyone who’s spent time in other old Rust Belt cities, like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St Louis, and Kansas City.
Aging in Exile
I never got to know our state capital until my mom and stepdad relocated there in the mid-1990s. First renting a studio in an old factory building alongside other artists and small entrepreneurs, they then bought a renovated Victorian carriage house in an old inner-city neighborhood that was becoming a cosmopolitan mecca. They opened the first fine art photography gallery in the state, and became prominent members of both the art scene and the small business community, meeting regularly for happy hour at the neighborhood dive bar where young artists served drinks as small business people unwound after work. Contrary to the state’s media image as a racist redneck backwater, their community was politically progressive and every bit as diverse in gender and race as my West Coast milieus.
The closing of the gallery, widowhood, COVID, and the aging process have exiled my mom from that community. She misses her old friends but, like me in my remote small town, seems reconciled to isolation. Her home is her memory palace – on the walls of every room, she can see work made by her, the internationally-known artists she studied with, and the local people who were once her friends.
Single-Family Homes
At home I’m blessed with a wilderness three times as big as the county Indianapolis is part of, in a national forest twelve times as big, with mountains ranging from 5,000 to nearly 11,000 feet. So forgive me if I start to lose my mind in the congested cities and plowed cropfields of central Indiana. The closest undeveloped area is over an hour from my mom’s house, a state forest featuring a sandstone rockshelter and hills up to 250 feet tall (!), and I always drive down there for a day hike. On this trip, with a drive lengthened by freeway construction that seems to have been going on for at least a decade, I only had time for an 8 mile walk through the lush hardwood forest.
The grounds of the art museum include a nature preserve with a lake and a loop trail that I always walk – a little sanctuary in the city where I can get away from the noise, traffic, and stress.
But after that, I just walked the streets around my mom’s house, almost every morning.
All of these old industrial cities feature the opposite poles of old money and a rooted but increasingly desperate blue-collar working class. The old-money mansions line a narrow corridor northwards from downtown, while the shabby, soot-stained single-family homes of blue collar neighborhoods form a ring around the city elsewhere, and it seems that at least one house on each block is abandoned and boarded up. The conservative middle class and those with children mostly live in the distant suburbs, while more cosmopolitan and childless professionals choose gentrified inner-city enclaves like my mom’s neighborhood, again in single-family homes on streets shaded by giant hardwood trees.
Rainbow Flags and Strollers
The focus of Mom’s neighborhood has always been the commercial street to the south, so at first I instinctively headed north through residential neighborhoods to avoid traffic. But my way was soon blocked.
After the industrial collapse of the 1970s, the city eventually recovered into a state of constant reconstruction. Despite attempts to create “greenways” and more walkable neighborhoods, the massive freeways surrounding downtown and spreading outward keep getting bigger, noisier, and dirtier – hence the soot from vehicle tires falling on everyone from rich to poor. As the home of the Indy 500, the “Racing Capital of the World”, it’s a driving culture, with drivers conditioned to treat freeways and streets alike as race tracks, unconsciously reckless and mostly oblivious to pedestrians, yielding an ever-increasing rate of traffic fatalities.
Enduring the hammering din of overhead traffic through a dark, filthy underpass, I meandered northward through a preserved historic enclave where stately three-story Victorians set back in big lawns share shaded streets with generic postmodern townhomes. As a Westerner raised on visions of organic Midcentury design and enlightened by indigenous lifeways, I find both traditional Euro-American and postmodern architectures repugnant. But every yard is lovingly landscaped, every lawn manicured by dark-skinned gardeners, many of whom were working as I passed. And to counterbalance the state’s right-wing reputation, every other property bears rainbow flags and posters promoting diversity and tolerance.
The farther north I went, the less ostentatious the homes, and the more I encountered nannies, and occasionally young parents, pushing babies in strollers.
Postmodern Apartments and Cobblestone Streets
Midway through the Old Northside, I passed a cheap-looking high-density development that was under construction twenty years ago. It must’ve been designated for low-income residents, because it’s already turning into a little slum amidst all the spotless middle-class properties, graffiti spreading across its courtyard walls and trash filling interior corridors.
In the following week I explored south, where, twenty-some years ago, a few disused multistory factories were converted to “lofts” – not the DIY artists’ lofts I knew in coastal cities in the 1980s, but upscale condos for affluent young professionals. Lowrise commercial buildings in this area have since been rapidly replaced by postmodern apartment complexes for the millenials who’ve been attracted to most of these Rust Belt cities by emerging tech jobs. Here, the big employer is Salesforce. It’s hard for me to imagine young people who would aspire to a career surveilling and manipulating consumers, but apparently schools are churning them out by the millions.
I could only walk a few more blocks south before I ran into light industry, but just before that I encountered the tiny, quaint enclave of Lockerbie, with a cobblestone street and the brick Victorian home of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” and a literary pop star at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Alongside more sophisticated fare, I was raised on his homely works – “Little Orphan Annie” and “When the Frost is on the Punkin” – which can still evoke our shared roots.
Sponsorship City
Next, I headed west on the Cultural Trail, a work of landscape architecture partly designed by my mom’s former friends and neighbors who have spearheaded the city’s ambitious greenway corridors. Like sidewalks, all these corridors are used primarily by riders rather than pedestrians – cyclists, riders of e-bikes or e-scooters – so people who walk need constant vigilance to avoid getting run down. Cities are getting more and more dangerous for pedestrians – cyclists and riders of e-bikes and e-scooters almost universally disobey laws prohibiting them from sidewalks, and laws go unenforced. Cyclists at least have the excuse that sharing the streets with cars and trucks is suicidal.
Wheeled transportation is necessary because despite gentrification, cities like this have evolved away from walkability. In New York and San Francisco, you’re never more than a few minutes’ walk from a bodega or corner store, and most neighborhoods still have hardware stores. Corner stores and neighborhood groceries are long gone from Indianapolis; my mom’s supermarket and pharmacy are each a mile away in opposite directions.
On my five-mile round-trip across downtown to the historic canal with its ducks and geese and the big river with its rim of flood debris, I was reminded that like the professional sports it’s crazy about, this is Sponsorship City. It seems that every public building, monument, sidewalk, stairway, wall, and overpass is permanently engraved with the names of rich white sponsors.
Several of my friends, like the designers of the Cultural Trail, have accepted philanthropy as an integral part of their institutional careers, but I find it deeply troubling that poor people face constant reminders that their environment belongs to the rich. Philanthropy, sponsorship, and the private naming of the public environment are just more examples of our obscene wealth disparity and the fundamental injustice and unfairness of our society.
With its early auto industry, Indianapolis was a major destination in the Great Migration of Black folks from south to north, hence its reputation as a breeding ground for jazz sax players. Its population is now half nonwhite and 30% Black, but you’d never know it from the sponsors’ names inscribed in the urban landscape.
My mom’s neighborhood has changed dramatically with high-density development and the influx of thousands of young office workers. Most of my friends in West Coast cities live in single-family-home residential neighborhoods which haven’t changed visibly since they moved there decades ago. I suppose one reason Indianapolis has changed so much is that the economy was so depressed for so long, and when it began to recover, inner-city neighborhoods were in ruin, but the old low-density pattern was no longer profitable for developers.
Digital Experiences
For decades, the city’s art museum, a few miles north of my mom’s neighborhood in a park on the banks of the river, was my refuge. Many works in the permanent collection moved or inspired me, they occasionally hosted impressive temporary shows, and there were a couple of contemplative contemporary installations that could always calm my troubled soul. But as usual, I was apparently in the minority. They were losing membership, attendance, and revenue, and like most urban museums, they’ve transformed the entire vast property, first to prioritize entertainment over art, and now to “add wokeness” to their collection. The art museum is now just one component of a sprawling family recreation complex.
I was shocked and saddened when they replaced an entire floor, a third of the exhibition space containing all the contemporary works I loved, with the kind of generic “immersive digital experience” that’s become popular with Instagrammers everywhere. Whereas the old galleries offered hundreds of eclectic works by hundreds of diverse artists, the digital experiences feature a single old white artist – household names like Van Gogh or Monet. At the same time, they closed the small but excellent Japanese art gallery and the Renaissance and Medieval European galleries. The latter eventually reopened featuring yet another immersive digital experience.
Museum of Curation
The other European galleries have been replaced with a big roomful of works by a local Black collective, and a series of smaller rooms where a more limited selection of European and American works are surrounded by curatorial content to educate the viewer on their historical and colonial contexts such as slavery, imperialist looting, urban redlining, etc. Since my last visit, this curatorial content had been enhanced by another underrepresented, marginalized collective including LGBTQ artists and scholars as well as people of color.
For example, the museum has long featured paintings of Black folks by Black artists. To these, the collective has added detailed commentary on the injustices endured by the artists and subjects, sometimes in the form of additional paintings or poems of their own.
The net result of all these reforms is that most of the art formerly on display has been moved to storage and replaced by curatorial content – including wall-sized panels of explanatory text and dubious “interactive” experiences where visitors are encouraged to document their reactions to what is now more curation than art. The few works of art returned to the galleries have been selected to address curatorial themes, rather than based on their value as art. Artists and art that played no role in social injustice are now implied to share the blame. The result is what should really now be called a museum of curation.
One-Sided Dialog
I was sympathetic with the new collectives and found their work competent and sometimes poignant. But the museum’s new curators, by selecting work from the collection on the basis of themes they’ve learned in academia, have relegated the collection’s most mysterious and challenging art to storage in favor of the didactic – work that can easily and instantly be explained to the undereducated viewer.
As a precocious white artist growing up with the privileges of my race, I was inspired to make mysterious work that challenges the viewer, rather than being primarily representational or decorative. But even purely representational or decorative work can raise questions. Instead of leaving the viewer to ask those questions – because they may be entrenched in a biased worldview – the curatorial content both asks the questions and provides answers for the viewer. It’s a false, static, one-sided dialog.
The viewer may end up being educated, but the original art tends to recede into the background as its mystery is explained. And what I consider the most important functions of art in society – to challenge and inspire – are sometimes lost in the process. The curators are unintentionally foregrounding their egos and careers, and the previously marginalized commentators are colonizing the galleries, but with reactionary rather than original work.
Who Knows Where It Will Lead?
As I was studying one of these “enhanced” exhibits, an elderly white docent came over and asked for my reaction to the new galleries. I briefly told her where I was coming from and how I’d followed the reforms over the years, put off at first but now understanding the direction they were taking. She nodded with a broad smile. “Don’t you just love it!” she enthused.
“It’s a start, but who knows where it will lead? Once they’ve started in this direction, the museum could turn into something completely different,” I replied. She seemed shocked and perplexed.
What I meant was that as an art museum, it represents a century and a half of selective collecting by rich white folks. The very idea of an art museum is a European institution which has been a tool of imperialism and colonialism for hundreds of years. For me as an underrepresented, marginalized white artist, the museum’s collection was a place of inspiration and solace. The biased and looted collection can’t simply be reformed to provide a similar experience for underrepresented minorities – it will have to be replaced by a different type of institution. All we can do is wait and see what that will be like.
Consumer Playground
Toward the end of my visit, I finally, reluctantly entered the massive new mixed-use real estate development near my mom’s home. They started by transforming a former low-rise art-deco factory – a soft-drink bottling plant – into a complex combining hotel, restaurants and food court, shopping, office space, and recreation. In rapid succession, they’ve added a cutting-edge virtual reality arcade, a taller office building housing a high-end restaurant and multiplex movie theater, and are now completing a high-rise apartment building. Having preserved the retro facades of the factory, they’ve appealed to both fashion-conscious millennials and nostalgic boomers. The complex has become a consumer playground, with a captive market of young people drawn by tech jobs to the thousands of new apartments that have turned this formerly quiet, single-family neighborhood into one of the most congested parts of the city.
This is the kind of culture I and my artist colleagues were rebelling against in the late 1970s and early 1980s – shallow hedonism amid the rampant collapse of the larger society, that inspired punk rock and transgressive performance art. It’s interesting to contrast this yuppie mecca with the new galleries at the art museum. I’m always mystified when women aspire to soul-killing jobs invented by men, when gays and lesbians aspire to destructive institutions – like marriage or the military – that have caused so much suffering among heterosexuals, and when people of color aspire to colonial institutions, like galleries and museums, developed by European imperialists.
Proud Hoosiers
Indianapolis is just the capital city for the state, which mainly consists of crop fields and small farm towns. Growing up in one of those, my friends and I had Black classmates and were shocked when one of those, a teenage girl, was stabbed to death in a nearby town which had been the national headquarters of the KKK. As rebellious young artists, my best friend and I couldn’t wait to get away from this backward place where there were no opportunities for us, but when we reached the West Coast we discovered our small-town Midwest origins – and especially the Hoosier state of Indiana – gave us a sort of awe-shucks authenticity the coastal people envied. So for decades, we freely confessed our Heartland heritage. After all, Abe Lincoln himself spent his boyhood and youth in our home state.
Then by the end of the 90s, politics had polarized everyone and everything, and our homeland emerged as a horrific backwater of racism and general intolerance. We had to rebrand ourselves as proud urbanites and Westerners, rejecting and suppressing our shameful redneck roots.
But now, our Hoosier friends are proud of the lives and freedoms they’ve been able to carve out in the midst of this state that’s condemned by the distant coasts. I’m proud of them, and especially of my heroic family as they struggle to survive, isolated in the midst of massive changes, the outcome of which no one can predict.
Monday, July 10th, 2023: Animals, Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Southwest New Mexico.
We’re having the kind of weather we have if the monsoon doesn’t start on time – highs in the mid-90s in town. In the past, it would drop into the 60s overnight, I’d run the swamp cooler to fill the house with that cool air, and the interior would never get above the mid-70s.
Now, it’s only dropping to the low 70s overnight. It’s too humid inside for the swamp cooler to work. The interior of my house gets up to 90 in the evening and never drops below 80. On today’s hike, I was really looking forward to getting above 8,000 feet.
But first, I had to chase these deer out of my backyard, where they threaten my apple and pear trees.
When I reached the pass at 8,200 feet, it was clear, sunny, still, and hot. The Rio Grande Valley to the east lay under heat haze. This is the old familiar trail that follows the crest to a 10,000 foot peak in 5-1/2 miles; I sweated during the long traverses and relished a light breeze when crossing saddles. Finally, after about three miles, I reached the relief of the shaded mixed-conifer forest.
I’d been missing birds on recent hikes. Sure, I’d always see jays, ravens, and vultures. But this has always been the best place to see birds, and today there were a lot of different kinds active on the crest, from flocks of bushtits in the understory to woodpeckers squabbling over tree trunks in the canopy.
After I crossed over the peak and started down through the alpine meadows of the back side, through the burn scar of last year’s mega-wildfire, I began encountering the pollinators. They seemed to be loving this hot, still weather, they were swarming tiny, dull-looking flowers we’d normally ignore, and in the windless quiet the buzzing of the bees could be heard from far away.
No one had been down the crest trail past the peak since my last hike here in October of last year. The trail, which had been cleared last year, was now almost completely obliterated, from post-fire erosion, blowdown, and overgrowth. I was only able to follow it because I know it so well.
As usual, I was hoping to continue the full nine miles to the junction saddle, but I was stopped at seven miles by blowdown in a spot where I knew the overgrowth would keep getting worse.
I was okay with turning back at this point; even truncated, this would be my most challenging hike since the first week of May, with 14 miles round-trip and over 3,200 feet of elevation gain. And I was mesmerized by the swarm of bees on a shrubby, dull-green annual that surrounded me on this hillside stopping point.
So I started paying more attention to flowers and pollinators, and all the way back up to the peak, I kept stopping to watch them at work. I literally had to tear myself away from each little patch of flowers along the trail.
Some of these photos are like those puzzle pictures that challenge you to find all the hidden objects. Can you find all the pollinators?
I’d been praying for rain all day, and storm clouds had gradually been gathering, finally producing thunder, breezes, cooler temps, and a few drops here and there. It was perfectly timed to keep me cool on the last three miles of exposed crest.
I drove through some heavy rain on the way home, and my house cooled down a few degrees more overnight. Hopefully we’ll get more monsoon weather this week!
Monday, July 17th, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
Thanks to the wonders of technology, everyone with their face glued to a screen knows the Southwest is experiencing a dangerous heat wave. Unfortunately, my regular high-elevation hot-weather hikes have become impractical due to forest loss, blowdown, regrowth, or flood damage – all except for the one I did last weekend. The temperature in town was forecast to reach 98, and without a storm to cool things off, I could expect temperatures in the mountains to reach the high 80s. I was almost ready to give up on this Sunday’s hike.
But I’ve done serious hikes in the desert in the high 90s – I’d feel like a real wimp if I let this heat wave whip me. I kept thinking about the beautiful, shady mixed-conifer forest at the start of the abandoned-trail hike I’d done two weeks ago. Another equally-abandoned canyon trail started from there, and even if it turned out to be a dud, at least I’d be in nature, and ten degrees less hot than at home.
There was absolutely no information available online – even before the mega-wildfires, this had apparently been an unpopular trail. Like its companion trail, it had been subjected to two wildfires in a decade, and I could expect deadfall, blowdown, deep washouts, boulder-strewn debris flows, logjams, and thickets of thorny locust. But I found the post-fire remediation map from last year’s fire, and it seemed there might be slightly less severe burn in this canyon, and hence more shade during a heat wave. On the map, it reaches the 9,000 foot crest in only five miles – if I was lucky, I might find significantly cooler weather up there.
I was driving my little 4wd this time, so I could make it down the steep, deeply-eroded, incredibly rocky approach road onto the 7,200 foot floodplain to park in the shade of the old-growth. There was a flood warning sign, but the catastrophic post-fire flooding had already occurred last fall, and I figured enough regrowth had occurred in the meantime to forestall anything like that now. A storm would actually be really welcome today, to cool things off.
I’d gotten a late start, and it was already too hot in the sun when I got out of the vehicle. The creek had shrunken to an occasional algae-choked trickle, but my friends the flies were still there, swarming my head net. I climbed across the debris flows, deep washouts, deadfall and blowdown of the old forest road to the junction of two canyons where I’d started the previous hike. Today’s hike would continue up what was left of the road – mostly nice and shady.
The Forest Service map shows this road ending after about another mile, where it climbs the right bank of the creek and the old trail begins, climbing about 200 feet up a slope to bypass a rocky narrows in the canyon. On the ground, the road had mostly been obliterated by catastrophic flooding and regrowth, but I was able to read and follow its traces, finally arriving at an overgrown clearing on the right bank.
Straight ahead was a little erosional gully that might be the remains of the trail, and when I pushed through shrubs on the easier left bank of the gully, I sensed the vaguest indication of an old cleared corridor climbing the slope. I climbed a hundred feet or so up a rounded shoulder, repeatedly checking the topo maps I’d brought. They were the highest resolution I could get, but still omitted most of the actual topography I was seeing on the ground, so I had a really hard time figuring out where I was.
But before the shoulder merged with the higher slope, in a place where there was no other surviving evidence of a trail, I suddenly came upon a big cairn. The map shows the trail making a left turn two hundred feet above the canyon bottom, and a cairn often indicates a turn or crossing point, but when I looked left, a little thicket blocked my way. So I continued up the slope, imagining I was following the ghost of a trail.
Just before the shoulder merged with the main slope, I did come to some kind of trail that approached a steep gully. But I couldn’t see its continuation on the opposite slope, so I kept climbing. It was now impossible to judge how high I was above the canyon bottom, and the map just wasn’t detailed enough. I climbed another fifty feet or so, before giving up and heading down the gully. There was no sign of a trail anywhere, so I just began laboriously sidehilling across the very steep slope in loose dirt.
Eventually I emerged high above the main canyon again, and came upon a path that was so nice I assumed it had to be the remains of the old hiking trail, now used only by game. The map showed it leading back down to the creek after a quarter mile, but suddenly it ended in a dense thicket of thorny locust. I spent another twenty minutes or so scouting for a route through, above, or below, finally giving up and heading straight down the slope toward the canyon bottom. That’s where I found another cairn, hidden behind a big blowdown log, and looking back saw the old hiking trail leading up the slope far below where I’d been hiking. Talk about trial and error – I’d used up almost an hour routefinding in only a half mile of terrain.
The canyon bottom was fairly narrow here, alternating between surviving sections of floodplain where there were faint game trails, and washed out sections where I had to walk in the creekbed. But within another quarter mile I came to another cairn, pointing to an overgrown corridor up the floodplain. I was really encouraged – I hadn’t found anything like this near the start of that other canyon hike.
It was still hot in the sun, without a whisper of wind, but there was enough surviving forest to offer intermittent shade. What remnants of trail I found were overgrown and only maintained by game, but I continued to find cairns every hundred yards or so – until I came to a badly burned basin where side canyons came in from left and right. This basin was filled with debris, including logjams I had to make long detours around.
The map shows a point where major side canyons come in from left and right, with the trail making a sharp left into one of them. But I didn’t think I’d gone far enough. There was nothing to do but laboriously climb through the long debris field. And once past it, I did see another cairn, all by itself out in the middle of the boulder pile.
From there, I found a route up the left bank, and re-entering forest, soon came to a steep side drainage where I spotted another cairn, high on the slope to my left. And below it, the faint trail I was following ended.
The map shows the trail climbing the left bank of this side canyon, but the cairn beckoned me up the right bank. There was so little evidence of a trail up there I had to imagine it, but the canyon turned out to be so narrow that I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
After the late start and all the routefinding and bushwhacking, I was running out of time. But this climb up a side canyon was the beginning of the ascent to the crest, so I was excited to keep going. And although I seldom had a clear trail to follow, I kept finding cairns – much better than the previous hike in this area.
After about a quarter mile, I came to the convergence of several side drainages, some of which didn’t show up on the map. There were two little cairns in the convergence, but they didn’t indicate which way to go. I guessed that my route should go up a little shoulder and began climbing it, through an open forest where I had to detour around a lot of deadfall. There was no evidence of a trail, but squinting up the slope I finally spotted another big cairn.
A second cairn above this one led me around a rocky narrows in the next drainage. I even found an old, sun-bleached ribbon tied to a burned snag. This whole hike was like successfully solving a puzzle, using familiar clues in an unfamiliar landscape. I’d wasted a lot of time on unsuccessful forays, but if I ever wanted to come back, I now knew enough to avoid those.
I came to another stopping point, where a big gully came down from the right, with a very steep and rocky slope on the opposite side and impassable thicket on my side. I was out of time, but studying the opposite slope closely, I thought I could see a couple of cairns way up there. I zoomed in with the camera so I could confirm them later.
Returning, when I reached sunny stretches in the main canyon I figured it had to be in the high 80s. So I took it easy, drank lots of water and used my electrolyte supplements.
A few big cumulus clouds had formed and drifted over at times, but unfortunately no storms. I’d started the day with two trays worth of ice cubes in my uninsulated water reservoir, and the water was still blissfully cold eight hours later. Even so, I was repeatedly paralyzed by bad leg cramps, and my foot was hurting even in my best hiking boots. A worrying development since last winter.
The county road that leads to this trail may be the rockiest in our entire region. There’s a little signpost along the scary traverse out of the canyon, commemorating a guy who drove off and bounced down hundreds of vertical feet, probably ending in a fireball, in 1980.
It’s not so bad in my pickup truck with its leaf springs, but in the stiffly-sprung little Sidekick it feels and sounds like World War Three. So I had to take much of the 8 miles at less than 10 mph, and it was a huge relief to reach the paved highway.
Checking the map at home, I found I’d made it to within a mile and a third of the 9,000 foot crest. Now I’m familiar with the route, if I start the day on time I can probably go all the way. But as I’ve found elsewhere, the route on the ground deviates significantly from routes, including GPS, shown in mapping databases. So there are no guarantees.
I’d gone 7.15 miles out and back, with little over 1,100 feet of elevation gain, in seven hours. A pretty pathetic pace and a far too easy hike by my usual standards. But not bad for a hike in a heat wave when people are probably dropping dead elsewhere in the Southwest.
Monday, July 24th, 2023: Hikes, Pinos Altos Range, Southwest New Mexico.
Our daily high temperature was forecast to drop from 98 to 90 this weekend – a significant cool-down from the past three weeks. But the humidity remained high, and I still needed high elevations and shade for my Sunday hike.
And after last Sunday’s routefinding and bushwhacking, I wanted an easy trail. The mountains in Arizona were still too hot, so there was really no choice – I had to do the crest hike near town that I’d already done only two months ago.
There’d been a brief storm yesterday, the canyon was dripping with dew, and the flies were out in force. I was sweating heavily from the humidity even before the air warmed up. I found lots of tracks from yesterday on the canyon bottom stretch of this popular trail, but as usual they dropped off in the first couple of miles before the climb to the crest. The only tracks that preceded me on the climb were from a mountain bike sometime in the past weeks.
I wound my way up through the mixed-conifer forest on the south side of the 9,000 foot peak, and just below the crest noticed an older couple sitting in the shade fifteen or twenty feet above the trail. We exchanged pleasantries about the cooler weather and the beautiful day, and I pointed out we were lucky the wildfire that cleared forest from the north side had left this side intact.
The woman immediately launched into a lecture about fire suppression and the importance of fire in the ecosystem. I smiled, letting her finish, then I said that for years, my hikes in this and other national forests had been amateur studies in fire ecology. I said one thing I’d learned is that hiking trails like this are unsustainable in wildfire habitat. The man said “Yeah, they’re actually abandoning a lot of trails!”
“Yep, habitat will just have to recover without us,” I added.
“And that’s a good thing!” the woman maintained, sternly and emphatically. “Nature is better without humans!”
I smiled again. Here they were enjoying a day in nature, and she was resenting it.
I asked them where they’d hiked from. Like others I’ve met recently here, they’d driven all the way up the fire lookout road to the crest, and hiked less than a mile to this spot. They’d actually spent the night there on the road, battered by yesterday’s storm, and would drive the twenty miles back to town today.
The man asked me where I was hiking from, and after I’d told him said “That’s a big hike! How far do you go from here?”
I told him about the shallow basin with old-growth conifers and a grassy meadow three miles farther out the crest. “Wow!” he said.
“Yeah, eighteen miles out and back, but on an easy trail, which is what I need at this point.” I told them about the bushwhack I’d done last week, when it took me seven hours to cover seven miles. I recommended hikes over in Arizona where trails were better maintained, but got the impression they were only interested in van camping and short walks near town.
The remaining three miles went smoothly, but I was hot, sweaty, and plagued by flies even on the crest. Such a relief to reach the shallow basin and collapse on a bed of pine needles in the shade.
Flowers were more subdued here than on previous hikes – many had already gone to fruit. But the pollinators were still busy. I was really feeling the heat on the way back, stopping to drink my still-cold water in every patch of shade.
The big milestone on the return is the saddle below the peak. At that point you’ve done twelve miles, and what remains is all downhill. I was wearing my best boots and my feet were doing better than on other recent hikes. And bigger clouds were forming, so I had intervals of darkness and cooler air in addition to the shade of the forest. The flies continued, worse in some parts of the forest than others, seemingly without rhyme or reason. But my head net allows me to ignore them.
On the final descent into the canyon I began seeing tracks of people who’d walked a few miles in while I was hiking on the crest. My left heel was acting up. I stopped to stretch, but was still limping intermittently on the last two miles in the canyon bottom, where I found more footprints and hoofprints of horses.
And when I got home, I discovered my whole lower body was covered with a rash that burned like fire in some places. So ironic that what keeps my heart, lungs, and mind healthy is causing skin problems, at the same time as trails become less accessible.
