Sunday, July 21st, 2024
Monday, July 1st, 2024: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico, Whitewater.
Today’s hike would be another experiment with knee pain, so I was looking for something with gentle grades. But it was forecast to be a hot day, and the only way to mitigate the heat is to hike a shady canyon or a high-elevation crest. All the canyon hikes involve steep grades, and most of the crest hikes involve a long drive. I’d initially decided to bite the bullet and do the boring crest hike near town, but on a last-minute impulse I headed west instead, to take the “short” trail down into the big, spectacular west-side canyon, hoping to explore the newly-opened tributary that had intrigued me on my last visit, in February.
I was so anxious to explore a new trail that I conveniently forgot that this route involves dozens of steep grades, with big rocks to climb over, all of which would be hell on my knee.
Plus, it’s lower-elevation – below 6,000 feet, lower and hence hotter than home, and mostly exposed. My heart sank when I got out at the trailhead – it was already sweltering at 9:30 am, with not a cloud anywhere in the sky.
I hoped for monsoon storms in the afternoon, but until then I would just be sweating through my clothes.
Since I wasn’t wearing a knee brace, it was all about using my left leg to raise or lower myself at every step so I could avoid bending and putting weight on the right knee. I was really strict about that, so I went slow, and it worked. But it meant my left leg was being overworked from the beginning, and it took longer to reach the shade of the canyon bottom.
Once past the big side canyon, it got even harder – I’d completely forgotten how steep and rugged this trail is. I was thinking how this was perfect snake weather, and sure enough, encountered a medium-sized rattler as soon as I reached the canyon bottom.
This is one of those canyons that’s full of house-sized boulders – fallen down from the cliffs above – so the trail constantly has to climb steeply around them, sometimes with points where you need to make bouldering moves, which was hard on both my knee and my shoulders, which are in much worse shape. It ended up taking me three hours to reach the creek crossing that marks the junction with the tributary canyon – a hike of little more than three miles.
On the way, I spotted a single tiny cloud, far up the canyon, and prayed for more.
Whereas the creek had been flooded by snowmelt in February, now it was shallow enough to stagger across on barely submerged rocks in my waterproof boots. On the far side, there was no sign that anyone else had been this way since a crew had cleared the trail nine months ago. It made sense – the winter flood had blocked the crossing until late spring.
I was really excited to be exploring a new canyon! It turned out to be a narrower version of the main canyon – full of house-sized boulders and choked with dense riparian vegetation.
But struggling up and down those steep grades, working to protect my knee, ended up being worth it when I reached the “swimming hole”! This is only the second bedrock pool I’ve found in six years of exploring our local wilderness. Unfortunately the rock pool was lined with algae from the recent dry season – hopefully that would get scoured out in the next monsoon flood – so although I was literally dripping with sweat I wasn’t anxious to take a dip here. But it was a beautiful spot.
Past the swimming hole the trail entered a stretch of canyon that had been filled with debris from catastrophic post-wildfire floods, then filled in by thickets of riparian trees – primarily ash and alder. Here, the trail had little tread per se, being mostly just a vague route over the debris, further challenging my knee and shoulders as I often had to reach out for balance. And those thickets made for claustrophobia.
This canyon drains parts of the crest – 4,000 feet above where I was today – that I’ve hiked many times from other directions. So I was hoping today’s hike would add to my knowledge of the range. But too often my view of the slopes above was blocked by dense riparian vegetation.
Storm clouds had been building overhead, and I was getting some shade now, but it remained hot down there.
I entered a narrows with a sheer 1,000-foot-tall cliff on my right, and here, the trail finally climbed out of the canyon bottom and traversed the left slope through mixed-conifer forest. I’d reached my turn-around time, but through gaps in the forest ahead I thought I could see more light, possibly the end of the dark narrows and a wide place in the canyon. I wanted some sort of milestone to mark the end of my hike, but that dark, towering cliff on my right never seemed to end.
Finally I reached an open talus slope and decided to turn back. But my GPS device failed to find a satellite – the cliffs were blocking the sky – so I decided to keep going, and a quarter mile later the canyon began to emerge from the shadow of the cliff, and I was able to connect with a satellite and record my location.
Trying to protect the knee, I hadn’t been able to go as far as I’d hoped. I need to do something about all three of my bad joints – hiking like this is just not sustainable.
Lightning was now striking nearby, and one thunderclap was so loud it shook the whole canyon. Soon it began raining in earnest, and I took shelter under a spreading oak to pull on my poncho. Despite being in a narrow, steep canyon, there’s no danger of flash flood in storms like this – the cells are just too small and short-lived. As usual, this one lasted about twenty minutes.
Back at the big creek crossing, I was still hot and sweat-soaked, so I stripped down, rinsed my hat and shirt, and laid down in the creek. This in itself was really difficult and painful, because it required bending the bad knee and straining the bad shoulders, but it was bliss to lie in that cold water and rinse off the sweat.
Wearing the wet hat and shirt on the way back kept me from overheating, but all the steep grades, up and down, over and over again around those house-sized boulders, wore me out to the point where I almost doubted that I could make it. Those mini-grades amount to hundreds of vertical feet in a mile of distance, but none of them register in the GPS routes because GPS averages at longer intervals.
I was also running low on drinking water, and had to stop twice with bad cramps. The fact is, we just don’t have easy trails – all of our trails are too challenging for someone with my joint problems.
But with a final Clif bar and judicious use of my water and electrolytes, I made it back to the vehicle. It had taken me 7-1/2 hours to walk ten miles. Walking slowly and carefully had minimized the damage to my knee, but my shoulders were aching from being triggered several times. I could see a broad, heavy storm darkening the sky southwards toward town.
I’d left a liter of water on ice in the vehicle, and I used that to hydrate before hitting the road. But within ten minutes of driving I developed cramps so bad I had to pull over, get out, and stagger around for fifteen minutes until they finally began to subside. And sure enough, I drove into the storm farther south – some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever driven through.
Thursday, July 4th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
Preparing for Katie’s memorial ceremony in the desert, I found a folder of lyrics she’d left with me when we were partners in Terra Incognita, in San Francisco in the 1980s. Some of them she’d written before we met in 1984, and some after.
She depended on me to set her lyrics to music, but we never worked on these together, so now that she’s gone, they’re her orphans. My mission is to turn them into the songs they deserve.
The COVID pandemic began a four-year hiatus from the arts, a troubling time for most and almost fatal for me. So I’m rusty, and I have to fit creative work into brief intervals between the toil of surviving and caring for loved ones. But I wanted to share these lo-fi recordings of works in progress with our community, because who knows if I’ll ever have time to polish them for mass consumption?
I started composing most of them with the electric bass – Katie’s instrument, but also more and more my instrument of choice. The lyrics would suggest a rhythm, a melody would arise from singing over it, and the result was always surprising. But singing them myself is awkward, because they’re a woman’s songs and they should feature a female voice.
These first four came together quickly and easily – probably because I’d opened myself to her memory and her spirit. I had to revise a few lines here and there so they would work better with the music – that turned out to be the hardest part.
The drawing for “Stampede” and the photo for “I Wish You Were Awake” are by Katie.
Indian Paintbrush
Indian paintbrush is one of the most common wildflowers of the American West. Katie wrote this about our shared experience of falling in love with the desert and yearning for its mysteries. She seemed to be unconsciously channeling the spirits of the people who lived there before us, who also made songs about their journeys through the desert and the mysterious things they encountered along the way. Katie was the only friend who loved the desert as much as I did, so I’m especially sorry that I didn’t help her with this one while she was alive.
Runaway Train
Katie’s family moved several times, but finally ended up in North Dakota where she finished high school and “ran away” from home. Before I met her, I used to catch and ride freight trains all over the country, so I can attest that she captured the experience perfectly in these lyrics. And they also carry a hint of the next song.
Stampede
This is Katie writing about the condition that ultimately killed her, using her lifelong love of horses as a metaphor. I knew this would be a challenge, and I dreaded it, but I had to try.
I Wish You Were Awake
She scrawled this on a piece of scrap paper, early one morning while we were camping somewhere on the northern California coast.
Monday, July 8th, 2024: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
Sunday was forecast to be clear across the area, with a high in town of 95. I faced the same old challenge, finding a hike that would keep me out of the heat without crippling my knee. Reviewing the map of hikes I’ve already completed, I noticed there was a gap in the crest trail east of town. At over 9,000 feet average elevation, it should be cooler, and hiking it would connect previous hikes on the northern and southern segments, yielding a total of 21 continuous miles hiked on that crest.
The out-and-back distance would be ten miles with an accumulated elevation gain of 2,200 feet, which is about all my knee can handle now. The only problem was that the access road is the worst in our region, requiring all of my vehicle’s ground clearance in low-range 4wd to climb over 3,000 vertical feet of exposed bedrock ledges. I’d only driven the entire road once, and had sworn never to do it again.
Plus, I didn’t know what kind of trail conditions to expect – would it be cleared or blocked by logs and overgrowth? There had been two mega-wildfires across that crest – would I find shady forest or exposed thickets? Fortunately, there was a shaded option about an hour’s drive downhill if the crest hike didn’t work out.
I can take the lower gravel-and-rock-lined half of the road at an average of 30 mph, but my vehicle’s safe average on the second half – a distance of seven miles – is 5 mph, with much of it at less than walking speed. Still, I was feeling pretty good until I reached the 9,400 foot turnout for the trailhead, and the inside door handle broke off when I tried to get out. No problem, I just rolled the window down and opened the door using the outside handle.
Then I stepped out into the sunlight, and it already felt like the mid-90s at 10 am. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breeze in the air. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, but it’d taken me more than two hours to get here – I was committed whether I liked it or not.
Another reason why I’d chosen this hike was because it started with a descent, and hence ended with an ascent, which would be easier on my knee. At the beginning, it teased me with a patch of shady forest, then confronted me with a wall of New Mexico locust. The locust, the first wave of regrowth after the alpine mixed-conifer forest had been burned off, had grown to ten or twelve feet tall, and covered the ridges and slopes in virulent green as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by scattered patches of surviving forest.
My route forward was indicated by a shoulder-height corridor of younger growth through the mature thicket. Apparently a crew had cleared a path a few years ago, and new growth had completely fill it in since then. Virtually no one had used this trail in the past decade, so on the ground below, there was no tread – no actual trail – at all. There was only hard, uneven dirt. Not only did I have to push my way through a thicket of thorns, I was continually stubbing my toe or tripping over the stumps that the earlier trail crew had left, which were now hidden under the regrowth.
I’d had a lot of experience with locust thickets before, but never this much – this was probably a hundred times what I’ve encountered elsewhere. It shows how much we lost in these fires, that hundreds of square miles of forest were replaced by this. Of course the main impact is on the native ecosystem, but for me, it involves always hiking in long sleeves and long pants made from a rugged material, and holding my arms upraised in front of me, twisting from side to side as I push forward, to deflect the thorny branches.
Ridge trails wind up and down and around high points and saddles, and the thickets were interrupted often enough by trees that I could occasionally escape the burning high-altitude sun. I saw and heard lots of birds, and although my route was only sparsely scattered with wildflowers, butterflies and other pollinators were abundant.
After about a mile, I came upon what was obviously an old, long-abandoned forest road, and remnants of that would reappear over the next few miles. This led me from the 9,400 foot level to the 9,000 foot level, around which the remainder of the route would oscillate.
My main purpose in taking this route was to see unfamiliar parts of the landscape, to complete my mental map. But in this early stretch, I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen from other angles.
I’d brought a map, and after two miles I knew I was approaching a major saddle, a divide between east and west, at the head of a long west-side canyon. That would be a little more than halfway.
I reached the expected saddle and found myself looking down a long, wide canyon, eerily deforested by the wildfires and lined with bright green locust and Gambel oak. My map didn’t show the name, and it wasn’t until reaching the next big canyon that I realized this is the one hikers sometimes use to do a loop with the next trail. A cairn in the middle of the saddle marked the point where the canyon trail came up, and I followed it a ways down, but it seemed to be equally overgrown with even less tread.
From the beginning, I’d found big logs cut to make way for the trail, which I assumed had been done long ago, after the 2013 wildfire. But now I was beginning to notice logs that seemed to have been cut recently, often surrounded by sawdust. And past the cairn for the big canyon, the nature of my route completely changed. It was lined with cowshit, and occasionally horseshit, and dotted with the invasive grasses that cattle spread. Luckily the cowpies were at least a year old, maybe more.
And I found bear scat only a few hours old, and started making more noise to announce myself.
Past the saddle the route seemed to climb forever, once again through a wide swath like an old road, until it finally crested on a long plateau with expansive views to east and west. The view to the east was across a high, rolling basin, and at the southeast end of it was the 10,000 foot peak I climbed two weeks ago. I’d never seen it from this angle, and today’s hike was intended to link up with the trail I take north from that peak. The long plateau also brought the first breezes of the day, a huge relief in such an exposed position.
I was also joined on my right by a barbed-wire fence; west was cattle country, and east was federal wilderness – but the cowpies on my side proved the fence wasn’t holding.
At the end of the long plateau my route began traversing the west slopes of a series of hills. The old roadway ended and most traces of the route disappeared. I followed what looked like faint animal trails, always keeping the fence in sight below. The fence trended gradually downwards, so I knew I was heading for the junction saddle that would be my turnaround point.
I knew I was on the right track when I came upon a cairn, followed by a ponderosa with a blaze in its bark – neither of which were accompanied by a trail. After a mile and a half, the barest vestige of a trail appeared, and I emerged on the rim of the next big canyon, and saw my old familiar trail descending the opposite slope, with the high peak behind it in the east. That peak is an old friend, and I was now seeing the back side, which I’ve hiked so many times, in perspective for the first time.
Below, I could now see my current route continuing down to the saddle, but I’d visited that saddle many times and it held no attraction. This canyon rim view provided a much better turning point.
It’d taken me four hours to go five miles, fighting through that locust. I dreaded the hike back, especially since it involved more uphill in this heat. It seemed to take forever to reach that midway saddle, but I was so tired I wasn’t even aware I’d passed it, so that in the end, I suddenly found myself facing the final ascent by surprise. That last stretch was the hardest, especially knowing I had that nerve-wracking drive left to do.
With so much locust to push through, I was constantly reminded of how important my hiking clothes are. You can’t get clothes like this at REI – they make outdoorwear as if wildfire never existed, using thin synthetic fabrics that are expensive and wouldn’t last one day in these conditions.
My shirts are made from chambray, a lightweight but tough cotton weave, and my pants are canvas. Thorns do tug at them and they don’t last forever, but they do last at least a year, which for me means up to 1,000 miles of hiking. There are tougher fabrics, but they’d be too hot in our summers.
After seeing dozens of logs sawn through recently to clear this route, I was puzzled that the trail crew didn’t attempt to clear the locust thickets. At home that night, I found an online report that a Forest Service crew from Montana had cut those logs in April. Apparently they were only equipped, or only had time, for sawing logs, so they just pushed through the locust like me. Or maybe they were horseback, and made their horses endure the thorns?
I made much better time returning – five miles in three hours – but the drive down the mountain took 50 percent longer. I hope I never try it again.
Monday, July 15th, 2024: Blue Range, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
To help my knee recover, I was preparing for a major change in my lifestyle and routines – daily short walks around town instead of long weekly hikes in remote mountain wilderness areas. But I still wanted to get out in nature on Sunday, and it was still hot, so I was desperate for a shady, high-elevation hike with little elevation change.
Since it would be a short hike, I could justify a longer drive, and there’s a ridge trail on the Arizona border, in one of the most remote parts of our region, that I’d been saving for a situation like this. It runs south from the rugged backcountry road that leads to the “valley at the end of the world” that I’d explored last October. I knew it would be forested, at least at the start, and it offers the option of a side trip with a total of four miles out-and-back and less than 500 feet of elevation change.
Driving toward the turnoff at a high point on the highway, I watched a range of mountains in the northwest, a range I’ve seen and driven past dozens of times – and driven through once – but have never been able to figure out. The topography from a distance doesn’t intuitively match the topography once you’re in it. I vowed to study the topo map in detail at home later, drawing a transect across the high points and comparing it with the profile as seen from the road.
The backcountry road is difficult and slow, but the most spectacular in our region. It winds up over a low forested divide, then down into the broad forested valley of a major creek, then up over an exposed pass with a forever view, down into the narrow forested canyon of a tributary creek, and finally up onto a forested plateau at 7,200 feet. None of this is visible from the highway. Despite the road featuring a popular campground and a series of dispersed campsites, I only passed one other vehicle in 13 miles.
The trailhead is just past the Arizona state line. Getting out, I realized this hike wasn’t going to meet all my criteria – it simply wasn’t high enough for cooler temps. It was already noon and the temperature here was in the mid-80s. And the plateau forest, a mixture of ponderosa, pinyon, Gambel oak, and alligator juniper, was open enough that shade was spotty.
The trail showed no recent bootprints but was well-traveled by cattle and horses, and it started out fairly level. Early on, it ran near the rim of the plateau and I got a view west over the “lost valley” toward the distant 9,000-foot Mogollon Rim. I saw a wildflower I’ve never seen in our local mountains, but couldn’t easily get my camera to focus on it.
The trail traversed down into a shallow gully and passed a junction with a mostly abandoned side trail that crosses back into New Mexico. Past the junction, the main trail got rockier, with more ups and downs, entered a recent burn scar, and eventually emerged on the rim of a big side canyon, where my map showed it would descend 400 vertical feet. To save my knee, I would turn back and explore the side trail I’d passed earlier.
Fortunately this canyon rim featured rimrock that made it a rewarding destination in itself.
I returned to the junction, and a short distance down the side trail I found a gate and wilderness signs, marking the state line. The tread was faint, overgrown in spots, and occasionally blocked by logs, but I had no trouble following it. Parts of the surrounding slopes were sadly overgrazed. When the trail started climbing between a series of low peaks, I climbed just high enough to get my bearings on the topo map, then turned back.
Back at the trailhead, it was after 2 pm, and I’d hoped to stop at a cafe on the highway for a late lunch, but the cafe closes at 3. I really didn’t want to repeat that difficult road, and wasn’t sure I could make it in time that way. My other option was the road over the mountains, where I’d been stopped by fallen trees the last time I’d tried it. I decided to try it again.
It’s another spectacular road, but since I was hurrying I didn’t stop for photos of the views. It basically climbs the crest of this small mountain range, through dense and mostly intact fir-and-aspen forest, to the shoulder of the summit at 8,700 feet, and then descends steeply to an 8,000-foot pass on the highway. It’s a 15-mile drive on gravel and rock, and to my chagrin, took 50 minutes, so I missed lunch at the cafe. On straight roads my vehicle is slower than most, but on this extremely twisty one you couldn’t make better time without sliding off and plunging hundreds of feet to your death.
Still, it’s a beautiful and really remote landscape, I didn’t see another vehicle anywhere up there, and I was glad I’d finally explored it.
By the time I got home, I’d spent 5-1/2 hours driving and 2 hours hiking. I wonder if most Sundays will be like this while my knee recovers?
I did study the map at home and finally discovered that those mountains I’ve always watched from the highway are indeed a named range, but a little-known one that’s omitted from most maps. The backcountry road crosses the middle of the crest as viewed from the highway, which is counterintuitive because the profile from the east masks the interior topography. It’s really complex, but I’m starting to figure it out. The only bummer is that all of it, including the wilderness area and the high peaks, is overrun with cattle.
Thursday, July 18th, 2024: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Rustler, Southeast Arizona.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they often suck at expressing the feelings inspired in nature. My current series of Dispatches reports on hikes or drives to the 9,000 foot crest of various Southwestern mountain ranges, but I’ve gradually realized that neither the pictures nor my reports have conveyed the feelings these places inspire.
I literally become ecstatic when I reach the crest of a mountain range, especially if it includes an unobstructed view to one or both sides, across the landscape thousands of feet below. That experience is the goal of my favorite hikes. In the major ranges of the Southwest, the crest averages 9,000 feet in elevation, 4,000 feet above the alluvial fans at their feet. In the Mojave Desert, the crests are much lower, as are the surrounding basins – the ridgelines of my favorite desert range seldom reach 5,000 feet, whereas the alluvial fans lie 1,000 to 2,000 feet below. But the feeling I get is the same regardless of the numbers.
Why? What is a crest, and why is it special?
Of course there’s the view – climbing from one side, when you reach the crest, you discover a whole new world, as far as the eye can see. The crest is where the weather happens – air is squeezed, wind funnels across, clouds form, rain or snow falls. A crest defines watersheds – the high line that diverts creeks to one side or the other. Reaching the crest fills my heart to bursting.
On the way to a doctor’s appointment in Tucson, I noticed the eastbound lanes of the interstate were under construction. With all that driving, I wondered if there was a chance of getting a short hike in. So on my return, I took a detour off the backed-up interstate. I knew there was a forest road that crossed the crest of one of my favorite ranges, and I’d seen it from far away, snaking up the mountain, but I’d never driven it. If I could drive up there, I might be able to hike the crest trail for a mile or two without taxing my knee.
It was a beautiful drive on a spine-hammering road starting out as deeply washboarded gravel, rising in single-lane hairpin turns on hard-packed dirt, rocks up to two feet in diameter embedded in hard-packed dirt, and ledges of solid bedrock. It took forty-five minutes to drive the ten miles to the crest. I passed several deer, and in a shady grove in the foothillls, a group of kids on an outing supervised by two women. But I didn’t pass another vehicle all morning on that narrow, twisting road.
I was thrilled to reach the crest, to cross the watershed and glimpse the eastern landscape, the mountains I was familiar with from many previous trips. Here a side road continues a thousand feet higher to a campground in the sky. I drove below tall firs that emphasized the altitude – everywhere there was a feeling of being on top of the world. I passed some kind of official crew camping at a dispersed site in a grove of giants below the road – they were gone when I returned in the afternoon. At the 8,400-foot campground I saw one RV, but apart from me and these there wasn’t another vehicle on the mountain. I parked, breathed the clean high-elevation air, and ate the tacos I’d picked up on the way.
The crest trail starts at the parking area outside the campground, and climbs through a fern-covered burn scar. It was hot out in the open – probably in the mid-80s. The trail traversed above and around the campground, and nearing the actual crest I came to a side trail, and followed it to a small saddle where I got my first view west. Clouds were building over the mountains south of me, and the west looked stormy.
I rejoined the main trail, which continues traversing across the east side of the crest, through patches of shade and thickets of thorny locust, and onto a narrow ledge below a sheer cliff. Past the cliff, the trail curves back into a hollow where I came upon an older couple struggling to control two big dogs – the people from the RV. Patches of forest and burn scar alternated across the slopes, jays and woodpeckers flitted through the trees and snags above me. Eventually the trail reached a saddle on the crest. I’d intended to turn back here, but there wasn’t much of a view, so I kept climbing.
Past the saddle, the trial climbs steeply through more burn scar, to a sort of barren hump with an expansive view west. I made my way to a rock outcrop, from which I could see rain falling out in the plain. But an outlying ridge blocked my view south, so I decided to climb even higher.
I reached a small hollow that was choked with ferns, charred logs, and thickets of locust. I tried going off-trail, hoping to get a view, but found myself blocked by forest. So I returned to the trail and continued still higher, out of the jungle and around the shoulder of the outlying ridge, and here I found my view to the south, at an elevation of 9,100 feet.
I was just shedding my pack and digging for my water bottle when I heard the sound of jets. It was two A-10 Warthogs, a fearsome machine designed to fly low and obliterate people and vehicles on the ground. They were flying up the canyon below me, just above the trees, and I watched them cross the crest in front of me.
On the way back, I detoured off the crest trail and down onto a very primitive forest road, hoping it would be easier on my knee and give me better views to the east. But it was so rocky I had to walk very slow – tottering between a problem foot on one side and a problem knee on the other.
At one point I heard screeching high above, and turned to see two golden eagles circling each other. Later, in a shady grove of tall firs, I came upon an empty Forest Service “Guard Station” – rustic cabins used periodically by work crews. Everything here felt high, remote, and lonely. Far from the world of screens, cities, celebrities, the rich and powerful and their advanced technologies – except that killer jets could thunder past at any moment.
Driving back down the crest road I passed a side road to another “park” – rural vernacular for a level place on top of a mountain. As I was checking my map, an old guy on a motorcycle approached and passed me.
I got turned around and climbed the side road, over a ridge and down into a densely forested basin, where I noticed the motorcyclist on the road below me. I finally emerged in the “park” – a grassy meadow surrounded by fir forest, with informal dispersed campsites, all empty. The motorcyclist passed me again and returned up the road without stopping – apparently just out for a ride in the sky, no need to get off the bike.
Shortly after I started back up the road, I encountered a big pickup pulling a loaded horse trailer down that steep, rocky trail. There was barely enough room for me to pull over, and the driver was staring straight ahead with his jaw clenched.
I began thinking about the RV at the campground. Most of these roads are single-width, and trees often fall across them. Rigs like that sure couldn’t back up in an emergency, and there’s absolutely no space for them to turn around. I guess they just count on other people to come by and save them if anything goes wrong.
Now I would continue down the main road off the crest to the east, and I immediately found that it’s just as bad as its western counterpart, and I could go no faster. But now it was like rush hour, one vehicle after the other passing me on their way up the hairpin turns. I had to pull over and stop to let the motorcycle guy past for the third time – he was going twice as fast as me, bouncing over all those rocks.
Halfway down I was approaching another blind turn when out shot a late-model minivan. The driver saw me and slammed on the brakes, going into a slide toward the sheer drop-off, his tires catching at the last minute. I pulled over, stopped, and rolled down my window, shouting “Slow down!” as he pulled alongside. It was a vanload of students on a field trip with their bearded, conservatively-dressed professor driving. He responded with a big smile, saying “How ya doin?”
I understood the rancher types with their pickups and trailers – they’ll drive anywhere. But I couldn’t fathom people who would drive minivans – let alone big RVs – up a rocky, narrow, seemingly high-clearance road like this.
Again, I passed lots of deer – mule deer, all very small. When I finally reached the oak-studded foothills, I came upon another big truck towing an even bigger horse trailer, the animals all sticking their heads out the side to watch me pass. This truck had broken down on the road, and its young cowboy driver was sitting in a folding chair behind the trailer. He said a hose had burst and his wife was on her way to get a replacement. Down here it was in the mid-90s.
After bouncing over rocks for hours, never knowing who was going to show up around those hairpin curves, my nerves were completely shot by the time I reached the paved road in the canyon. I got dinner and beer at the cafe, and decided to grab a room for the night – the only other option was driving home in the dark. But my troubles didn’t end there – it was over 90 degrees in the room and took three hours for the window air conditioner to cool it down. Makes a better story that way, right?
