Monday, February 3rd, 2025
Monday, February 3rd, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Horseshoe, Southeast Arizona.
This Sunday was forecast to be unseasonably warm, reaching 70 degrees at home. Still looking to test my newly medicated knee on a mid-distance hike with elevation gain between 1,000 and 2,000 feet, I had my heart set on a trail west of here to a little 7,500′ peak that had been recommended for its views. But I’m trying to get pictures of rocks for my mother, and when I dug up some pics from that hike online, I could see it was all forest and no rocks.
So despite the warm weather I resigned myself to hiking lower elevation areas along the Arizona border, where rocks abound. I wanted to avoid livestock if possible, and the maps showed a trail through a wilderness study area, up an exposed, rocky canyon that had intrigued me, from a distance, for years.
But when I reached the turnoff to the access road, I found it closed, with a locked gate, guarding a small settlement of what appeared to be scruffy retirees and desert rats. I guess remoteness explains why they get away with closing access to a trail on public land.
Of course I always expect things like this when exploring new areas. My backup plan was to check out a canyon on the east side of the sky island mountain range, popular with birders, that I’d hiked so many times before. Most of my hikes had focused on the high central area, accessed via the northeast basin. One of those previous hikes had reached and traversed the head of this eastern canyon, which was enough to make me curious about the trail up the canyon below, accessed via a forest road entering the east side of the range
It’s a long canyon. My mapping platform shows the access road ending 5-1/2 miles in, with the trail continuing 6-1/2 miles to the saddle I’d reached before. But the old Forest Service map shows the access road continuing another 4 miles to the wilderness boundary, where the trail proper begins. Who to believe?
The most complete and up-to-date trail guide for this range says the access road was destroyed in the catastrophic floods after the 2011 mega-wildfire and is “not passable by vehicle for a number of miles”, and the trail up the canyon to the saddle I’d reached from the other side has “not been maintained for a very long time and conditions are poor to nonexistent”. I assumed today would be a repeat of my explorations in a similarly described canyon northwest of here, where the road had been apocalyptically washed out for miles and I had a very difficult scramble to even reach the trail – something my knee definitely wasn’t ready for today.
But I was in the vicinity and it would only take a half hour to check this out, after which I could drive to the interior basin to re-do an easy but forested trail there.
What I found was a rough ranch road that led to a corral and water tank at the mouth of the canyon. After closing the gate behind me, I was only able to drive a few hundred yards before hitting the sandy crossing of a big wash where my 2wd truck would surely bog down, so I parked in a clearing, loaded up, and starting hiking the road. At 1,400 feet lower than home, it was already warm enough that I had to unbutton my shirt.
This turned out to be a very wide canyon between rocky ridges, with a broad floodplain. The floodplain was lined partly with grasses and annuals, and partly with open oak woodland that became dense as it extended occasionally up gently slanting cuts through the rocky ridge on the south side.
A few hundred yards beyond the wash crossing, I found two pickups parked beside the road, one with a Wyoming plate. Not knowing what to expect, I have to admit it was a little reassuring to know other hikers were up ahead – instead of, for example, gun nuts on ATVs.
The road was dusty, and walking it under full sunlight quickly became a trudge – not the hike I’d wanted for today. But this was a pretty canyon I felt like I needed to explore, and as usual I wasn’t paying enough attention to distances on the map. I was hoping I would reach the end of the road in an hour or so and still be able to enjoy some roadless hiking in a wild canyon beyond.
I had my eye out for cattle and soon spotted a bull resting under an oak on the opposite slope. And a quarter mile later where the road wound through oak forest, I came upon another bull, standing just off the road. He was watching me but didn’t seem concerned, so I continued past. Maybe this canyon sees enough recreational use that the bulls are more accustomed to strangers than in the more remote areas I usually target.
The road crossed the wash again, near groves of big oaks that featured really pretty campsites. So far, the road had been easily passable by high-clearance 4wd vehicles, and I was thinking this would be a great place to camp – just outside of bear habitat, but with access to the higher mountains.
I went through another gate and back across the wash, and soon met the other hikers – a party of six, three couples roughly my age, all birders with field glasses hanging on their chests. They were engaged in conversation and barely acknowledged me as we passed.
I saw some bluebirds crossing from oak to oak, and spooked a whitetail doe that ran up the south slope.
A little ways farther up the road I came to a huge water tank about 50 feet in diameter with a solar pump. There had been plastic pipe running beside the road all the way, feeding occasional small water troughs, and it continued past here. This was by far the biggest ranch operation I’d seen in this range – my earlier thought of camping was fading fast.
The canyon narrowed, the road began making tighter turns, and I came to a right-angle bend, the forested intersection with a side canyon on the right, where a rocky side road branched off. I continued on the main road and found that the birders had turned back here. But I continued upcanyon for more than a mile, to another crossing where the road climbed a steep bank and the rancher had built a long drystone retaining wall hoping to control erosion. Here, a side road climbed steeply left into oak forest where I could see a freestanding fireplace and chimney and hiked up to investigate.
The map showed this to be the start of a trail up a small peak, but all I could find were meandering cattle trails. There was no cabin foundation around the fireplace, but the chimney showed a fringe of rusted flashing from a metal roof. Hard to say what happened here.
Back on the main road, after another quarter mile I heard mooing and spotted a herd of cattle ahead in an oak grove south of the road. I could see a corral ahead, and standing in front of it facing me down, another bull. A bull’s first duty is to protect his cows, so I turned back in disgust.
I knew I hadn’t gone more than three miles yet, so the best thing I could do now would be to go back and explore that road up the side canyon.
After returning a mile-and-a-half around the big bend, I found the side road was only rocky for a short distance, then became another dirt road up a floodplain. I could see the side canyon opened out and became relatively vast. But while stopping to pee, I heard a dog bark, and looking back, saw a mountain biker stopping under oaks at the entrance to the side road. His dog ran up to meet me, and the biker passed me shortly after, again roughly my age. I realized to my chagrin that, rather than a wild canyon devastated by catastrophic floods and abandoned by hikers, this was actually a combination working ranch and recreation park for retirees.
But in less than a half mile the road disappeared under a debris flow of white rocks from the historic floods. I couldn’t find where the biker had gone, but I continued working my way upstream across the rocks, until I got really frustrated by the oaks in the canyon bottom blocking my view of the landscape. So I carefully climbed the east slope to a high bench with an expansive view. And the first thing I saw was another herd of cattle, facing me from the corresponding bench across a deep ravine. This was clearly their area, not mine.
But it was a really pretty canyon, like a vast inner world hidden from the outside of the range.
I hadn’t gotten much elevation today, but I’d walked almost nine miles, and my knee was complaining despite the meds. During the past week I’d tried alternating oral Celebrex and Voltaren gel. The Voltaren failed to ease my pain, and its complicated application is completely incompatible with hiking or camping.
Environmentalists and conservationists have long accepted that responsible ranching is better for habitat and wildlife than urban sprawl. I don’t know how responsible the ranchers are where I hike, but I’m learning that hiking in this rangeland is complicated. I’ve hiked in remote, forested rangeland where cattle graze where they please and seldom if ever see a human, and that’s where I’ve found the most pristine habitat and encountered the most aggressive bulls. I’ve hiked in remote, heavily overgrazed grass-and-scrubland where the livestock likewise rarely see a human and are inclined to be defensive. And I’ve hiked in places like today’s canyon, where ranching and recreation peacefully coexist, but which are much less interesting to me.
Normally when I make the minimum hour-and-a-half drive to this range, I hike until evening, enjoy dinner at the cafe, and spend the night in the motel. But today’s walk returned me to the truck a little after 4pm, so I just drove home and saved some money. I will soon spend it on an overnight bag anyway, since my old one is decomposing into toxic microplastics.
