Sunday, June 22nd, 2025
Sunday, June 1st, 2025: 2025 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
Turns out my knee problem was misdiagnosed, last summer, as merely inflammation – a closer look at the MRI shows an actual tear in the tendon that’s never been allowed to heal. My only chance of healing is to wear a knee immobilizer brace for at least three months, and give up hiking for six months.
I already gave up hiking for six months, from fall through winter, while I was traveling. But wearing this brace is going to be harder. I’m still partly in denial, partly in shock. I don’t even want to imagine what it’s going to be like.
I asked the doc what about driving, and he said I could take it off, since driving mostly uses the ankles. So I did another road trip, over to the magical “pine park” in the sky that I discovered last summer. This is a lush meadow right below the 9,000 foot crest of the range, accessed via a very rocky track, surrounded by tall pines and Doug-fir. It’s a dark place at the foot of a dramatic peak, and I hadn’t really explored it last summer. I guessed there had been a campground below the meadow that was abandoned after the big wildfire in 2011. I’d seen rough tracks leading from the meadow down into the darkness of the forest, but those tracks looked too sketchy for my vehicle at the time.
Now, with my lifted suspension, I started following one of the tracks down into the darkness, and immediately came upon some cast-concrete picnic tables and the foundations of cabins. The farther I went, the more of these I glimpsed through the trees, farther down the dark slope. Apparently, before the campground, there had been something like a scout camp up here, with a dozen or so cabins.
There turned out to be a network of dirt tracks winding among the tall conifers, leading to more and more campsites. Two or three had been used in recent years, but none had been used much, because the vast majority of campers here use trailers, and there’s no way you could get a camping trailer down to the park now. Some of the campsites had been buried under deadfall. It felt like I’d stumbled upon the ruins of a lost civilization of campers – both spooky and idyllic.
At the farthest end of the old campground, I found myself driving up a rise, and came to a dead end in a little clearing on a knoll. I had a spectacular view of the west side of the crest, darkening under a rain cloud that was moving up from the south. As I was taking photos, sparse raindrops began to fall.
I’m only now discovering how rugged the west side of this range is. It gets few visitors compared to the more easily accessible east side. There’s an old network of trails, but they’re all abandoned and blocked by deadfall and regrowth. Of course, that makes the whole area really attractive to me – if I’m ever able to hike again.
Above the tall trees, I’d glimpsed the south slope of the peak above the park – rimrock at the top and a broad talus slope below – but to get a full view of it I needed to pull on the brace and carefully traverse a grassy slope over deadfall and embedded rocks. I almost lost my balance a couple times, but it was worth it.
Unable to hike, I still need to get out into nature. So expect a lot of road trips for the rest of the year.
The rain was just a brief tease, as usual this time of year. But the clouds on the way back down from the crest remained spectacular.
I had a burrito in the cafe as usual, and on the way back, stopped in the pass guarded by granite cliffs and boulders.
Sunday, June 15th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Since 2020, when we lost our local restaurants to COVID, I’ve been preparing all my meals at home. Imagine that, you city folks. Imagine being single and actually preparing every damn meal, every day. Yes, I can do it, and do it healthy. But although I now walk with one knee immobilized, and can’t hike, doc says I can still drive. So I try to get away on Sundays to someplace with both wild nature and a decent restaurant. One restaurant meal a week, prepared by somebody other than me, seems like a huge luxury.
This Sunday I learned that a cafe I like over in Arizona would close on Monday for lengthy renovation. It was forecast to be our hottest day yet, the air conditioning in my 30-year-old Japanese vehicle struggles to keep up, and the destination is lower elevation and would be hotter than home. But I was desperate, and driving our lonely highways helps clear my mind.
When I arrived, setting my watch back an hour, I discovered that all the indoor seating was taken – for the first time ever – so I had to sit outside, where it was nearing 100 degrees and a sycamore offered only spotty shade.
But they had a special brunch menu, and I ordered grilled trout with scrambled eggs and a regional IPA, at about half the price you’d pay in the city. The Canadian Grand Prix was just starting – a guilty pleasure – and I followed it on my iPad via the cafe’s sluggish wifi. Still hungry and wanting to hang out till the end of the race, I next ordered pancakes and an espresso.
Expecting the heat, I’d brought my old Yucatan hammock, and after the extended brunch, I drove up the canyon, nearly empty of tourists during summer, to a secret place, tucked away on a dead-end forest road too rocky for cars. I strung up the hammock in the sometime shade of a cloud and spent a couple hours reading, sweating, and drinking ice water I’d prepared at home and carried in my ancient mini-cooler.
Most of the southeast corner of Arizona lacks cell phone coverage, but as I drove away from the mountains, I began to get text messages on my flip phone from our electric utility. An outage had begun at my address at 2 pm and power was initially predicted to be restored after 5, possibly before my return. I wondered if I would lose the precious leftovers I had stored in the freezer. The closer I got to home, the more texts I received, delaying the resumption of service. No problem – I’m always prepared for camping, and I had canned chili and soup I could warm up on the old gas range without opening the fridge.
I was more concerned about the wildfire. It had started Friday in habitat I hike regularly, fifteen miles north of home, and by this morning it had grown over 12,000 acres, with zero containment. Nearing town, I could see the smoke obscuring most of the range just north of town.
Two blocks from my house, I passed the utility crews, blocking a side street with crane trucks and repairmen hard at work atop two power poles. Confirming my power was still out, I walked next door to check on my older neighbor.
In homage to Cormac McCarthy’s epic Western novel Blood Meridian, I call my neighbor The Judge – he retired a few years ago from a popular judicial career in the state of Texas. Similar to McCarthy’s judge, my neighbor is a large, nearly bald man, but the only other shared characteristic is his encyclopedic knowledge and storytelling acumen. In fact, people like my neighbor have shown me where McCarthy got many of the characters in his Western novels. Rural Texas and New Mexico really are full of eccentric, erudite, and interminable storytellers.
The Judge’s house was hotter than mine, and as we sweated and discussed the power outage, he recalled an episode featuring his former El Paso neighbor, a recent immigrant from Mexico. At home one hot summer day, the power had gone out, and with air conditioning disabled, everyone in the neighborhood escaped outdoors with cans of cold beer while crews worked to replace a blown transformer.
As soon as power was restored, the neighbor’s house began to pop and crackle, with lights flashing on and off, and the new transformer was quickly fried. It turned out the neighbor had hired an electrician from across the river in Juarez, and none of his house had been wired in compliance with the North American electrical code.
The El Paso neighbor was partners with his brother in a chain of botanicas north of the border. The brother, profiting from the superstitions of his fellow immigrants, became rich enough to buy a big ranch in Mexico and stock it with exotic wildlife from Africa.
The brother bred horses as food for his African cats, and one day, he drove out on the range, forgetting there was a leg of horsemeat in the back seat of his convertible. A lion smelled it, tore through the car’s soft top, and proceeded to eat the hacendado.
The Judge assured me he initially deemed this a tall tale, but was surprised to confirm it later on Wikipedia. Anyone wondering what inspired the cheetah scene in McCarthy’s movie The Counselor might likewise be surprised to learn that the truth is both stranger and more satisfying than Cormac’s fiction.
I returned next door to shower off the day’s sweat, but before turning on the water, I heard my fridge powering on – electricity had been restored. After my modem completed its lengthy startup procedure, I checked the satellite data on CalTopo, and saw that the fire had reached the eastern highway, with a hot spot on the far side. This would give it access to the vast Black Range, which had already lost most of its forest in two mega-wildfires since I moved here. Old burn scars can provide plenty of fuel for new fires.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2025: 2025 Trips, Gila, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Wildfire.
Yes, I realize that on the national and global scale, the news is terrifying. But in remote southwest New Mexico, we have worries that may never make the national, let alone the global, news – and we hope to keep it that way.
During the nineteen years I’ve lived here, we’ve had three large wildfires in the mountains just north of town, which rise to 9,000 feet in elevation and are covered with mixed conifer forest dominated by ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir. Strangely, the fires have been separated by exactly five years: in 2015, 2020, and now 2025. Each fire has started within fifteen miles of my home, growing to consume habitat I hike regularly, destroying places that are special to me.
But the fire that started just over a week ago has become by far the biggest – and in fact, the most dangerous in the entire country during this period. Firefighters and equipment have been moved in from all over the U.S. Thousands of people have been evacuated from nearby rural communities. In town, we’ve watched the apocalyptic smoke column towering above our skyline, the helicopters and jet tankers shuttling back and forth from the Forest Service fire station at our county airport. Our phones have buzzed with evacuation alerts, and the latest evacuation zone was created only two miles from my mom’s assisted living facility. The fire’s most active front is burning toward town in fire-adapted forest that has never burned within historic times, and is currently the driest vegetation in the U.S.
Calling my mom’s privately-owned facility to ask about their evacuation plan, I was told by the owner that they don’t have one – families are responsible for moving their loved ones to safety. Slowed by my knee-immobilizer brace, I made a rough inventory of valuables in my house, and shifted empty boxes up from the basement to carry irreplaceable documents and artwork.
With the “incident team” growing to over 1,400 people, the fire still showed zero containment after the first week. But on Friday, they finally claimed 11 percent containment, and the incident commander said that they’d bulldozed lines around the entire perimeter and were planning to restore power and begin allowing some of the evacuated back to their homes. They described a huge effort to protect structures throughout the vast area, and continued to claim that no structures had been damaged.
Friday afternoon, I drove my mom to the edge of town to see the smoke column. I figured, and hoped, that she might never have the chance to see something like this again. I wouldn’t have considered showing it to her a few weeks earlier, but her chronic anxiety has subsided, and she appreciated the opportunity to experience this awesome vision of nature’s power.
Throughout the week, I followed the fire’s advance online – hour by hour – via several apps, discussed it with neighbors, and attended community meetings. By the following weekend, the danger was reduced, but the fire was now burning through some of my favorite places, destroying more of our last remaining old-growth alpine habitat. I was a wreck.
There was a place northwest of town where I’d always wanted to picnic or camp, a ledge in ponderosa forest atop a ridge a thousand feet tall, overlooking the north end of our wilderness. I’d just learned that a brew pub had recently opened in the village nearby. Unlike the two existing restaurants, it stayed open Sunday evenings, and I wanted to check it out.
I arrived at noon and was the third customer. The owner, a big bearded guy, latched on to me and told me his story. I was shocked to discover he had ten beers on tap, but only one was an ale. Every other craft beer joint – and I’ve been in hundreds – carries an equal number of ales and lagers. His explanation was that he’s burnt out on ales, implying that what the customers want is irrelevant.
But it got worse. He said his menu consists of Italian dishes – rather than pub favorites or Mexican food (which the village lacks and needs). Not because he’s Italian (he’s not), but because nobody else here serves Italian food. Such is colonial culture on Turtle Island.
I had a salad, it was bland, and with no ales on offer, I won’t be returning.
My destination is a short drive up a dirt forest road from a pass on a remote stretch of highway – there’s no signage, and even after studying the map you’d never know it was there. With a high of 85 in town, up there at 8,300 feet it was in the 70s and breezy.
I unfolded my camp chair in a patch of shade on the rim and drank ice water out of my mini-cooler for a couple of hours. With the aid of field glasses and a BLM topo map, I challenged myself to identify all the peaks on the horizon, while admiring the occasional passing butterfly.
On the drive back, I mentally compared the pub owner with a motel owner in an alpine resort an hour further northwest. She runs scent diffusers in all the rooms, despite visitor complaints, because she likes the smell and doesn’t care what customers want. This is what you get off the beaten path – eccentrically selfish business owners.
I wasn’t looking forward to the return to town, where I would get the day’s first view of the current fire. It’s burning down an outlying finger of the crest of the range, about nine miles from the center of town now and still approaching. The forest ahead of it is what I was describing earlier – unburned in historical memory, and drier than anyplace else in the U.S. It’s also roadless, so it can only be fought with air drops, which are only marginally effective.
We’re expecting monsoon rain this week, but thunderstorms include outflow winds which could push the fire in new directions.
