Monday, April 27th, 2026
Sunday, April 5th, 2026: Black Range, Hikes, North Star, Southwest New Mexico.
I usually start researching options for my Sunday hike later on Saturday, after finishing my chores. It was easy this time – there’s an area on the state line with ranch roads that might get me to a spectacular box canyon, and afterwards, the restaurant in the Mormon farm town.
But on Sunday morning I realized it was Easter, and the restaurant would be closed. It took me another hour and a half, squinting at maps and scratching my head, to come up with another option – in an area I seldom visit, in the opposite direction. It’s in the foothills of our eastern mountains, between the two big wilderness areas, and I’ve always thought of it as a long drive. But when I checked the drive time, it was actually less than that area on the state line.
It’s a trail I’d never considered, because when I’m in good shape it doesn’t offer a challenge, and I doubted that it would feature anything else of interest. It merely connects a reasonably spectacular trail, at higher elevation, to a spectacular canyon hike, at lower elevation. But it looked like the perfect distance and elevation gain to continue my knee and foot recovery.
I’d hoped to hike in Arizona, at lower elevation, because today was forecast to be cooler – in the mid-60s in town. This connector trail would be up to 3,000 feet higher, but the sky was mostly clear. From the backcountry highway in the long, narrow valley, the dirt road climbs to the mesa, runs mostly straight north, then deteriorates to one rocky lane while descending into a rugged, shaded canyon.
What appeared to be an extended family group had taken over the tiny campground beside the creek in the canyon bottom. The dirt road crosses the creek dozens of times and washes out in every good rain, so it has a high berm of boulders that are constantly bulldozed out of the way.
After about two-and-a-half miles the road leaves the canyon and climbs to the next mesa, where you immediately come upon the trailhead. I’ve never seen anyone else here, and today’s trail started out nearly invisible.
Like last Sunday, it was in the 60s when I hit the trail, but hiking would keep me plenty warm without a sweater. The trail varied between obvious and nonexistent, but as usual I had no trouble figuring out the route. It climbed steadily at an easy grade in and out of drainages on this east side of a high ridge, passing several modest rock outcrops. I studied every patch of dirt in the trail, and the only tracks I could identify were from javelina.
The ridge was completely forested, so views were rare. I was looking forward to the view west from the ridgetop, across 50 miles of wilderness. But when I finally reached it, I could only glimpse narrow slices of landscape through the tall pines and firs.
The trail followed the ridgetop for about a mile – a pleasant, mostly level stroll. I wasn’t sweating, but flies were starting to bounce around my face.
Finally the trail began descending the west slope of the ridge. Descending steadily, I was surprised to encounter pinyon–juniper-oak forest first, then ponderosa pine forest, then pinyon-juniper-oak again, then ponderosa again, over and over until I reached the trail junction at the bottom – breaking all the rules of habitat and elevation.
As soon as I started down that west-facing slope, the flies swarmed me so bad I had to dig out my head net. I couldn’t figure it out – I was barely sweating, there was no livestock anywhere near here, and the only surface water was in occasional pools in the canyon far below.
I’d planned to turn back at the trail junction, but I was so frustrated at never getting a view out of the forest, I continued on the trail into the canyon, hoping to get a view of its rock bluffs.
After about a quarter mile, I did get a view down-canyon, but this was only a tributary – not the main rocky canyon. It would have to do for today.
With its gentle grades, this seemed the perfect hike to work on both foot and knee. Yeah, it was frustrating not to be able to see out of the forest, but it was a very pretty forest.
As I’ve written elsewhere, this is part of the national trail from Mexico to Canada, so it was built well generations ago. But nobody uses it anymore – all the through hikers detour to the big river twenty miles west of here, because the official trail no longer has dependable water sources.
The drive is actually more spectacular than that trail.
Ground Zero for the American Myth
Monday, April 20th, 2026: 2026 Trips, Apache Pass, Chiricahuas, Hikes, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Society, Southeast Arizona.
I was on my way to Tucson and had another opportunity to explore enroute. This time it would be an area with rock outcrops that had caught my eye during 20 years of driving the interstate highway west. I’d studied it on the map and searched online – at the foot of the rock outcrops is a BLM picnic area used by the RV and motorcycle-touring crowds, and past it is a canyon used by peakbaggers to reach the distinctive pyramidal summit above. The RVers and bikers claim that the picnic area is overrun by cattle, so my expectations were low.
My weather app was full of hysterical high wind warnings for the area, predicting dust storms that might shut down the interstate. Temperatures were forecast to be warm, but the sky was gray with nearly continuous cloud cover as I drove west, fighting the steering wheel to keep my high-profile vehicle from swerving off the road or bashing into big rigs.
Unsurprisingly, the rock outcrops turned out to be white granite, very similar to the area where I first fell in love with the Mojave Desert. And most of the clearings around the picnic area were anchored by huge RVs or fifth-wheel trailers, so I kept driving past into the canyon. I never saw a human soul – they were all huddling indoors, out of the wind.
Past the picnic area, the graded gravel road became a very rough 4wd track, and I immediately braked next to two bulls fighting in the roadside brush. Beasts right out of Greek mythology, muscles bulging, back legs braced, heads locked together, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Only one seemed to have horns, but they both looked deadly serious, completely ignoring me as I frantically shifted out of gear, yanked the emergency brake, and fumbled with my camera. Meanwhile they were constantly moving, shuffling around through the brush and dust, pulling apart, bashing together repeatedly. I thought I got at least one good shot, but I was wrong, and they had moved out of sight, so I continued into the valley, unnerved. I’ve seen a lot of bulls and have been chased and even charged, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen them fighting – not a pleasant sight.
The rocky track led to an impressive ranch compound, but just before the gate was my turnoff – what the map shows as a dead-end valley road, from which a foot trail continues up toward the peak. This road turned out to be much worse, running into and up a creekbed consisting of flood debris that required most of my high ground clearance.
I drove about a mile and a quarter, encountering cattle the whole distance and literally using my bumper to shove groups of them out of my way several times, before I reached the end at a corral and water tank. It was a beautiful valley but teeming with cattle – I could see them grazing across the slopes above, and a cow nonchalantly emerged from the brush for a drink at the tank next to me as I was shooting pics.
I was ready for lunch, but had no desire to linger in this trashy clearing, so I drove back to the granite outcrops. The similarity to the Mojave was inspiring and I really wanted to hike, but my foot condition refuses to heal and there was no way I was going to go clambering over boulders.
Plan B was to drive to the historical preserve nearby and walk a short valley trail. The trailhead lies on a locally famous, badly washboarded gravel road over a legendary pass that I’d driven a couple times during recent years. The valley is beautiful, but the easy-sounding trail had never interested me until I ended up in my current diminished state.
There were a couple of city vehicles already parked at the trailhead. Wildflowers were starting to take off at this elevation, and the Park Service had provided regular kiosks featuring historic sites, so I went slowly. All I knew in advance was that the pass above was used by pioneer settlers, stagecoaches, and the “pony express”, and further into the valley lay the ruins of a 19th century fort. Not my usual cup of tea.
With every step, I was conscious of my injured foot, focusing on using my toes to keep pressure off the metatarsal, so it was never an easy hike, and it was often hard to appreciate what was around me. The trail meandered up and down and around shallow arroyos and low rises, and at one point I spotted a couple of young women ahead. I saw them again later, leaving a fenced enclosure that turned out to be a cemetery.
A sign explained that military graves had been moved away at some point, leaving only civilian remains, which include three Apache toddlers – one, the son of Geronimo. The implication being that this cemetery is of lesser historical interest with the removal of the soldiers’ bodies.
In this beautiful valley, under this spooky dark sky, having recently seen my mother die in front of me, and now fenced in among graves of peaceful people who had apparently died in acts of violence as mortal enemies – some of them too young, and all of them too traumatized to really understand what was happening to them – I felt like some castoff pilgrim sidetracked into a land of death, ruin, and ghosts. Which is exactly where I was.
From there, the trail led to the site of the famous “battle” – in which a few Apaches tried to ambush the much better-armed soldiers and wisely ran off before suffering casualties. Past there, in a hollow, the Park Service had feebly reconstructed a native wickiup. Then the trail entered riparian forest and came to the spring which explained and bound everything together across deep time – a water source for natives, travelers, and warriors spanning thousands of years. I found myself just standing there, overwhelmed, unmoored in dreamtime, barely conscious for an indeterminate interlude.
Past the spring, the trail led upward toward the Visitor Center – a classic example of British colonial architecture whose antecedents litter Africa, India, and the South Pacific. I’m not complaining – with its elevated site, low profile and wraparound veranda, I immediately wanted to move in and live there.
It was both well-maintained and modest, and in the dirt yard below the veranda stood a water fountain where I tasted cold metallic well water immediately carrying me back to childhood and the hand pumps and cast-iron piping of family farms.
Inside, the black-and-white photos of long-dead soldiers, settlers, and Apaches were mostly too painful to look at. There were a few mannequins behind glass, the most evocative for me a beautiful young woman who could’ve represented a prostitute or an officer’s wife. I bought a book of Apache oral history from the Park Service lady and we exchanged a few platitudes, then the two young women arrived. I wanted to ask them how they’d found this place – it’s far, far off the beaten path and poorly publicized, the sort of destination that normally attracts only the most determined retirees. But I felt barely capable of rational speech.
Another party had arrived outside, a Latino family, and fortunately for me I found an alternate route back to the trailhead, by climbing the ridge behind the visitor center. It was one of the most beautiful trails imaginable – the blue sky was opening, and a few cumulus clouds were emerging out of the undifferentiated gray behind the peaks and ridges that formed our southern skyline.
I’d researched the bushwhack to those southern peaks, and this gave me a chance to study the approach from across the valley.
But more surprise waited on the descent from the west end of the ridge. There, the trail actually crosses a fault – you literally step across a discontinuity in bedrock from limestone to granite. The Park Service plaque explains how the different substrates support different habitats, and you stare at the radically different plants on each side of the crack, and if you’re me, you’re astounded.
I own part of a fault that is world-famous among geophysicists – it created the canyon through my desert land – so I’m familiar with discontinuities in bedrock and habitats. But the scale and elevation of this site enchanted me. Encountered on a trail, it was intimate – but high on a ridge, with a view down a long valley to a basin fading into haze dozens of miles away, you could see these rock structures echoed on all the surrounding hillsides.
As I continued off the ridge, the Park Service never stopped burdening me with colonial history. And every type of settler or traveler passing through here had brought their own complex baggage of culture and family, which seemed to swirl through my mind like a plague of ghosts.
To rejoin the main trail, I had to cross the big wash that drains the whole valley. I met a young man and we agreed it had become a beautiful day. I realized that without the apocalyptic wind forecast by the weather app, it would’ve been uncomfortably hot. Everything had turned out for the best – for us today, if not for the Apaches and the other folks in the cemetery.
It wasn’t until a half hour later, cresting another pass on the interstate highway, that I was finally able to relax, and realize I’d had a pretty amazing day. I’d started the day tense, battered emotionally and physically by that wind, struggling to protect my injured foot. The dark sky, giant RVs, fighting bulls and intimidating cattle, the melancholy cemetery, the stories of violence, suffering, and death, the crumbling ruins – the physical and cultural landscape had conspired to trouble and oppress me.
Later, as I began to sort out what I’d seen and learned, I realized that this place really is a sort of ground zero for the human myths and experiences of this country. As water source, battle site, military post, and essential transit point between east and west, this is a true pivot of history. We know that many of those 19th century soldiers, officers, and Indian agents were ambivalent toward their own mission and recognized the tragedy they were perpetrating. As a descendant of refugees driven out of Europe, I’m sure most of those travelers were first-or-second-generation European refugees who realized they were, in turn, helping to drive Native Americans out of their own homelands. The Park Service says nothing about that – the primary purpose of this site is to further glorify the military.
But to me, it’s a perfect opportunity to discover ourselves in the landscape.
Monday, April 27th, 2026: Big Lue, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
This Sunday’s trip was one I’d been planning and dreaming about for months: to explore one of the most obscure parts of my state, and hopefully to hike into a dramatic canyon that few are even aware of.
This is an “orphaned” part of the state because to reach it by vehicle you have to make a long detour through Arizona – the New Mexico side is completely cut off by roadless mountains.
Surprisingly in this day and age, GPS-based digital mapping platforms omit most of the backcountry roads in this area – I had to study a scanned, ten-year-old Forest Service map and other even older scanned maps to determine whether my destination might be accessible. These roads, most of them requiring high clearance and 4-wheel drive, were built and are maintained by miners and ranchers. I suspect that they’ve graded illegal roads over the decades simply because they get so little scrutiny from New Mexico officials. I had no idea what condition those “ghost roads” were in, or whether they were even passable. This is truly a living relic of the Wild West.
Dangerous winds were forecast for our entire region, with a high in the mid 70s at the average elevation of 5,000 feet. I’d originally hoped to try a much higher forest trail far north of here, but was worried about getting trapped by trees blowing down across the access road. As it was, I had to fight the steering wheel whenever I was moving at speed on a highway.
Like so many of our hikes, this area is reached by a long drive up a “finger” mesa with deep ravines on both sides. I’d driven this road in the opposite direction once before; now, heading east, I got an intriguing, enticing view of the entire mountain range above the area I hoped to explore, as well as glimpses of the two rock spires I’d previously climbed to the south. And through an unexpected gap in the range, I was surprised to see the remote Homeland Security radar installation on a mountain about 15 miles east – an installation I’m used to seeing from the opposite direction, from the crest of our highest mountains.
When I reached the dirt road I’d hoped to take into the interior, I found it unused and overgrown, so instead, I turned back and followed a well-graded and well-used gravel road that begins by dipping into a broad, shallow canyon.
I found water troughs and salt blocks for cattle scattered all over, but I didn’t meet another vehicle or see another human all day. Crossing the wash, the road followed the north bank, well-graded for a mile and a half, until I reached a fork. I was confused by this and the map I’d printed and brought, but I was expecting to traverse south around something called Twin Peaks, and I could just glimpse a double peak on the skyline between the two forks, so I took the right-hand fork.
This fork appeared to be newly built, which confused me even more. It traversed a canyon that got narrower and narrower, as the road got more and more rugged, running up the bedrock of a wash at one point. And then I found myself climbing toward Twin Peaks, where I found a half dozen cattle resting on a ledge near a water tank.
Past the cattle I found myself in a saddle overlooking the interior I’d been dreaming about exploring. Apart from the cattle and the range infrastructure, the entire landscape surprised me. It was way more topographically complex than I’d expected – I’d expected an interior basin surrounded by peaks, but instead, it was a maze of rolling ridges and hidden gullies and canyons. And it was beautiful, both rockier and more lush than you would expect at this elevation, probably because of the rimrock-capped mountains that completely surround and hide it from the outside. Like they say about the highest mountains, this area creates its own weather.
Based on my map, I was now looking for another fork in the road that would lead east toward the mouth of a box canyon that I hoped to hike into. I expected this to be much less used, and potentially impassable. And sure enough, it didn’t even look like a road. I came to a clearing with a salt block, parked and started walking, and found a vague corridor leading back through the dying junipers.
This was clearly the road shown on the map, and although it was barely drivable, it was apparently still used by the rancher. I almost immediately had to switch into low-range 4wd, but was mostly able to drive in second gear. It was a fun road, cruising along low ridges for short stretches, suddenly plunging into narrow gullies, bouncing over bedrock. And after about a mile I reached a wide arroyo where the road had been washed out, leaving a nearly sheer bank about two feet high.
I was sure I could drive down it okay, but being alone with no cell signal, I wasn’t willing to risk not making it up on the way back. I was pretty sure I could’ve done it, but it was such a beautiful day, I realized I would much rather continue on foot anyway. According to the map I had less than two miles to go to the box canyon.
The grasshoppers were unbelievable! Dozens of them exploded off the ground continuously as I walked up the road. And the views kept changing all around. From the wash where I’d left my vehicle, the road climbed up a ridge to a fence and gate. The map showed this road continuing south to connect to a ranch road which used to be the main access to the box canyon. The ranch was bought by an obscure Buddhist retreat center, and they’ve erected a huge locked gate across that road – hence today’s attempt to get in the back way.
Shortly, I came to another branch road, which climbed over the ridge and down toward the creek that empties the box canyon. It was damn windy on that ridge, and it was all I could do to keep my hat on. From there, I could easily see the old mine road into the box canyon, traversing high above the opposite slope. I’d found one trip report online, from an avid Phoenix hiker who’d reached the canyon 15 years ago using that now-inaccessible road.
I was expecting the creek to be dry, but I was leery of cattle, especially bulls, and descending the road I came to a water trough, solar panels, and a pump box. The road into the creekbed would’ve likely been too steep and rocky for my vehicle, and sure enough I saw another half dozen cattle resting in the dry creekbed downstream.
The old road resumed across the broad creekbed. Although it clearly hadn’t been used in ages, it was easy to follow, and I was soon surprised to see big pools of water in the creekbed below. When I finally reached road’s end, the creek, although full of algae, was running sluggishly. It hosted a beautiful sycamore forest, and unsurprisingly I found myself clambering over bigger and bigger boulders as I approached the mouth of the box canyon.
This is where I need to define “box canyon”. Technically it’s a canyon with only one way in – either from above or below. From my map studies, I knew you could hike into it from above – so by definition today’s attempt was probably doomed. But I didn’t know that for sure.
I knew from the maps and that old hiker’s description that somewhere ahead of me were cliffs 800 feet high, with caves. But before I became buried in a jungle of huge boulders and dense vegetation, all I could see ahead was a steep juniper-dotted slope topped by a high saddle. How did the creek drain from that?
The water running between the boulders here was clear and free of algae, so there had to be a grade ahead putting some force behind it. The mouth of the canyon was curving north, and just before I lost sight of what was ahead, I spotted a rock pinnacle that seemed to be separated from the cliff directly above me, by the narrowest of cracks.
I climbed over boulders and fallen trees and pushed my way through low branches, reaching a little hollow completely hemmed in by a solid wall of vegetation. I could see the top of the cliff, high above the vegetation, but could go no farther. I assume the creek drains through a slot, somewhere ahead of where I stopped. You might be able to push or hack through all that if your life depended on it – but maybe not!
It was past lunchtime, but I wanted to reach the vehicle before those cattle stirred themselves and blocked the road. This is another one of those outrageously beautiful Western riparian areas spoiled by ranching. The cattle can reach anywhere we can reach here – there’s really no place to hang out and enjoy it without facing cowshit and mud.
Once I reached the ridgetop and rejoined my original road, it was all downhill to my vehicle, with more intriguing views. North of here is a wilderness study area with the promising name “Hells Hole”. It can only be reached on foot, and from a distance appears very rocky – but again, I expect it’s overrun with cattle.
I snacked beside the vehicle while waiting for a GPS waypoint, followed by a leisurely drive out, past Twin Peaks. This obscure, hidden, rarely visited area just seems to get more and more beautiful the more I explore it – even during severe drought, with junipers and pinyon pines dying on all the lower slopes.
Driving out the mesa I could see a whole array of distant peaks I’d either climbed or driven over. And after reaching the highway, it was only a dozen miles to the steakhouse in the Mormon farming village, where I enjoyed an enchilada plate before driving home through that howling wind.
