Monday, September 14th, 2026
Monday, September 14th, 2026: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Still trying to rest the foot. Not as easy as it might seem, but the only other options are (a) at least a year of laborious, time-consuming daily ultrasound treatments, or (b) giving up hiking completely.
And by this Sunday I’d gone nearly two weeks without a day in nature. My plan was to drive to the remote ghost town, up in our high mountains, for lunch, and explore a potential hike on the way.
I’d passed the turnoff for this hike, an hour north, hundreds of times. The Forest Service has prominent warnings that the trail is completely inaccessible and impassable due to washouts after the 2012 wildfire. It makes sense, because both the access road and the trail ascend a steep, narrow canyon, gaining nearly 5,000 vertical feet in less than 7 total miles.
I could find no reports of anyone trying to hike it since 2012. But of course, all those obstacles are what makes it attractive to me. The old, long-abandoned trail tops out near the crest – at my favorite spring, just over 9,000 feet on the trail that first introduced me to our vast wilderness, back in March 2019. There’s virtually no tread at that end, but a few years ago, by guessing at corridors through the mixed-conifer forest, I had traversed to the upper rim of that steep canyon. Looking across and down, I could tell it would be a spectacular hike, with plenty of tall cliffs and massive rock formations.
Our heat wave has transitioned to milder days, with near-daily forecasts of rain, but little actual precip. The sky was mostly clear when I left home, but despite being unable to hike, I dressed in long sleeves and hiking pants in case I should get stuck somewhere and have to walk out.
I’d been studying the access road on topo maps for months. Starting at 4,600 feet in a river valley, it climbs nearly 2,000 feet in 3-1/2 miles, with an average grade of 10% and maximum of 30% – which would be one of the steepest roads I’d ever driven. I figured there was little chance of it being drivable, but until my foot recovers, it was worth a try.
The GPS-based online topo maps show the road ending on a ridge above the canyon, with the trail continuing down from there. But the older Forest Service map shows the road continuing down, crossing the canyon bottom, then traversing the steep west face of the range for another mile and a half, past a corral, to some unlabeled structure high on another ridge.
Right after leaving the highway for the sandy two-track, I passed a couple of young guys moving gear in and out of a Prius. I’d gotten a late start – it was already 11 am – so I wondered if they were planning to park here and backpack up the road.
Past the Prius, the road entered a narrow, sandy wash, and truck tracks led right up it, meandering between low banks, over and around small boulders. After a few hundred yards I reached another narrow wash merging down from the left. Vehicle tracks led up both drainages, so I got out and walked up the tributary, and after a hundred feet or so could see tracks climbing a bank ahead. Based on the Forest Service map, this appeared to be my route.
The Forest Service map shows this road climbing a long ridge – but it’s hard to get an idea of how that happens just by reading the map. It had clearly been graded by a crawler – a bulldozer with steel tracks rather than rubber tires – very recently, since the last decent monsoon rain. And my first challenge was one of those 30% grades in loose dirt, so I immediately engaged low-range 4-wheel-drive.
At the top, I emerged onto a long rocky stretch, a narrow ridgetop between deep ravines, with an increasingly better view of the mountain wall ahead. The ridgetop kept making further steps upward, each with another 30% grade. I passed a water pipe running beside the road, and a metal water tank with runoff.
Finally I reached a large, cleared plateau with scattered cattle sign, an earthen dam at its upper end. There was no water in the old “stock tank” behind the dam – it had filled with sediment. Water was draining into the shallow enclosure from a plastic pipe, supporting a lush carpet of annuals. The road continued above the dam, getting much rockier, and the pipe seemed to follow the road down from above. There was a story here, if I could piece it together from the signs.
Past the dam, the rocky road climbed to the rim above the canyon – where GPS topo maps show it ending. An ancient Forest Service sign warned “Trail Closed Due to Hazards Caused by Fire”. But there was no trailhead, and the newly graded road continued down into the canyon.
What I could see ahead was much rockier and more deeply eroded than what I’d driven so far. But that’s why I’d spent a bundle on this vehicle during the past couple of years, so I eagerly started down it.
It was as steep as any other grade I’d encountered today, and toward the bottom it switched from rock and gravel to rock and loose, deeply eroded dirt. I entered a riparian canopy, and suddenly I was in the narrow, shady canyon bottom, facing a sharp left turn across the dry creekbed. I stopped and got out to walk it. The graded road continued as predicted by the old Forest Service map, but a short spur climbed the steep slope at right, dead-ending in a tiny clearing, about where the map showed the old canyon trail starting. No trail sign anywhere.
With some tight maneuvering on a road surface made of boulders, I backed my Sidekick up onto the spur. Then I got out and did some scouting for sign. The only clear tread led up from the left, into a side drainage, but after a hundred yards it turned out to be an obvious cattle trail leading away from the main canyon.
The map showed the canyon trail starting in the dense pinyon-juniper forest opposite where I’d parked. I bushwhacked through that, but it just got denser until it was blocked by an erosional gully, forcing me into the dry creek bottom, where I saw about a dozen black plastic water pipes leading down-canyon, like bundles of spaghetti.
I bushwhacked up the creekbed, diverting back and forth to avoid deadfall and boulders, following water pipes where they seemed to indicate a better route. Often, I found broken pipe ends, but there were always more intact sections of pipe upstream. I concluded that as always happens in these remote drainages, pipes were run after wet years, destroyed in the next big storm event, then abandoned, leaving a growing, near-eternal legacy of trash. I found one short stretch of narrow tread at the base of a south slope, but there were no cairns or other signs of human intervention, so I assumed it was another cattle trail.
So far, the canyon had been so narrow, and the banks so steep, that you wouldn’t want to get caught there in a heavy rain. But after nearly a quarter mile, I emerged into a wider stretch below talus slopes. I shouldn’t really be hiking, so I went no farther. But I’d convinced myself this is worth returning to when my foot feels ready. This canyon bottom is much easier to bushwhack than the bigger canyon I’d hiked into a few months ago, where a perennial stream, riparian thickets, and massive old-growth deadfall made for excruciatingly slow going.
As I said, I didn’t expect the access road to be drivable. And the grading had clearly only been done in recent weeks. I figured I might be the only person in the world, other than the local rancher, who would even try driving this road. So imagine my shock when I got back to the road and saw a big old pickup truck parked just below my Sidekick, blocking the road to the corral.
There was nobody in it. I opened the Sidekick to dig my chilled water bottle out of the cooler, and when I turned to face the road below, two guys were approaching.
“What are you boys up to?” I asked.
“Oh, just out exploring,” said the taller one. They were close to my age.
So we started talking, and even without having to explain who we were, the three of us sensed kindred spirits. They’d been as shocked to see my vehicle here as I’d been to see theirs! After a while we settled side-by-side in the shade on the bank above the road.
They live in the valley near where this road meets the highway. Both hikers, like me, they’d always wondered about this canyon, but had figured the road would be impassable since the fire. We all agreed it was a hell of a coincidence that the three of us had ended up here at the same time, soon after the rancher had re-opened the road with a friend’s bulldozer. We figured we truly were the first people apart from the rancher to reach this spot since 2012.
One of the guys was a retired trailbuilder – he said, like me, he prefers bushwhacking to following trails. “I never want to see another trail in my life,” he said, chuckling.
We entertained ourselves by identifying trees in the riparian canopy in front of us, and sharing stories of local people from our mutual acquaintance.
They had walked up the road to the corral, and when it was time to leave, suggested I drive on up there to check it out. So they backed up, and I continued up the road so they could use my parking spot to turn their truck around.
The corral, a rustic construction of juniper trunks bound together by 2″ steel pipe, lay at the center of a big level clearing. More plastic water pipe led across it, but was dry. The road continued steep and rocky from there, so I decided to walk it, hoping to reach a view into the next big canyon to the north. Instead, I discovered that the long traverse across the spectacular slope of the mountain wall is simply more rollercoaster, in and out of ravines. I felt like my day was a big success already, without the risk of driving another mile of steep, rocky road that might get me in trouble.
Returning up the steep grade out of the main canyon, I was surprised to see the pickup just ahead of me. Despite having 4-wheel-drive, it looked like they were having more trouble than me, moving in short lurches, with their much bigger vehicle bouncing and rocking back and forth over the rocks. That seems to confirm my theory that smaller is better in off-highway travel.
I stopped and waited to give them some space. And after they were out of sight, I continued, and found them parked in the saddle, where they waved me past.
It was on the drive down that I pieced a story together about what I’d seen. The rancher clearly decided to finally invest some effort in water features high on the mountain. He hadn’t yet dug out the big stock tank behind the dam, but he’d succeeded in piping water down to that metal tank at the halfway point. I figured the structure at the far end of the road, way past the corral, is an old tank, and his plans from here probably include getting it and the dam working again, so he can run cattle on the upper mountain.
Growing up in the Midwest, where cattle ranching involves nothing but level ground and plenty of seasonal rain, the extremes of Western ranching never cease to amaze me. But like so many backcountry roads, this one is clearly unsustainable! Ambitious plans like this are totally contingent on continued dry monsoons, poor winter storms, access to a big crawler, and deep pockets for diesel fuel.
In any event, I hope that amazing road stays drivable long enough for my foot to recover, so I can explore that spectacular, long-abandoned canyon.
