Redemption Hike
Monday, July 26th, 2021: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Conflicting desires this Sunday. The weather was forecast to be cloudy and cooler – in the 70s. So this was a perfect time for a lower-elevation hike, for example over in Arizona where I could get a burrito and a beer afterward.
But for the past few weeks I’d been frustrated with shorter hikes and less elevation gain, so I felt I really needed a bigger hike today to maintain my conditioning. On paper, I’d been investigating ways to get longer hikes by stringing together multiple trails into loops. However, these loops would have to include include trails that were abandoned or in bad shape. The problem with Arizona is that the longer driving time limits me to shorter hikes on bad trails or longer hikes on good trails. So for today, I decided to try a loop close to home, involving two trails I knew to be in good shape, and one that appeared to be long abandoned, with no info available on its condition. As usual, I was just going to take my chances, hoping I could redeem myself somehow if the first attempt failed.
Driving west of town, I could see clouds literally hugging the low mountains ahead. We’d had a lot of rain the past week, and both air and ground were saturated.
The hike starts with a two-mile stretch on an old familiar trail, dropping into a canyon and following it up to the trail junction. As usual this time of year, the canyon bottom was a green jungle, but the creek was barely running. The branch trail, climbing over a ridge into the next, bigger canyon system, leads ultimately to an old miner’s cabin, and is maintained by the Arizona family of his descendents. The Forest Service reports this trail impassable, and at the junction it’s overgrown to the point of invisibility, but once across the creek, it turns into a good trail.
Entering the monsoon jungle of the first canyon I discovered an unexpected problem: heavy dew on all the vegetation crowding the trail meant that by the time I started climbing toward the ridge, my pants were soaked. This was a northwest slope, mostly in shade, so I was hoping that once I crossed over to the southeast side, sunlight from regular openings between the clouds would dry me off. Despite the cooler temps, it was so humid that my shirt was soon soaked with sweat and I had to keep mopping sweat off my brows as I climbed.
One unexpected benefit of this trail was the different perspective I got on previous hikes, which continued north up the first canyon. As I climbed higher, I could see that canyon was much rockier than is apparent from the trail, which sticks to the densely forested canyon bottom most of the way. Above the forest are numerous huge rock outcrops and cliffs.
The miner’s cabin trail crests the ridge at a low saddle, where I had a great new view into and across the bigger canyon. This canyon is eight miles long and very rocky, and there’s no trail up it from its mouth like there are in every other canyon on this side of the range. You can only drop into it from farther up the sides, as on this trail.
The trail drops into the narrow side canyon of the north fork, which is where I hoped to pick up the abandoned north fork trail that climbed to a ridge, far back in the wilderness, where I would return on the continuation of the trail I’d left in the first canyon. The full loop would be about 15 miles, with nearly 5,000′ of accumulated elevation gain.
The clouds shifting around, covering and uncovering the peaks and ridges across the big canyon, made this a spectacular descent. Most of it had been burned in the 2012 wildfire and was exposed, through oak scrub, but I was relieved to find a little shoulder halfway down, shaded by parklike ponderosa forest. Descending past that, I flushed a white tailed deer.
From there the trail got steeper and rockier. I began to hear a roaring from the canyon bottom – this side must really be draining a lot of rainwater!
As I approached the canyon bottom, I checked my map for details of the junction with the abandoned north fork trail. It seemed to be close to the creek, but when I got to the bottom of the canyon it was very narrow, with steep sides lined with dense jungle. The cabin trail just disappeared – the only way down this canyon was via the flooded creek, through overgrown riparian vegetation. There was no sign of a trail junction, and this was no place to linger.
I double-checked my map, which was a just a low-resolution printout from a trails website. Now I could see that the junction probably lay 40-80 feet above the creek, so I began climbing back up the steep trail, carefully examining the right side for any sign of an old branch. After a quarter mile of climbing, I was about 120′ above the creek and had only seen one faint game trail that might be worth exploring, so I climbed all the way back down and tried it out. It disappeared within a dozen yards, and clearly wasn’t the old trail.
I spent about 45 minutes exploring all along that stretch of the cabin trail, bushwhacking several long side trips, and never found any sign of the old north fork trail. It’s just completely vanished. The only thing I could do was return, back over the ridge, to the first canyon. It was a steep climb and I was feeling exhausted and very sweaty as I headed over the saddle and back down to where I’d started, but at least the sporadic sunlight on the southeast-facing slope had dried the dew off my pants.
Approaching the original trail junction in the first canyon, I decided to make up for my aborted loop hike by walking up the first canyon trail a ways. I was pretty beat, so I’d just see how far I could get. I know this trail well, and figured I’d probably turn around at the base of the switchbacks that lead to the crest. That would give me another mile-and-a-half one-way and a few hundred more feet of elevation.
Not far past the junction in the first canyon, I surprised a rattlesnake at the base of a log alongside the trail. It’s always surprising to find a western rattlesnake in such a lush environment. I carefully sidestepped it and stopped to look back and memorize the configuration of rocks and logs so I could watch out for the snake on my return.
When I reached the base of the switchbacks, a tiny clearing in creekside forest, I wasn’t feeling completely exhausted yet. So I started up the switchbacks, figuring I’d stop at the boulder pile before the long traverse up the other side. There’s a really steep stretch leading to the boulder pile, and I figured that would do me in.
But somehow I was getting a second wind! I breezed up the steep part and past the boulder pile. A trail crew had been up here recently and cut up all the logs that had been blocking the trail for the past couple of years, which made it easier. Now I figured I might make it to the end of the first long traverse, where you get a view out over the big canyon where I’d failed to find the abandoned trail. That would really give me some elevation to compensate for the aborted loop.
As it turned out, I was feeling so good, I not only made it to the end of the first traverse, but I continued onto the much steeper and more difficult second traverse, which brought me to the edge of the final ascent to the crest – as far as I got on my first hike on this trail, 2-1/2 years ago. I now knew this was turning into a respectable hike – true redemption for my failure to find the abandoned north fork trail over in the other canyon. Although the combined hikes would amount to a little less than 13 miles, my accumulated elevation gain for the day was now nearly 5,000′. After being pretty miserable a couple hours earlier, I was now elated.
I descended in late afternoon through a forest made magical by alternating low-angle light and blue shadow. It looked like some weather was coming in the west, toward the mouth of the canyon.
Sure enough, when I reached the rattlesnake’s place, it was still there, in exactly the same position, but now it was asleep. It must’ve eaten recently and was immersed in the long, slow digestive process.
Climbing out of the canyon toward the trailhead, I finally got a glimpse of rain, miles away to the south.
It just kept getting better. Light rain appeared on my windshield as I neared the highway, and when I stopped there to loosen my bootlaces, I saw a half rainbow to the south. Rain and rainbows kept shifting around as I drove south, and all the arroyos were in flood. A big storm hung over the Gila River where it emerges from the mountains, and it was way over its banks at the bridge. What a day!
