Stone for Joan
Monday, December 6th, 2021: Hikes, Rain, Southwest New Mexico.
Last week’s hike was so epic, it would be hard to top – and besides, I needed to take it easier on my recovering foot and hip. By Sunday morning, I’d convinced myself to head east of town to repeat an easy ridge hike I’d probably done a dozen times before.
But as I packed for the hike, I found myself longing to return to the same area I’d hiked last week. It seemed I just couldn’t get enough of that place – it was the rockiest area I’ve found in our local mountains. Including last Sunday’s hike, I’d hiked the ridges on both sides of the ten-mile-long canyon, but I hadn’t explored the abandoned trail in the canyon bottom, which would be passing between and looking up at all those stone promontories, cliffs, and pinnacles.
The only recent information available on that trail comes from the website of a guy who’s obsessed with waterfalls. He and a friend went up the canyon in 2018, encountering a 75-year-old man who they claim “has long been repairing and maintaining trails that the feds have discontinued and abandoned”. Frankly I was skeptical of their story, but I’d printed out their low-resolution map and would give it a try. If the trail turned out to be a bust, I planned to follow the main trail to the next ridge and bushwhack off it up the ridge as far as possible, to look down on the canyon from a different perspective.
But if I succeeded in following the abandoned trail through this wonderland of rocks, I would dedicate this hike to my mother, Joan, who is always asking me for “more rocks”!
It was a clear and cold December morning at home – 37 degrees. At the trailhead I found only one log entry since my visit a week ago: someone from the nearest village who said they were going fishing in the creek. I was a little bemused since in my experience the creek had been ephemeral and intermittent and I’d never seen fish in it.
But down the trail a bit, when I got my first view into the big bend far below, I saw a bright ribbon of water, and as I hiked lower in the morning sun, shedding my jacket, I could hear the creek rushing noisily over rocks in the canyon bottom.
The mesa around the trailhead is heavily used by cattle from the Moon Ranch, and fresh cowshit preceded me down the rocky trail, but disappeared by the time I reached the wilderness sign a half mile in. I saw no sign of cattle in the canyon itself.
The canyon bottom was dark and so chilly I had to put my jacket back on. It’s a mile and a quarter down into the canyon and across the creek to the junction where my favorite trail continued up the other side, and where I believed the abandoned canyon trail branched off north. The canyon trail is not signed – there’s only a fallen, broken sign for the ridge trail.
I headed up the unmarked branch, and found it to have good, but very narrow, tread. The map showed it closely following the creek, but that’s at low resolution. In reality it climbs high above the creek to clear obstacles, then drops down and crosses to the other side to avoid more obstacles, as the creek itself winds back and forth through this 2,000′ deep canyon.
For the first quarter mile or so I found it easy to follow. I didn’t see any evidence of trail maintenance by the mythical 75-year-old. It was blocked occasionally by deadfall, but less so than many of the regularly maintained trails I use. There were cairns, but most of them were minimal, buried under vegetation, and hard to see. From the abundant recent scat, it was clear that bears were the most active users of this trail. They, not some phantom human, were keeping it open for the rest of us.
I was eagerly hoping to get to the really rocky part of the canyon, but my progress was slow because the trail was so hard to relocate at its frequent creek crossings. The creek itself disappeared underground before I’d gone too far up it, leaving a broad dry bed of cobbles. But I gradually came to trust the ancient cairns. If you started by assuming they were buried under vegetation, they became easier to find. The trail’s tread might completely disappear for up to a hundred yards, but if you followed natural openings in the vegetation and rock formations, you’d eventually be able to find another buried cairn.
I was anxiously watching for a big side canyon to open up on the left – the big canyon I sat above in the stone saddle at the end of last Sunday’s hike. I’d been curious as to whether you could actually hike that side canyon. When I finally reached it, it appeared at the bottom as a broad washout, old enough to have cairns and descending tread on both banks. But once across that washout, it took me forever to locate the next cairn and the continuation of the trail. From there on, I expected to see more rock – I’d be passing directly below the monumental rock formations I’d looked down on last week.
The canyon did get a little rockier, but the upper slopes still lacked the impressive formations I expected. Back and forth I crossed, looking for buried cairns, following tread when it was available. Suddenly I came upon the remains of a recent campfire – a fire ring filled with ashes and unburned trash – directly in the trail, in a narrow passage where you couldn’t avoid it. What the hell? Who would build a campfire on a public trail, and even worse, walk away without dispersing it? The ashes were really fresh, so I suspect it was the local who came “fishing” only three days earlier.
I kept going, figuring I’d disperse and restore it on my return. And eventually I began seeing some fanciful rock formations on the slopes above.
Now I was in rock heaven, in the heart of the canyon. Bedrock in the canyon floor kept the creek running on the surface, often for long level stretches with deep pools. And cliffs and house-sized boulders forced the trail to climb steeply for up to a hundred feet above the bottom before descending and crossing again.
This local rock is not “real” rock like the sandstones of Utah or the granite of my beloved Mojave – as crumbly volcanic conglomerate, held together by tuff, which is just compacted mineral dust, it’s a poorer quality rock for climbing. But surprisingly, its eroded shapes are similar, from a distance, to the familiar forms of sandstone and granite.
I reached a broad grassy meadow where a tributary creek poured out of a really big side canyon on my left, and up that canyon I could see the back side of the ridge I’d wanted to climb last Sunday, 3,000′ above me now.
My time was getting short. It had been a slow hike, partly because the trail had often been hard to follow, but also because I’d stopped a lot for photos. I didn’t really know how long it would take to get back. But I wanted to reach the point, near the top of the main stem of this creek, where the map showed the trail finally leaving the canyon proper and clinbing up the right-hand slope to the ridge above the canyon, marked “steep difficult trail” on the map. That would be a real milestone.
Unfortunately, past the big side canyon, which was already quite a ways past where I’d hiked last week, I entered a long stretch of narrow canyon shaded by towering walls, where the trail had to climb even steeper and higher above the creek to avoid giant boulders and cliffs. I was racing against time now.
Again and again I dropped down a steep left-hand slope and crossed to the right side of the creek, thinking this might be the place, only to find the trail recrossing to the left side again. Finally I reached a point where the left-hand wall of the canyon seemed to come to an end. The trail crossed the creek and climbed a short ways to where it was blocked by deadfall, with no visible tread beyond. I unshouldered my pack, sat on the big log blocking the trail, pulled out my map, and saw that I’d in fact reached my goal – this was the base of the trail to the ridge top! A short distance up the canyon was the top of the main stem of the creek, where three major tributaries came in from west, north, and east.
What a canyon! This was definitely the rockiest, most spectacular place I’d found in these mountains. And once you knew what to expect, it was surprisingly easy to hike.
It was getting late. I wasn’t even sure how many miles I had to hike back, let alone whether the return hike would be easier now I’d done it once. My only hope was that I’d reach the main trail in time to use my headlamp, because there was no way I could find all those buried cairns after dark.
The return did prove to be easier. I stopped and dispersed the campfire on the trail, and restored it as best I could. We’re expecting rain this week, so that should help finish the job.
On the long hike down the canyon, I realized I preferred this to all the other actively maintained and “recently cleared” trails I normally use. This trail has just enough tread and markers for me to be able to follow it, without being easy for other hikers. I didn’t see a single human footprint on the trail, and hopefully mine will quickly wash away. The old hiking trail is basically just a really good game trail at this point. I’d like to keep it a secret for me and the bears.
In the end, the sun set nearly a half hour before I reached the main trail, but my eyes adjusted to the gradually falling darkness so that I didn’t even have to use my headlamp climbing out of the canyon.
On the 20-mile drive down the mesa, I stopped when I realized the night was as dark as it was going to get.
I got out of the vehicle and gazed for a while at the Milky Way arching overhead, picking out the old familiar constellations. Despite living under one of the clearest skies on our continent, since my house fire, I hadn’t had a chance to relish a night sky like this. It felt so good.
