The Hike That Almost Wasn’t

Monday, December 20th, 2021: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.

This Sunday’s hike barely happened. I won’t bore you with the details, but Saturday was hard, I got up Sunday assuming I wouldn’t be hiking, and by the time I decided I might as well give it a try, I was almost two hours late getting to the trailhead.

Starting late, I should’ve done the hike near home, but my mind was still obsessed with that area over on the west side of the wilderness. Without the time for a serious exploration, I decided to hike the canyon-to-ridge trail that I’d previously given up on as too much trouble for too little payoff. If my body held up, I might be able to reach the junction at 9,000′ where another abandoned trail branched off into unknown territory. I didn’t expect to get much farther in the limited time I had, but at least I’d get a sense of the condition of that old trail.

It was another crystal clear day, just below freezing.

Map shows most of the highest peaks in the range. If you make a diagonal from Nabours Mtn at upper left to Lookout Mtn at lower right, everything to right of the diagonal is only accessible by backpacking, but all of the trails are blocked by thousands of deadfall or blowdown logs. A few people still venture into that part of the wilderness, but not happily. Also, some of the trails shown on this crowd-sourced map are completely wrong. Today’s hike followed the Little Dry trail to a point left of Windy Point, where I could look down over the junction of Spruce Creek and upper Big Dry Creek, where I’d bushwhacked the last time I was in this area. For some reason, the abandoned trail past Windy Point is called Silver Drip.

The farther peak is 9,800′ West Baldy, which I bushwhacked to back in July.

5 months of log entries at trailhead. It seems we’re actually getting more hikers since COVID, and you can see they’re not all liberals. My favorite is “TOO MUCH ANGUS BULL” – the lower half of this canyon has always been infested with cattle, and I can totally relate to the bull issue.

One reason I’ve avoided this trail is the condition of the canyon bottom. The canyon is narrow and very rocky, and would be spectacular if it weren’t choked with deadfall and post-wildfire thickets. All the crowd-sourced websites show the trail from the canyon to the ridge top as 3.8 miles, but they omit all the zigzags, switchbacks, and up and down sections required to avoid obstacles in the canyon bottom. And because of the towering cliffs and forest cover, I’m sure there are huge gaps in everyone’s GPS readings. The hike to ridge top takes a minimum of two hours, and I’m convinced it’s closer to 5 miles.

The saddle at 8,240′ is no place to linger. That’s where I hit the first patches of snow from our storm a couple weeks ago, and the north slope below the saddle was coated by a couple inches. The trail continues straight east up the next steep section of ridge then starts a series of six long switchbacks, none of which are shown on the maps, before traversing around a white conglomerate cliff into the bowl at the head of Little Dry Creek. There, you face the arc of ridges that top out at over 10,000′. I’d previously bushwhacked up to 9,800′ there, but now I was hoping to turn off onto the abandoned trail at about 9,100′. I was looking forward to getting above 9,000′ for the first time in months – usually the higher elevations are inaccessible this time of year due to deep snow.

There was virtually nothing left of the old trail, but I clambered over deadfall, followed gaps in the oak seedlings, and used occasional sections of tread maintained by elk, for a few hundred yards, reaching a level clearing on the shoulder of the next outlying ridge.

The descent into the canyon involves a lot of up and down to get around rocky obstacles

Creek running pretty good in most places

Finally past the obstacle course, I traverse a thousand feet up to the ridge top, surrounded by the arc of 10,000′ ridges at the head of the canyon. The bump at the right end of the ridge is West Baldy, the 9,800′ peak I bushwhacked to up dangerous talus a few months ago.

Past the saddle and the long series of switchbacks, the trail rounds an outlying promontory to get a view of my destination. Up there somewhere at left of the peak is the junction with the abandoned trail.

There’s actually almost no trail left up the ridge, but I’ve hiked it a couple times before so I know more or less where I’m going

See the trail? Neither do I, but that’s okay.

A view northwest across the canyon of Big Dry Creek and a saddle I bushwhacked to last summer

Last summer, I had lunch on that section of rimrock left of the distant saddle

See the abandoned trail? You have to imagine it’s there.

First stretch of abandoned trail blocked by deadfall.

Next stretch is just a corridor through the oak seedlings

No tread at all here, but it’s got to wind up at that saddle

Clearing on a shoulder of the mountain

Beyond that clearing, a solid thicket of Gambel oak had completely obliterated the trail, but another couple hundred yards past the thicket, I could see the old trail crossing a wide talus slope. That’s one of the few good things about talus – as long as it stays clear of vegetation, it preserves trails.

Due north of me were some of the highest peaks in the range, and thousands of feet below me were the parallel canyons of Spruce and upper Big Dry Creeks, whose junction I’d bushwhacked to last July on another abandoned trail. It was a great view, but all that country was essentially inaccessible to humans now due to post-wildfire deadfall, blowdown, and regrowth.

Since I couldn’t get any farther, I had some extra time. I hung out there for a while, soaking up the views, eating a snack, and reminding myself not to rush the return hike. I hadn’t even expected to hike today, so it was sort of a free day anyway.

The old trail went straight through that post-wildfire oak thicket and between those charred snags, toward the talus slope in the background

There’s the old trail crossing the talus

My view to the north from the saddle, across the canyons of Spruce and upper Big Dry Creeks, with the highest peak of the range left of center

At lower left is the junction of Spruce Creek and Big Dry Creek, where I bushwhacked last summer on another abandoned trail

Unlike the other hikes I’d done recently, this return was almost all downhill. Not to say it was easy – in addition to the usual loose rocks, I faced that canyon obstacle course, which is equally hard going up and coming down. But I finally realized I just had to stop thinking of it as a trail, and treat it as a bushwhack. So much of hiking is in your mind, and your mental attitude.