Raynaud’s Camera
Monday, January 24th, 2022: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Rain, Southwest New Mexico.
Distractions at home have been preventing me from reaching my weekly target levels of hiking, and last Sunday’s hike, on an unfamiliar trail near the heart of the wilderness, didn’t provide the elevation gain I needed. So this Sunday I was looking for something that was still relatively low-elevation – to avoid deep snow – but with a lot more elevation gain. I decided to revisit my favorite trail over on the west side. It’s a hard trail, but if I could make it far enough, it would yield over 4,000′ of gain.
The day’s forecast was partly cloudy, with no precipitation, and a high in town of 46 degrees – a little colder than we’ve been having recently. The rest of the week was forecast to be clear – sadly for our drought, no rain or snow on the horizon.
Those partial clouds were moving over from the southeast as I started down the trailhead into the canyon of the first creek. And surprisingly, I could see some serious snow clouds several miles to the south.
Given the forecast, I’d dressed for cold but not for rain or snow. And given our mild winter so far, I’d forgotten the lifelong lesson that weather in mountains is unpredictable. But the sky over the canyon ahead was still mostly clear.
What worried me more, initially, was the roar of the creek. I wondered what the crossing would be like. When I got all the way down the rocky trail, I was able to find a couple sticks and some partly-submerged stepping stones that managed to keep the icy water off the uppers of my boots.
The first thing I found heading up the steep, shaded trail on the other side was a dusting of sleet, apparently from last night. And as I climbed the 1,400′ slope to the peak of the rolling plateau, I could see snow clouds moving over the head of the canyon and dropping snow that gradually hid the high ridges beyond. I was still hoping the weather would avoid me, but I figured I was now in for an unusually cold hike.
The next thing I found, as I approached the peak, was another swath of vegetation butchered by the backcountry horsemen in the name of trail clearing. Since this trail had already been cleared by previous volunteers and was in good shape the last time I’d been here, I could now see that what they were doing was selecting cleared trails and widening them into wilderness super highways.
As I started across the rolling plateau that fills the divide between two major creeks, I could see snow clouds and falling snow hiding peaks and ridges all over the mountains, from north to south. And I saw how the backcountry horsemen had left, in many places, a nearly continous berm of slash piles beside the trail that would act as fuel for future wildfires, channeling fire along trail corridors, allowing it to move freely for long distances through the mountains.
Particularly sad was how they targeted beargrass and yucca, beautiful native plants that apparently scratch their horses’ legs – so they chop them to the ground wherever they can, far back from the trail.
When I finally reached the last saddle above the canyon of the next creek, cloud cover was complete, but I’d still only encountered very sparse flurries. The initial hike led through some 6″-8″ snow drifted in the narrow drainage at the head of the descent, which began dampening my boots, which I’d learned were not waterproof. But my feet were still keeping warm. I eventually moved out of the snow-covered drainage onto the steep, seemingly interminable, rocky switchbacks that led more than a thousand vertical feet down to the tall ponderosa forest of the creek’s tall banks.
The horsemen hadn’t worked the switchbacks – there was already a broad clear corridor in that stretch of trail – but they’d clear-cut the dense creekside willows at the crossing. Unfortunately, with the creek swollen from snowmelt, there were no stepping stones for hikers at the crossing, and I had to work my way up the remaining willow thicket about a hundred feet to find a crossing point.
I still had an hour before I had to turn back, and I assumed, from their note on the trail log, that the horsemen had cleared the stretch of trail up the other side of the canyon. This was the only stretch that previously had some hard to follow stretches that slowed me down a little. Maybe I could get farther now – maybe even make it to the third creek?
But as I started up the trail, which alternated between dense bunchgrasses, steep rocky slopes, and thickets of oak and mountain mahogany, large flakes of snow began to shower down in earnest. I kept pushing and found, again, broad corridors where the horsemen had clear-cut living shrubs and piled them alongside the trail. They hadn’t improved navigability for hikers at all, and they continued to target yucca and beargrass, ignoring deadfall in favor of killing living plants.
My time was up when I reached the saddle above the next creek. No matter, I was content to turn back because I knew my elevation total for the day would be good.
The snow gradually ended as I worked my way back toward the second creek, but now I had a new problem. The snow had melted on all the bunchgrass in the trail, and my heavy canvas pants were getting soaked. I had lightweight thermal bottoms in my pack, but the temperature was still only a little above freezing, and I hated to stop and take the wet boots and pants off to put them on.
My feet were now wet inside the boots, and I knew that eventually I’d have to change into the spare pair of wool socks in my pack. Fortunately my hands stayed dry and warm inside my wool glove liners. I made it back down to the creek, bushwhacked to my crossing point, crossed easily, and headed up the endless switchbacks on the other side of the canyon, hoping the climb would generate enough body heat to keep my extremities warm, maybe even enough to dry out my heavily soaked pants a little.
That climb is normally the hardest part of this trail, but a positive mental attitude made it manageable until I reached the narrow, congested, snow-drifted drainage near the top. It was snowing again, my wet legs were freezing, and my wet toes were starting to burn, so I stopped in the snow of a level stretch of trail in the dense riparian forest. I laid out my thin plastic tarp across the snow as a changing area and began to undress from the waist down. My camera was in its holster on my belt, so I moved it to the pocket of my shell jacket. I had to take off my gloves to untie the double-tied boot laces, and by the time I’d finished working with the wet laces, my fingers were burning with cold – always a scary thing, because it takes so long to warm them up again, and I was not sure I could even do that in these damp, near-freezing conditions.
But there in the dark, snowy forest, with fumbling fingers I managed to get my pants off, pull on the thermal bottoms and wool socks, force my legs back into the soaked pants and my now dry-socked feet back into the soaked boots, and double-tie the boots yet again.
I immediately pulled the glove liners back on, and with difficulty yanked my heavy Goretex ski gloves on top. Packing the wet tarp in a plastic bag I bring for emergencies, I continued up through the deep snow of the narrow drainage, flexing my burning fingers and toes constantly to improve circulation and maybe return some heat into them.
My toes warmed up fairly quickly, but I had to keep flexing my burning fingers continuously for another 45 minutes as I climbed to the saddle, dropped hundreds of feet into the next hollow, and again climbed hundreds of feet up the next rise of the plateau, where I was surrounded by a dense cloud that hid the surrouding forest, canyons, and mountains, with snow falling continuously.
All but one of my fingers had finally warmed up, with feeling returning so I could use them normally, when I reached a stretch where the horsemen had left a slash pile right on the trail. I figured I would get another picture of it, and discovered my camera was gone. Christ! What was happening to me? Was I losing my mind, or was I under some sort of curse?
I was sure I’d taken it out of the holster when I’d stopped to change, putting it in my jacket pocket. I was sure I’d scanned the ground around the trail after changing and shouldering my pack to leave that spot, to make sure I hadn’t left anything. I thought I remembered seeing nothing there that I’d left behind. I even checked my pack, but the camera wasn’t there.
The jacket pocket was recessed enough that I couldn’t imagine the camera falling out by itself, unless I’d taken a big fall, which I hadn’t. I’d simply lost my camera – this camera that I’d bought last summer, after weeks of searching, to replace the identical model which I’d dropped so many times it’d stopped working. I’d been developing a new protocol to protect the new camera, getting the holster for warmer conditions, training myself to use the wrist strap whenever I took it out to carry, moving it to the jacket pocket when the weather got cold. As much as I hated giving it up, I thought I could probably buy yet another replacement. Going back to find it, after suffering so much from the cold, having to climb all those hundreds of feet again on some of the worst stretches of trail, seemed inconceivable. And the extra time spent retracing my steps would mean finishing the last mile or two of the hike back to the vehicle in the dark – maybe even having to recross the creek in the dark. So I continued on the winding trail across the long brushy rise.
It was only a hundred yards farther that I realized I hadn’t only lost my camera – I’d lost the photos I’d taken so far that day. That was the last straw. Damn it, I would just have to go back and try to find that camera.
The thermal bottoms and wool socks had done the trick – although still wet, my legs and toes were now warm enough, as long as I kept moving. The middle finger on my right hand still had no feeling, but by the time I reached the bottom of the deep hollow, after an hour of continually flexing my fingers, feeling finally returned to that finger and all was copacetic.
Crossing that hollow, I suddenly remembered that the thin wrist strap of my camera usually hung out of the jacket pocket, and occasionally caught on passing branches. Whenever that happened, I would feel it – it would usually bring me to a stop until I disengaged the strap from the branch. But maybe I hadn’t left the camera in the snow of that drainage – maybe a branch had pulled it out of the pocket somehow, without me noticing?
The climb out of that hollow to the last saddle is the hardest part of this trail to follow – blocked often by major deadfall, deeply eroded, with many informal, unmarked detours. Heading up it, I remembered a steep passage where the old trail is completely blocked with a fallen dead tree with all its branches intact. When you’re ascending, the way around it – through a steep, narrow gap in vegetation – is fairly clear. But descending from above, you always end up on the old trail and have to clamber through the limbs of the fallen tree to reach the detour. That would be the logical place for a branch to grab my camera.
When I reached that spot, 2/3 of the way up to the saddle, I first saw the fallen tree blocking the old trail on my left. Then I peered into the shadows of the narrow detour, where I saw my camera, hanging against a rock, suspended from an almost impossibly delicate branch.
The glass display had been scratched in several places, and the edges of the metal body had been nicked from swinging against the rocks as it was pulled out of my pocket, but the camera still turned on. The display itself now had a jagged black line of missing pixels down the left side, but otherwise it functioned normally. And best of all, I didn’t have to continue climbing to the saddle and down through the snow of the other side.
I resumed the hike with fresh energy. My new camera protocol had been an experiment, and now I had information that would help me improve it. The camera was still just a tool – like my car, my computer, my power saw. It wasn’t the purpose of my adventures – it was just something to help document those adventures. I would never mold my behavior significantly around it – I just had to take reasonable care of it.
One thing that makes this my favorite trail is the views from the rolling plateau. The snow had finally stopped, but as I recrossed it, the entire landscape round me was hidden under clouds. Storm clouds had spread across the west and I could barely tell where the sun was in its descent to the horizon.
Hidden though it might be, the sun was clearly setting by the time I started down the switchbacks into the first canyon. There was just enough light left to cross the creek, and then on the final ascent to the trailhead on the mesa, I tested my night vision as long as I could, finally strapping on my headlamp for the last extra-rocky stretch.
The road down the red clay surface of the mesa, which had been frozen in the morning, had turned to wet cement during the day, and raised a deafening splatter against the underside of my vehicle. I switched into 4wd low to avoid sliding off. And my fingers, on the steering wheel, became numb yet again.
This is something that’s been happening occasionally, for as long as I can remember. There’s nothing I can do about it, but it gradually fades away over a half hour or so. After the scary incident on the hike, I began wondering if the occasional numbness could be related to the sensation I feel when my fingers or toes get cold. Other people say their extremities get numb when cold, but mine burn as if they were on fire. It’s really scary – I’m always convinced I’ll get frostbite and lose my fingers – and I have to work really hard to get rid of it.
So I looked it up when I got home, and discovered, after all these years, that I have an authentic medical condition called Raynaud’s disease, or syndrome, or phenomenon. It’s rare and the cause is unknown to science. It simply means that the blood vessels in your extremities contract in response to cold or stress, cutting off the blood supply and causing numbness or pain. There are no effective treatments – you just need to try to avoid stress and cold temperatures. As if!
