Bad Luck and Trouble
Monday, April 4th, 2022: Bear, Hikes, Pinalenos, Southeast Arizona.
Trying to maximize the time available for my Sunday hikes without rushing and stressing out, my weekend schedule is tight, and I’m still having trouble adjusting to daylight savings time. This weekend I set my alarm to go off early, but still ended up getting a late start, because I couldn’t decide where to go. I really wanted to return to the range in Arizona with a trail that climbs through granite boulders – it’d been almost a year since I’d been over there – but it comes at a high cost.
I burn a prodigious amount of energy on these hikes, and end up starving afterward. But it’s a two hour drive, and there are no restaurants along the way, so I need to end the hike in time to get back home at a reasonable hour. I never like to drive home in the dark anyway, because of the chance of deer on the road. Those time constraints generally result in shorter hikes than I can do closer to home. But for other reasons, the cost of today’s hike was much higher than usual.
The day was forecast to be partly cloudy with a high of 70 at home. Perfect hiking weather. But I wasn’t thinking about elevation and aspect – the trail starts 1,000′ lower than home and is fully exposed on a south-facing slope for most of the way.
One reason I like this trail is that it’s a steady 4,000′ climb to the crest. But since most people prefer an easy hike, trails in this range are intended to start at the paved road on top and end at the bottom, where there is no marked trailhead. You have to know the turnoff onto a high-clearance 4wd track that meanders a few hundred yards into the foothill scrub, and then you have to know where to start the trail, a few hundred yards beyond the end of the track. I figured all that out on my first visit.
Nobody had driven that 4wd track recently, but it’d been fully trampled by cattle. The boulder-strewn base of the mountains alternates between meadows, dense scrub, and giant old Emory oaks, and the trail meanders between them while climbing gradually into the complex topography of the foothills. I could hear the cattle before I saw them – they were grazing a grassy basin to my left – then while stopping to stretch I was surprised by a cow and her calf emerging from the oak scrub a few yards away.
This is generally a good trail, and a very beautiful one, but it’s seldom used. One large man had walked the first mile or so recently, but his footprints ended soon. Even the cattle seem to stick to the foothills and never venture higher.
Flies were bad and I had to pull on my head net shortly after starting. Small flowers brightened the trail, and the Emory oak leaves were turning. We think of deciduous trees as changing color and losing their leaves in fall, but the Emory oak does this in our windy season of March and April.
The day felt hot from the beginning. My memory of this place was rusty, and things had changed in the eleven months since my last visit. The steady climb that yields spectacular views is exhausting, and last summer’s wet monsoon had resulted in overgrowth of the trail by grasses and shrubs. Near the bottom it was thorny mesquite that scratched my hands and made me especially grateful for thorn-proof pants. Since virtually no one besides me hikes the full trail, grasses had obliterated much of the tread and hid rocks that kept throwing me off balance. Game trails often had more tread than the hiking trail, so I really had to rely on memory and cairns, which were themselves sometimes buried in overgrowth.
Fortunately the flies disappeared beyond the foothills – hopefully they were localized around the cattle. But it seemed to take much longer and require much more effort than expected to reach the midway point, a saddle in the ridge that stays to your right during the climb. Since the entire trail, ending at the crest highway, is only a little over 6 miles – shorter than my usual Sunday hikes – my plan had been to add a mile or two on a side trail. But I was so fatigued by the halfway climb I wondered if I’d even be able to finish this trail.
The second segment of the climb to the crest runs through completely different habitat: a unique mixture of scrub oak and fir forest between outcrops of white rock. The vegetation is so dense you know it’s the product of wildfire and is now overdue for another burn, but in the meantime it’s a great place to visit. But in dense vegetation, protected from wind, it felt like it was 80 degrees, and my head net went back on because the flies in that area were terrible.
Entering the shadowy old-growth fir forest near the crest I got a second wind. The second milestone on this trail is a tiny saddle where it crosses to the north side of the crest and enters dense, cool fir forest – the third completely different habitat adding to the appeal. It’s a 3,200′ climb to that saddle, and while traversing upward on that north slope you occasionally get glimpses through the firs of the vast Gila River Valley 5,000′ below to the north.
Shortly after starting that traverse I heard the voices of a young couple hidden in the trees above the trail. Like most people, they’d walked down from the crest highway and were just hanging out. Three quarters of a mile farther, near the 8,700′ high point of the trail, I heard kids yelling and screaming on the little peak above – more people who’d simply walked over from the crest highway – and that made up my mind about what to do next.
Just below the peak there’s a signed junction – a trail that’s sort of the mirror image of mine, climbing from the northern foothills. I couldn’t remember anything about this trail, but I figured I’d explore and use it to add mileage and elevation for the day.
It surprised me by dropping very steeply through more dense fir forest, in a seemingly endless series of switchbacks, the most I could ever remember, some of them only two or three dozen feet long. Due north of me I could see a white rock spire and knew there had to be a saddle between me and it. I figured that would be my turnaround point, but it seemed to take forever to get there, in 600′ of descent that I would then have to climb out of.
When I finally reached that saddle in a small sunny clearing, it was hard to leave it. But my hip was hurting and I couldn’t afford to delay.
I counted the switchbacks on the way up – 32! But they actually made the steep climb tolerable. It was late enough now that everyone else had left and the only sounds were from wind and birds.
Heading down the south slope from the junction saddle, my hip was so sore I took a pain pill and began favoring that leg. Precarious footing on loose rocks, swarms of flies – but in partial compensation, those endless views!
As expected, I made much better time going downhill, but in the foothills, where tread was often buried under grasses, I first got confused, and then got completely lost.
In a level patch where grassy slopes declined on three sides, there was a nice big cairn, but nothing more that looked like a trail. Why hadn’t I noticed and marked this spot on the way up, like I usually do if the way seems confusing?
I spent 20 minutes scouting far and wide for trail in all directions beyond the cairn, but could find no sign of trail. I was now running late, so I said “Screw this, I’ll just bushwhack.” Far below I could see a little rocky peak. I knew the trail crossed a grassy saddle just before it, then traversed the left side. If I just headed straight down I should intersect the trail somewhere.
With the deep grass hiding sharp rocks and drop-offs, it was slow and hard going. After another 20 minutes, I came upon another cairn and the continuation of the trail. I figured I was now a half hour late.
I was in one of the prettiest parts of the trail when a golden eagle flew over, hazed by a small, screeching hawk. I couldn’t get a picture because they were directly in front of the setting sun.
Further down, I found the cattle in exactly the same place as 8 hours ago.
The drive home was uneventful until dusk, when the highway home climbs through the foothills of the low mountains south of town. I’ve occasionally found deer standing in the road there and am always paranoid. I did pass a small group standing off in the grass on the right, but they didn’t even raise their heads as I drove past.
Then, about 10 miles outside of town, when visibility was getting poor, I suddenly noticed another small group standing off in the brush to my right, grazing peacefully. I was driving the speed limit, 65, but since they weren’t on the move I figured I’d make it.
But just at that moment, one doe darted directly in front of me, the length of her body slamming against the full width of my car’s grille, and her sideways momentum combined with the forward momentum of my car threw her limply all the way across the highway to my left.
She was killed instantly, and parts started flying off the front of my car. In shock, I slowed and pulled over and got out to check the damage. The car seemed to be running fine, but the grille was gone, the front frame and hood were slightly buckled, the radiator fan was just hanging loose behind the bumper, and the headlights, glass completely gone, were barely hanging on by their wires.
It was getting dark fast, and I focused on just getting home, especially since my headlights were useless. Approaching town I started to smell anti-freeze and knew I was on borrowed time. I took a detour on back streets to avoid cops. The temperature gage still looked normal. But a block from home, the engine emergency light came on and I noticed the temperature gage was pinned in the red. I managed to roll up to the curb in front of my house just as smoke started pouring out from under my buckled hood and I turned off the ignition.
I was still in shock, but I knew this was an overdue initiation to rural driving, and I was very lucky. A guy in his 20s had recently died just outside of town after swerving to miss a deer, and one night in the Sierra Nevada of California, my dad rolled his car, was thrown out into a field, and broke his collarbone after swerving to miss a deer. More recently, one of my oldest friends hit a buck while driving home late and, like me, barely made it home with his crippled car.
