Autumn Leaves, Part 6
Monday, November 30th, 2020: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
Ground-Truthing the Data
It was now the end of November. We were finally getting nightly freezes, into the 20s, but the sky was still mostly clear. This Sunday was expected to rise to the low 50s in town, but I knew that in the mountains, in shady canyons I’d freeze, whereas on a sunny ridge I’d be sweating.
I’d missed my midweek hike, so I was hoping for something long – 13-16 miles – with a lot of elevation gain. A return to the trail where I’d hacked all that locust would be perfect, because I could potentially add a mile or two to my previous one-way distance without all those thorns slowing me down. But when I checked the map, I could see that it still wouldn’t take me into significantly different terrain, or yield significantly new views. Once you get into the back country here, it’s all, unfortunately, much the same.
However, I couldn’t think of any more attractive options at this time, so I packed up and left town fairly early. It’s a one hour drive to the trailhead, so I had a lot of time to think, while gazing at the peaks I was slowly approaching. I began to consider the next trail to the south, the one I’d last hiked over a year ago, finally giving up on it because a jungly section in the canyon bottom took up so much time that you couldn’t reach interesting destinations on the upper trail.
My mind flipped back and forth between the options as I drove toward the mountains. My original destination would be a sure thing, but it’d only been a few weeks since I’d last been up there. Just before reaching the turnoff for the “jungly” trail, I made a snap decision and took it.
It’s a long drive on a couple of slow dirt roads through pinyon-juniper-oak foothills. I slowed to pass a father and son out hunting. When I finally got to the trailhead it was empty, but the log book showed regular visitors over the past couple of months, typically two or three parties per week. The most recent, a party of two, had claimed a 4-night hike, which was really encouraging. That indicated they’d hiked the entire trail, which meant it should be passable for me, despite the official trail condition report saying it was impassable beyond Windy Gap.
Like I said, I’d last hiked this over a year ago, but I’d hiked it three times so I retained a rough outline of it in memory. One thing about this trail is the scarcity of information online, which in turn indicates how little used it is, at least in the past decade of GPS data logging and sharing. Maybe people have been discouraged by the jungle in the canyon, or by the official claims of obstructions and poor tread. But I think another obstacle has been gross inaccuracy of GPS distance data for this trail, and the complete lack of online trip reports. This trail is an online mystery, despite leading to the most distinctive peak in the range.
I’d first heard of it back in 2008, at a party held by one of my neighbors. A couple hours after dark, her younger brother had shown up, saying he’d tried reaching the peak – supposedly a 9-mile one-way – with some younger friends, only to turn back when he realized it would take much longer than expected. He was a big guy, an athlete, but it was just too much for him. The others had continued, and he figured they might not get back until after midnight. He said it was a real killer, way too challenging for a day hike. But that was before the big wildfire.
As noted in other Dispatches, after a fire, these trails gradually turn into obstacle courses, first through erosion and then due to deadfall – the trunks of fire-killed trees – “logs” – fallen across the trail, sometimes up to three together, and as many as half a dozen every ten feet. It takes many years, sometimes decades, for all the fire-killed trunks to fall, and with each passing year, more fall. The Forest Service does very little trail clearing, mostly leaving it up to volunteers, and the volunteers are overwhelmed, so many trails are simply abandoned, depending on their popularity and other factors. High elevation trails are the hardest to clear because that’s where the continuous stands of big trees are.
Recently I’d been forced to come to grips with these abandoned trails – I just needed more distance than the cleared trails had to offer. The physical struggle to climb over, under, or around these obstacles was partly psychological. If you expect a good trail, you’re more likely to give up. But if you expect an obstacle course, you’re more likely to persevere.
Since the 2012 wildfire, I could only find one trip report for this trail – in 2017 – and two GPS data sets: one from 2017, charted on a site called HikeArizona, and the other anonymous, from AllTrails. The trip report, by a guy who hikes and blogs about New Mexico trails, only covered the early canyon-bottom section of the trail, since the guy lost the trail where it starts climbing the ridge. The HikeArizona route is a mystery – the only actual trip report on that site documented a young woman bushwhacking a completely different route, not shown, using 4wd roads to the south to access the peak from a different direction.
Another data set is embedded in Google Maps – strangely enough, because it’s the only trail mapped in this area, and Google Maps seldom shows forest trails. And it gets stranger: whereas the HikeArizona GPS route for this trail is wildly inaccurate, and the AllTrails GPS route omits most of the many switchbacks, the Google route is fairly accurate, but includes no distances.
The GPS distances shown on AllTrails and HikeArizona can’t be relied on, since they don’t include the switchbacks, but it’s also clear that they’re way off because even the easy parts of the trail take much longer to walk than they would if the logged distances were accurate. For example, the first real milestone on this trail, Windy Gap, the point where you get your first real view over into the next canyon, is logged by AllTrails and HikeArizona as 3.7 miles from the trailhead, but takes 2-1/2 hours to hike at top speed in the best conditions. And past Windy Gap, both crowdsourced sites deviate wildly from the actual route.
Once I got down into the canyon, I realized I’d forgotten how beautiful it is – much rockier than the canyon I usually hike to the north. That, in turn, makes it a more challenging hike and results in the narrow jungly section in the middle where fire-erosion debris and thickets make for slow going. Unlike in the canyon farther north, the stream here was running the entire distance, and with its many small waterfalls, made for a great soundtrack.
A mile or so in, I came to the first major obstruction, a huge pine trunk that I’d previously had to climb over – and somebody had cut a gap in it. Yay! Maybe a crew had been working on this trail, without yet entering it in the official list.
The farther you go, the more dramatic the canyon trail gets, as it climbs dozens of feet up and down to get around boulder falls, between overhanging cliffs. But more surprising at this time of year was the fall color! Peak color in this canyon seemed to be a month later than it’d been in the canyon to the north. The maples were hallucinatory, and in two days it would be December.
I didn’t find any more evidence of trail clearing, but the jungly section seemed much easier than before, just due to tread laid down by recent visitors. The only thing that really slowed me down was the need to stop and take off clothing as I climbed out of the canyon. I’d started in the 30s, but while climbing in sunlight, it felt like the 60s.
Each of these crest hikes, which have been partially cleared since the fire, features a prominent initial milestone: a high peak or saddle. The first time I hiked the trail, that was my destination. Subsequently, it became only the starting point for the additional mileage and elevation I was aiming for. Windy Gap was the first milestone on this hike. I’d made two forays beyond that last year, the first about a half mile, and the second to a second saddle nearly a mile beyond. Today I was hoping to use the second saddle as a starting point. Ignoring my previous experience with distances on this trail, I was relying on the GPS data, and hoping to reach the big peak, which the GPS data showed was only a little over 7 miles in. I’d been doing 15 mile round-trip hikes easily, so why not? The 360 degree views up there, at 10,658′, should be amazing!
I reached my previous milestone, the second saddle, by about 12:30. This was a little worrying. According to the GPS this would be only about 4 miles into the 7-mile hike. I should turn back at 1:30, which meant I had only an hour to do a further 6-mile round-trip on a trail the Forest Service claimed was impassable.
But I forged ahead, and soon discovered the trail was indeed abandoned. Confusingly, there was a handful of pink or orange ribbons, placed seemingly at random, that I used to confirm I was going in the right direction, but no actual trail work had been done, and even the ribbons soon disappeared.
I got around dozens of obstacles, and scratched my head a few times regarding which way to climb, but in general, I could always find some tread, even if it was no wider than an animal trail. There were definitely no human tracks, and it soon became evident that no humans had been this way in recent years. Not only were there no human prints in patches of bare dirt – only the occasional elk hoofprint – there were trees that had fallen long ago, with dense, rotten branches blocking the trail, that anyone passing would’ve had to break off. That party claiming the 4-night backpack had clearly been fantasizing.
I was climbing up the side of a broad bowl toward ridges that arced around the head of the canyon below, climbing toward high stands of aspen – some killed and fallen like matchsticks, others still thriving. The living aspens had been landmarks on previous hikes, especially when carrying their fall color, but all the foliage was gone now, at nearly 10,000′. Occasionally leaving my own cairns or rock arrows at questionable turns, I finally summitted a last group of switchbacks below the first ridgeline, and began a traverse that seemed endless, at a minimum 30% grade. It took me across talus slopes into the first big grove of fallen, bonelike aspens, where I encountered my most daunting obstacles.
Still, I kept going, nearly a mile on the long, steep traverse, until near the ridge top, I came to still more switchbacks. I checked my watch – I hadn’t even reached the midpoint of the arcing ridges, but I was well past my planned turnaround time to get back to the truck before dark. I could keep going, fighting the obstacles and scouting for trail, but that would force me into difficult route-finding in the dark through the jungle in the canyon bottom, which might add another half-hour to my return hike. And I now realized that the GPS data was so far off, it could take me another 3 hours to reach the peak. 7 miles to the peak! Hah! It was more like 7 miles to where I was now, and 10-11 miles to the peak.
This was no auspicious turnaround point. The trail wasn’t even level – I was just trying to maintain purchase on a steep slope, thousands of feet above the canyon, in a thicket of aspen and locust seedlings. But I figured I’d gone 7 miles and climbed well over 4,000′. My body was pretty thrashed from fighting the obstructions and the steep grades, and I had a 7-mile return hike with very steep descents and that rocky jungle/rollercoaster between cliffs in the canyon bottom. At least I had a clear satellite signal to log position on my own GPS message unit.
My legs were burning by the time I returned to the second saddle. Then I brought my knee up to straddle a big log in the trail, and screamed with pain. My inner thighs had caught fire with cramps, both of them, and I toppled to the ground on the other side of the big log. I tried to straighten my legs, but it only made it worse. I was screaming and rolling back and forth, there in the wilderness, high in the sky. I’d never felt such pain from cramps, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. I tried to get up to stretch, but the pain brought me back down. I tried to reach a leg up to stretch against the log, but every time I moved the cramps got worse.
Finally, lying on my stomach for I don’t know how many minutes, I was able to relax enough to carefully stand up. I began to hobble stiff-legged like Frankenstein, and gradually, with a hundred feet of walking across the saddle, the pain subsided. Then I did some stretching and drank some more water. I’d been drinking water regularly, but apparently not enough, and I was obviously short on electrolytes. Maybe I should start carrying some kind of electrolyte supplement in addition to water.
My legs recovered and I quickly descended into the canyon. Shortly after hitting the canyon bottom, with the sun beginning to set, I encountered another hiker just starting up the trail. It was a young guy carrying a smallish pack, but when I asked if he was doing an overnight, he said he just wanted to get somewhere with a view before dark, then he’d hike back out.
I told him he was shit out of luck, the sun would set before he’d reach the first saddle. I warned him not to get lost in the dark, but he said he had a couple of GPS units to keep him on the trail. Hah, good luck with that! But he was a nice guy and clearly wanted to chat. This was his first hike in the Gila – he’d just finished hiking in the San Mateos far to the northeast, in the recent burn scar. I recommended the next hike to the north, where the trail was much clearer and the accessible views better.
It’s interesting – before COVID the only other hikers I encountered on these trails were locals my age or older, but now, I seem to mainly run into twentysomethings from out of state. This guy was from Texas but clearly hadn’t grown up there – no accent.
I got through the jungle fairly easily, and reached the truck before dark, but as I started to drive out, a bright light flashed in my rearview mirror. Had the young guy given up and turned back right after meeting me? No, it was the full moon rising behind the mountains in the east, to light my way home.
