Day of the Cosmos
Monday, November 28th, 2022: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Sapillo, Southwest New Mexico.
Last Sunday’s knee problem meant that this Sunday’s hike wasn’t guaranteed. I’d had to ice several times a day for three days just to get rid of the pain, and I assumed that the steep, hard-packed downhill stretches of last Sunday’s hike – over 4,000 vertical feet – were to blame. Previous knee problems had taken up to three months to resolve, so I was heartsick thinking I’d have to give up my beloved high-elevation hikes for the near future, and lose even more of the lung capacity I’d tried so hard to regain.
But I’d rested that knee for a solid week, and I wanted to try an all-day hike on fairly level terrain to see how it would hold up. The problem was, around here, whereas most of the mountains are public land, all the level ground is private – fenced cattle range. And the only level trails in the mountains are canyon-bottom trails, which either involve dozens of river crossings or have been severely damaged by monsoon floods.
Well into my second day of poring over maps trying to find a level hike, I remembered the hike I’d done over on the east side last winter, which started up the broad floodplain of a long but fairly shallow canyon. The average grade of the foothills there is only about 6 percent, with the canyon bottoms gaining even less. The Continental Divide Trail goes a couple miles up one of those canyons before climbing into the hills, and I saw a tributary canyon that extended an additional 4 miles without much elevation gain. Based on what I’d seen in that area, I should be able to bushwhack up its floodplain pretty easily, yielding up to 12 miles out-and-back of fairly level hiking. On new ground, inside the wilderness area, with no company and hopefully no livestock!
Another day of clear skies and freezing air. I was aware that the eastbound trails in this valley cross the big creekbed, but near enough to its head that it should be dry by now. What I didn’t expect was to find – within a few yards of the trailhead – a flood 12 feet wide and 6 inches deep, clear water flowing over grass. Probably runoff from irrigation upstream.
I thrashed my way downstream, through shoulder-high brush, looking for a place to cross, finally spotting a fallen log that felt solid. But to cross it I’d need a stick, which I found farther downstream – a dead lower branch of a small juniper.
Once across, I beat my way back to the trail, and could see an earthen dam across the mouth of the big canyon I was headed for, dimly remembering some kind of small reservoir on the map. The CDT led up the forested slope to the right of that dam, emerging behind it for a view of its mostly dry basin, filled with mud, gravel, and rocks from post-wildfire floods – a depressingly post-apocalyptic landscape.
That would be my route for most of the next two miles. The CDT did provide a few detours off the coarse debris flows and the uneven, hard-frozen mud of the brush-choked floodplain, but I used up a lot of time scouting for a path.
I’d brought a map, but it wasn’t detailed enough to clearly identify the side canyon I was targeting for my knee-friendly bushwhack. I passed one tributary, but didn’t think it was big enough so I kept going. After the first mile, the main floodplain narrowed and began winding back and forth between low cliffs of coarse volcanic conglomerate.
I’d used up so much time finding my way up that nasty debris flow, I was now an hour and a half into my hike and I still hadn’t found that side canyon. As the main canyon had narrowed, large cairns had appeared linking surviving segments of the CDT that shortcutted the bends of the canyon, in the shade of the canopy up on the banks above the streambed. The stream itself was intermittant, but flowed vigorously when aboveground.
The problem now was that the intact segments of trail were overgrown by the armpit-high stalks of my old nemesis, Cosmos parviflorus. As a genus, Cosmos is both a wildflower and a popular garden flower, but all species produce burrs – seed capsules – that stick to clothing and animal fur, which is how they’re spread. Cosmos provides a great learning experience about invasive plants! Although a few species are declared invasive by state governments, ornamental cosmos are still widely planted – my new neighbor has them all over her yard – and wild, native cosmos are spread by humans, livestock, and wild animals alike, to dominate large areas of disturbed habitat, such as trails, where they quickly become an irritant to the very animals that spread them.
I knew I’d spend the rest of my day accumulating and laboriously picking them off my clothing, but there was nothing I could do but forge ahead, trying to anticipate stands of cosmos and keep my arms raised.
The canyon bottom had been heavily trafficked by horses, and the frozen mud was deeply postholed, but whenever I crossed a sandy stretch of streambed I found the footprints of a couple of hikers who’d been up here in the past week or so.
Finally, about 2-1/2 miles up the narrowing, winding canyon, with the now-picturesque stream running aboveground and dark cliffs towering above, a cairn beckoned up the left slope and I realized I was at a crucial decision point. This was where the trail left the canyon and climbed to the ridge. If I wanted to protect my knee from a downclimb, I should just turn back and find that side canyon. But I didn’t want to turn back when I had a trail to follow and the hike was just getting interesting. Maybe it wouldn’t turn out to be a long, steep incline, and I could take it easy enough on the descent so as not to trigger my knee.
Unfortunately, the initial trail up the spur of this outlying ridge was the steepest part, with almost a 30 percent grade. But as a spur of the ridge, I knew it would become gradually gentler until it virtually leveled out at the top.
Most of the ground was covered with the hated volcanic cobbles, but these are easier to ascend on, so I continued in denial of how hard the descent would be. The biggest problem was that the farther I climbed, the more the trail was overgrown by armpit-high dead grasses and annuals, which hid the treacherous rocks underfoot and included copious amounts of cosmos. On some stretches, I could see a suggestion of trail ahead where someone or some animal had faintly trampled the dry vegetation, but these stretches were intermittant, and I often had to stop and scout for a route. The few cairns were thoroughly buried in vegetation and only appeared when you were right above them. I eventually concluded that nobody had been up this trail since the peak of the growing season, late in the monsoon. Local hikers largely avoid these famous national trails, so their use tends to be minimal except in spring when through hikers start their journey north.
Although the grade did gradually become gentler and gentler, the uphill trudge through dense overgrowth, over hidden rocks that continually tripped me, through an open woodland of pinyon, juniper, and oak that blocked my view over the surrounding landscape, felt interminable, even Sisyphean. At least I was in sunlight all the way – the ground was uniformly frozen and a dusting of snow remained under the low trees.
Suddenly, through a gap between trees to the east, I glimpsed the peaks of the range, white with snow! We hadn’t had a storm in town since September – how had this one missed us? It had to have been really recent – we’d had some clouds late in the past week – and I realized the peaks, reaching over 10,000′, were showing the snow more because their forest had been cleared by successive wildfires.
On a brief steeper section of trail I looked back for a view west, and glimpsed a big redtail hawk wheeling out of sight behind the forested ridgetop at my left. Then, a half hour farther up the ridge, I stopped and glanced back again, and saw the hawk perched at the top of a low snag, watching me from about 80 feet away, looking huge. By the time I got my camera out it had disappeared.
Finally the ground virtually leveled out, the dry vegetation transitioned to mostly low grasses, and the trail became even harder to follow – but as if in compensation, more cairns appeared, some tall enough to be visible above the grass.
Despite the general lack of views, the occasional stands of cosmos, and the treacherous rocky ground, the endless golden meadows dotted with low trees provided harmonious surroundings, and the sunlight kept me warm, so I was coming to enjoy this unplanned hike anyway. I knew the trail would eventually descend into more canyons and basins, but that was 8 miles in and I didn’t have enough time left in the day to do the whole thing. I figured I’d end with 6 or 7 miles one-way.
I could see a taller ridge looming ahead to my right, and what eventually happened was that I seemed to lose the trail as my ridge approached the base of the higher one. The forest became denser, and my faint trail branched into several even fainter possibilities, one of them leading downhill. I pursued each of them for a few dozen yards, only to reach obstacles where even the faint disturbances in the grass disappeared, and had obviously been created by game. So I tried the downhill option. In short stretches it almost looked like there was an old trail underneath the dry grass, but these traces faded so I finally stopped to call it a day, logging my position with my GPS unit.
These national trails seem to be cleared annually, and next year’s crew have their work cut out for them! But amazingly, when I checked the position at home that night, I found that against all odds I’d still been on the CDT, and had turned back at exactly the right spot, before the trail gets really steep again as it descends into a side canyon.
Returning to an open gate I passed through a half mile back, I noticed a huge bootprint in the frozen mud. Some big guy had been here at the end of the rainy season, probably right after the last storm in late September.
It was here that I became truly lost, and lost my cool for a while. After passing through the gate, the trail seemed really clear for a few dozen feet, then got really sketchy, especially since the woodland was denser here and much of the ground was in shade. I spent nearly a half hour pursuing several alternatives that gradually petered out after a few hundred yards. Each time, I retraced my steps to the gate, finally remembering how a sharp turn had immediately preceeded the gate itself. I finally relocated that sharp turn, and there was my trail – a faintly trodden path no more than 8 inches wide, barely visible in the shade of a juniper.
As expected, the descent over volcanic cobbles was really hard and really slow, but I’d given myself plenty of time and remained in a good mood. In fact, I realized that since returning from the desert, I wasn’t pressuring myself to accomplish marathons of distance and elevation, and hiking had become a pleasure again, instead of a trial.
Plus, the low angle light of late afternoon was highlighting the grasses, which were, if anything, more beautiful dead than alive.
I did get lost once more, and lost another 15 minutes pursuing alternatives, but as usual, eventually found a route that was confirmed by a hidden cairn.
By the time I reached the canyon bottom, it was mostly in shade. I was dreading the final stretch of debris flow where the trail disappeared, but the winding part, where the trail was largely intact, seemed to go on forever, with the canyon getting darker and colder all the way.
Interestingly, I found the bootprint of a hiker who’d come up the canyon today, after me, only going as far as the base of the trail to the ridge. He’d been wearing Merrill Moabs, the favorite lightweight hiking boot around here and the boot that had eventually triggered my chronic foot pain.
Eventually I did reach the debris flow, and lost the trail in the center of the floodplain, so I ended up fighting my way for hundreds of yards through dense, dry riparian brush, on uneven, partly thawed muddy ground. I missed the place where the trail past the earthen dam drops into the debris, and ended up having to climb over an abandoned fence past deep pools of standing flood water before reconnecting with the last of the trail out of the canyon.
At home, after checking alternate views on my online mapping platform, I found that this one is ironically named Rocky Canyon. And it hosted such a big debris flow because it meanders 17 or 18 miles from the northern crest of the range, descending 2,500′ on the way.
