Another Abandoned Trail
Monday, July 3rd, 2023: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
I’d waited six weeks to be able to do a real hike – probably the longest hiatus ever. Sure, I’d walked over 50 miles during that interlude, but mostly on level terrain in the Midwest and the canyons of Utah. For my return to serious hiking, I didn’t want to overdo it at first, but I also wanted something interesting.
Since last winter, I’d been trying to find a way to the crest of the northern part of the long north-south mountain range east of here. I’d avoided that area in past years because the west side of the range consists of dozens of long east-west ridges divided by deep, narrow canyons. It’s anomalous topography; most ranges in the West are block-faulted (tilted), with a steep face on one side and a gentle rise on the other. The west side of this range is elevated and almost level, more like a high tableland cut over time by myriad parallel streams.
The canyons are generally too narrow to support roads, but a few of the east-west ridges are relatively flat on top – finger-like mesas – and dirt forest roads have been graded up these, occasionally all the way to the 10,000 foot crest. Hence most of the west side – the only side accessible to me – was left out of the wilderness area, and is still grazed by cattle.
The plus side of these roads is that theoretically, they offer access to high-elevation trails. But this range has also been deforested by two successive mega-wildfires, and I’m discovering, hike by hike, that the trails I hoped to follow to the crest have mostly been obliterated by erosion, deadfall, shrubby regrowth, and general disuse. Their remoteness has always made them less popular, hence they’ve been omitted from recent trail work. Like most trails in this new fire regime, they’re listed as “Open” on the Forest Service trail guide, but they’re essentially abandoned and increasingly impassable.
Today’s goal was an area near the high point of the range, where one of these “mesa” roads leads to the junction of two creeks, with trails leading up each of them to the crest trail, so that I could potentially do a loop, ascending one canyon, hiking a little over a mile on the crest trail, then descending the other canyon. It would be a total of 13 miles and 2,700 feet of elevation gain – an easy day hike by the numbers. But I had no idea what condition I would find the road or the trails in, and unusually, there was no recent information online. The last trip report dated from 2011, before the first big wildfire.
I’d tried to take this road in early April, but it starts with a river crossing that had been flooded then from snowmelt. Today I found the channel only about six inches deep, but past the crossing, the road becomes surprisingly rough and rocky as it climbs steeply to the mesa. My 4wd Sidekick needs work so I was driving my little 2wd truck, and I was really worried about how it would do on this unfamiliar road.
About 8 miles up the gently rolling mesa, the road begins traversing steeply down into the narrow canyon on its right, and here’s where the drive became really exciting. It’s a narrow high-clearance section over jagged bedrock – with a virtually sheer drop-off, hundreds of feet to the canyon bottom, at right – and the farther down I went, the more worried I was about my little truck being able to climb back out of it. Finally I reached the fork that led down to the creek, and a hundred feet down that I came to a steep section of white clay with deep erosional ruts I knew the truck couldn’t handle. But when I tried to back up the shallower slope to the landing at the fork, I immediately lost traction – the driving wheels are in the back while most of the weight is in the front.
I’ve been in this situation many times, and after blowing tires repeatedly on rough roads, I recently installed all-terrain tires, so with a little tricky maneuvering I managed to get back to the landing, where I parked, shouldered my backpack, and set out walking down the steep forest road.
I’d awakened this morning with a profound sense of impending doom, something that occurs regularly as part of my anxiety syndrome, and worrying about my truck and the road put me in a pretty black mood, but I expected the hike to cure that. I wasn’t sure of the elevation here – probably in the low 7,000s – but I was surrounded with beautiful, intact alpine mixed-conifer forest. I’d packed for weather in the 90s, but here and now it was in the high 60s and often shaded by drifting, partial cloud cover.
However, I’d been immediately swarmed by little flies when I first got out of the vehicle, and before I’d walked a hundred yards I had to dig out my head net. It was going to be one of those days.
The road wound down through the forest onto the floodplain of an intermittent stream, where it got sandy and passed the ruins of a cabin and corral. Shortly after that, I came to a five-foot-deep sheer washout. Nobody was driving past that anymore.
After scrambling over a long debris field and rejoining another section of the old road, I came to the junction of the two creeks. What was left of the old road continued up the left branch, so I began searching for the trail that led up the right branch. I’d read that there was a trail sign here, but there was nothing remaining of it or the trail – apparently victims of catastrophic post-fire flooding.
Exploring along the left creek, I eventually noticed a shallow dip in its bank, with a matching vague dip in the opposite bank. I crossed and headed up the far bank, where I found no trail, but continuing across a meadow, noticed the slightest sign of an old road cresting a rise, overgrown and littered with boulders. This beginning would set the tone for the rest of my hike.
This narrow side canyon had mostly intact forest in its lower part, but it had experienced serious flooding and erosion. Instead of a trail, I found remnants of an old road, most of which had been washed out, so that my hike alternated between stretches of climbing over and around deadfall on a gentle slope, and picking my way across debris flows and logjams in the creekbed. I found signs of cattle but they looked to be about a decade old. The creek was almost completely dry, but flies continued to swarm me.
It was slow going, and I soon gave up any hope of the 13-mile loop. I was looking for the first milestone, where the canyon would veer left and another “trail” would head straight over a low saddle. On the way, the slope at my right became a burn scar. I finally reached the left turn in the canyon, and saw the low saddle ahead, but I was bushwhacking at this point – I could see no trails anywhere. Then, squinting through charred snags in the canyon bottom, I thought I noticed a wooden sign on a dead tree trunk.
Like the abandoned cabins I occasionally find, this trail sign with no trails was a poignant reminder of how temporary our so-called “Anthropocene” really is. Everything we build is a future ruin.
A little more scouting revealed the scattered remains of a sign for the trail up the canyon. But before proceeding, I wanted to climb to the low saddle, hoping for a view into the next watershed. So I started bushwhacking up the drainage. It was a short climb, and in the saddle I found an actual trail and a cairn on the edge of the burn scar. This trail descends about five miles to a valley filled with spectacular white rock pinnacles I hiked to a few years ago.
Returning from the saddle, I found the remains of the old trail leading back down to within a hundred feet of the junction sign in the canyon bottom. It was so overgrown I hadn’t noticed it from below. Now I needed to find a way up the canyon.
The left slope was very steep and eroded, so I started bushwhacking up the right slope, where I soon found what appeared to be an old cattle trail, blocked often by deadfall. This trail, deeply pockmarked in loose dirt, climbed high above the creekbed, which was now flowing intermittently. In places, it even looked like the remains of a human trail, but I hadn’t seen human footprints anywhere all day, not even on the road.
The cattle trail descended to the creek, which was flowing over bedrock, and the intact forest ended. From here on it was all burn scar and dense regrowth, much of it thorny locust.
Rain clouds were massing over the head of the canyon as I picked my way up the creekbed, looking for more old cattle trails I could use to bypass debris piles and logjams. I often found one that would then disappear in a thicket of thorns or a mass of blowdown, but the deeply eroded creekbed had become impassable with flood debris and the right bank was too steep, so I had to keep fighting my way up the slightly more accessible left bank.
Eventually, after pushing through an especially nasty thicket of locust, I came upon what appeared to be a remnant of the old hiking trail. Now it was getting really dark, I heard thunder to the north, and before long it began raining. The old trail was often interrupted by erosion, deadfall, or blowdown, but it was still much better than fighting through thorns, and although thunder continued, the rain slackened by the time I reached a big level area at the head of the canyon.
Here, the map showed the trail veering left toward another low saddle. But the remnant of trail ended, so I simply headed off in what I thought was the right direction through low undergrowth and a maze of charred, fallen tree trunks. The level area continued for hundreds of yards. I finally saw the low saddle off to the left. The map showed the trail making a sharp right just below the saddle, then traversing the slope of the ridge that had been on my right while crossing the level area. This ridge would’ve been my route to the crest of the range, if I’d been able to make good time on an actual trail instead of routefinding and bushwhacking all day.
But at several points on this hike I’d thought to myself, this is just my kind of trail! My favorite kind of hiking is without a trail at all, but it’s hard to do that in densely vegetated habitat. A trail on the map suggests that there is a way to reach some interesting destination. And an abandoned trail makes finding that route a challenge – and potentially an adventure.
I could find no trace of the old trail anywhere below the saddle or on the slopes below the ridge. The ridge itself bore stands of intact forest but the forested slopes consisted of the earthen mounds and pits left by the roots of fallen trees, so traversing them was like walking across moguls on a ski run. I kept studying the topo map I’d brought, trying to guess where I was, but it was fairly low resolution – I was never sure exactly where I was on the slope.
Finally I reached the top of the ridge, where I faced a seemingly endless thicket of locust and ferns. It’d continued raining lightly on and off, and just as I started through the thicket the temperature dropped and thunder crashed nearby. I was on an exposed ridge in a thunderstorm, just inviting a lightning strike, but there was nothing to be done about it.
It was almost time for me to be turning back. I estimated I’d covered less than a third of the planned loop, and I hadn’t reached anything of interest that I could consider a satisfactory destination. But as the thicket got thicker, I found myself approaching some white rock outcrops, and behind them I sensed the saddle where my route would cross into the next watershed and begin its ascent to the crest.
Thunder crashing behind me, I pushed through the last of the thicket and found myself on a pretty little forested ledge surrounded by boulders, with a view of the crest in the east. I knew I was finally above 8,000 feet, but would later learn it was closer to 9,000. I’d found my destination, at the most dramatic moment of the day!
The storm was moving away by the time I left my little ledge and began retracing my route. After I traversed the level area below the ridge and rejoined the old trail, I found it easier to follow it and cattle trails all the way down the overgrown burn scar of the upper canyon. Easier to follow, but painful – an entire day of sidehilling in loose dirt in my more flexible dry-weather boots had been really hard on my problem foot, and I vowed yet again to add foot exercises to my weekly regimen.
The sky was clearing and the whole landscape was now so vivid I felt like I was tripping on acid.
The lower canyon was a different story. Although it was wider and often had an actual floodplain, it had been so torn up by flooding that I seemed to spend most of my time climbing through debris. Finally in the worst pile of logs and boulders I lost my balance and fell, bashing my elbow on a hidden rock. It was a pretty minor cut but surprisingly produced the most blood I’ve shed in these past five years of serious hiking. Especially considering that everyone warns me not to hike alone, and a friend fell off a cliff and died while hiking solo.
My anxiety returned and increased the closer I got to my vehicle. I mentally ran through the scenarios. If the truck wouldn’t make it, could I back it down to a wide spot? Walking up the ridge looking for a signal for my phone, or walking the nine miles to the nearest cabin, some of it in the dark, to call for rescue. Doubting whether AAA would send a tow truck out that marginal road. Spending the night in the truck – since I’d recently switched vehicles, I wasn’t carrying a sleeping bag.
But thanks to the new tires, the truck made it up the road – with a lot of hard bouncing.
