The Longest Day
Monday, December 18th, 2023: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Rain, Southwest New Mexico.
Trying to regain the capacity to do long, deep wilderness hikes with massive elevation gain, I thought I was ready for one of my favorites, on the west side of our local mountains. It involves steep grades that are brutal on the feet, so I’d avoided it for the past seven months, but I hoped I was ready now.
The sky was clear and the temperature in town was expected to reach the mid-60s. The hike involves crossings of two major creeks, but the drainages are on the south side of the mountains, we hadn’t had any precip in weeks, and I figured flows would be low.
I was surprised to find a new restroom installed at the remote trailhead. As I’d learned on my last visit, there’s a dirt airstrip a short walk away. It serves no purpose other than as a destination for aviation hobbyists, who like to fly into remote strips like this simply so, like birders, they can check them off their life lists. Fly in, fly out.
Anyway, they’d built a pristine new restroom at this trailhead that doesn’t need one, for their private convenience.
The traverse down into the first canyon gets full sun, so I was shedding layers all the way, until I reached the shade of the bottom, where the temperature immediately dropped 30 degrees. It was so cold down there my nose and face were in pain – probably another symptom of Raynaud’s syndrome – so I stepped up my pace.
The climb up the switchbacks on the opposite side soon warmed me up. I’d seen one footprint on the descent, but like most visitors here, other recent hikers had stuck to the canyon bottom, and the trail out of the first canyon had only been used by animals since the last work party, probably last spring.
My energy and wind seemed pretty good, but it still took me two hours to climb the two miles and 1,400 vertical feet to the west end of the rolling plateau, at a 13 percent average grade. It struck me that my old familiar trails are harder now, after months of foot trouble, than they were last spring. And last spring, they were harder than they were a year earlier, before my near-fatal illness. It seems that my loss of capacity is permanent.
After that sobering realization, the “walk in the park” north-eastward across the rolling plateau, toward the dramatic talus-draped wall of Lookout Mountain, cheered me up, and I covered that mile-and-a-half, including another steep climb in loose rock, in only 45 minutes.
The 1,200 foot descent from the saddle at the east end of the plateau, to the creek at the bottom, takes place mostly in shade and involves a steady 19 percent grade, in loose rock, for a little over a mile. Whereas most people find going downhill on loose rock more daunting than ascending, I’ve been downclimbing on this kind of surface for years and it doesn’t trigger my foot condition like going uphill.
Lunchtime had arrived, and I was holding an open bag of homemade trail mix at one point while hiking downhill and trying to do something with my other hand. A dozen or so nuts and sesame sticks tumbled out on the ground, but I still had plenty left, so I kept walking for half a dozen steps before catching myself. You’re deep in the wilderness, dude – waste not, want not. So I turned back and carefully picked every single nut and stick out from among the rocks.
It’s always a relief to reach the parklike ponderosa forest on the lower slope, where the surface immediately changes from loose rock to packed dirt and pine needles.
Sometimes I cross the big creek and traverse the opposite slope toward a third canyon. But my research had suggested that two miles of the upstream trail had been cleared since my last visits, so I wanted to try that today. But it’d taken me 3-1/2 hours to reach the creek, and I only had a total of 8 hours to finish the hike by sunset. Two miles upstream would take me at least another hour, getting me back to the vehicle in the dark. But carrying a headlamp, I wasn’t worried, and I really needed to check out the newly cleared trail, which could take me that much deeper into wilderness.
The upstream trail is another slow stretch, traversing a steep slope between ten and fifty feet above the creek, up and down and in and out of side drainages, around tree trunks and boulders, the forest blocking most of your view. I crossed the creek a few times, scrambled over some blowdown, passed the beautiful bedrock soaking pools I’d discovered a couple of years ago, and finally reached the debris flow where the trail had ended before.
Sure enough, there was now tread leading down the vertical bank and up the debris flow. I knew this was unsustainable – it’d be completely obliterated in the next big flood – but this is the future of trails in the new fire regime.
I had entered a stretch of canyon that had been devastated by the 2012 wildfire and subsequent flooding and erosion. The trail crew had done a huge amount of work here, but unlike trail work I’d seen in other more popular national forests, this was quick and dirty. Tread had been hacked up banks of loose dirt that would wash out in a heavy storm, and brush had been cleared across floodplains that would fill with debris in a wet monsoon. Still, it was new trail so I kept going.
After passing a huge pool, I finally reached a place where the creek ran wide over flat bedrock for 150 feet. I’d used up another hour and a half and really needed to turn back. But I saw a pink ribbon upstream, so I picked my way across, and saw that the trail continued on the other side.
It’d taken me five hours to get this far, and it would take me almost that much time to return. I’d never stayed out this long since I started doing these wilderness explorations, and I knew I’d end up hiking over an hour in the dark – but it’d be on familiar trail, with a headlamp.
On the way back down the canyon, while scrambling over all that flood debris, I managed to fall and slam the ball of my left foot against the point of a sharp rock – which is something I can never allow myself to do, because that’s where the inflammation is always latent. There I was, seven miles back in the wilderness, facing a 1,200 foot climb on loose rock at a 19 percent grade, and I might’ve set my recovery back six years, to when the condition first became acute.
But all I could do was keep going. I could still take short steps, thanks to my stiff winter boots. And when I reached the bottom of that killer grade, I forced myself to climb super-slow, with little mincing steps to minimize the flexing of my foot and the pressure on the ball. I’d never tried that before, and it worked – despite the grade, I could climb continuously, indefinitely, without stopping for breath – something I’d never been able to do before.
It took me an hour and a half to climb a little over a mile up that brutal grade.
The sun was still peeking over the plateau in the west, but I had a mile and a half of plateau to cross, followed by two miles of steep descent on loose rock, and the final climb of more than a mile out of the first canyon. I was trying to avoid rushing, trying to take short steps to protect my foot, but the sun was setting, I was running out of water, and I still had many difficult miles to cover.
The sun set as I descended from the plateau. My night vision is pretty good and I was able to see well enough to reach the steep switchbacks into the first canyon, but less than halfway down I was stumbling too much and strapped on my headlamp.
It’d been full dark for a half hour by the time I reached the first creek. I was still stumbling a lot, because with a headlamp there’s no shadows or contrast and you still have a hard time seeing the rocks in the trail. But I was still forcing myself to go slow, and that helped keep my spirits from sinking. That and the moon and the stars.
I’d seen the crescent moon overhead while back in the second canyon, and now it was setting toward the western wall of this first canyon. A bright red star hung high over the opposite wall, and as I climbed out of the canyon, I could see Orion rising in the east.
When I reach the trailhead, the Milky Way arched over the northern sky, Cassiopeia glittering at the crest. I’d gone fifteen miles and climbed a total of 4,100 feet, it’d taken me almost ten hours, and I didn’t think my body was up for this any more.
I’d brought my new noise-cancelling headphones to try them out – they’d worked amazingly well on the drive up. And now, wearing them again on the long, bumpy dirt road down the mesa, I had a revelation.
I heard every detail of music I’d been missing over professional studio speakers at home. But more than that, I was happy! A drive on a bad road after dark that has always been nerve-wracking was now peaceful. I was suddenly aware of the aural abuse I’d been subjecting myself to for years. I’d always believed that the rough ride was one of the major drawbacks of this vehicle – I needed to either find a solution for it, or find a different vehicle. But now I knew – it isn’t the rough ride, it’s the noise! From highway to 4wd road, the interior of this vehicle fills with an increasing cacophony of engine noise, road noise, wind noise, squeaks, rattles, and bangs.
And I now knew that I’m hypersensitive to noise. Noise makes me tense, anxious, and ultimately angry. It’s a disorder recognized medically as misophonia, and I’ve been suffering from it for years. It began with my neighbor’s barking dog. After two years of that, I went on a road trip in my new vehicle, accompanying a friend, and ended up having unexplained fits of anger so bad that we had to split up, and I sought therapy afterward. There, it was the dog followed by the vehicle noise that did me in. And since that was followed by two years of landscaping ordered by my new absentee neighbor – operating heavy machinery and gas-powered equipment a few feet from my office – I guess it’s no wonder I ended up a nervous wreck.
Now that I’m facing regular air travel, the noise of airports and airplanes is yet another trigger. But finally, I have a solution. And that night, driving home in the dark, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
