Canyon of the Bulls
Friday, June 21st, 2024: Blue Range, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
For over twenty years I faithfully performed a personal ritual on the winter and summer solstices, inspired by the sweat lodge ceremony at the end of my 1990 field course in aboriginal skills. Then, health issues and family obligations began to interfere.
But I still try to be mindful of the solstices, wherever I happen to be, whatever else I have to do on those days and nights.
This year, I had a commitment the night before, preventing me from rising before dawn and traveling to a place where I could observe the sunrise. After a long hiatus from hiking, I’d found a hinged knee brace in my closet from an injury many years ago, and wanted to see if it would enable me to start hiking again. I really wanted to get out in the wilderness, but all of our nearby wilderness areas are mountainous, and I needed to minimize the elevation gain on this trial run.
I finally decided to try a secret trail over near the Arizona border. I’d discovered this trail on the Forest Service’s website last year, while looking up another trail in the same area. The secret trail is shown nowhere else, and when I tried to retrieve the Forest Service map on this solstice eve, I discovered that they’ve removed the map feature from their website. The only map I could find that shows this trail is in an obscure internal Forest Service study that I dug up online in PDF form.
The trail starts at a pair of electric power transmission towers, in a remote, unpopulated spot a mile off a lonely highway. Despite being omitted from public maps, it has an old trailhead kiosk, literally on the wilderness boundary. But this is a relatively small wilderness area, so remote and obscure that even the published parts of it see very little visitation.
Except for cattle. I’d first checked out the trailhead last winter during a rainstorm, and discovered that because the trail is a secret, the only current users are cattle – which should theoretically not even be in a wilderness area.
Not far past the kiosk is a fence and a gate – I guess it keeps the cattle in the wilderness from mixing with the cattle outside.
And in all fairness, the habitat inside the wilderness area looks really healthy.
The transmission towers stand on a low peak with a view west over the entire wilderness area, which encompasses an expanse of mid-elevation ridges and canyons ending at a high mountain on the state line. The canyon bottoms dip as low as 5,500 feet, and the ridges rise to 8,000 feet on the west side.
Big cumulus clouds were forming and shifting around in the blue sky, high winds were forecast, and I expected the temperature in the canyon bottoms to approach 90 in late afternoon. The hard-to-find map shows the trail leading over a series of ridges, down and up and finally down into a northwest-trending canyon, where it follows the canyon bottom for a couple miles before joining a much longer trail. I was dreading the heat and was hoping the canyon bottom would feature a canopy of shade trees.
By the time I reached the far side of the ridges and could glimpse the canyon I was heading for, it appeared that the knee brace was useless. The secret trail turned out to be in really good shape – because of heavy cattle use over the years – but the grades were steep and rocky and I had to take short steps to protect my knee.
Cattle sign was actually pretty sparse, and thankfully at least a month old.
Finally I reached the canyon bottom, where I was surprised to find both big sycamores and a few big ponderosa pines, which are normally found at much higher elevations. But the canyon bottom turned out to be wide and sandy, with virtually no shade.
Despite being kept a secret by the Forest Service, the trail was well marked with big cairns. As the canyon twisted back and forth like a snake, the trail continued upstream, crossing and recrossing the wide dry wash, keeping mostly up on the bank in the sandy floodplain. It was bright and hot in that canyon, but the farther I went, the more the floodplain filled in with trees – oaks, willows, walnuts, two species of junipers, pinyon pine, sycamores, and a few ponderosas – so I eventually got some patches of shade.
Farther up, some pools of stagnant water remained in the creekbed. And on the now-shady floodplain, I finally emerged in a clearing, noticed a crude wire fence at my right, and turned to see an old log corral tucked back in a dense grove of trees. And when I turned forward again and walked across the clearing to study where the trail led from here, I saw the bull.
He almost looked like a brahma, but was probably some kind of Angus, and was hornless like most of the bulls in this region. Standing in the shade below trees at the edge of the bank, he was staring at me, so I started talking to him. After a while he turned away and resumed grazing. What to do?
The last bull I’d seen had let me walk past him, but that was in an area with frequent campers and hikers. This bull had probably seldom, if ever, seen humans. The canyon is really wide at this point – another big canyon joins it from the west, so I couldn’t easily detour to my left. I decided to try climbing the right slope and traversing above the bull, because there was a wall of dense vegetation between him and that slope.
Bad idea. I made an effort to be really quiet, but he either heard or saw me through the trees, and began bellowing angrily, again and again, while crashing directly up through the forest toward me.
I immediately turned around and began traversing back across the slope, hoping to get the fence and corral between me and him. The bellowing and crashing stopped, but dense vegetation still separated us, and he could’ve been crossing the clearing toward me, so I kept escaping as quickly and quietly as I could, re-entering the riparian forest downstream from the corral. It was like an obstacle course, but I was motivated.
About a half mile down the canyon, as I was rejoining the trail on the bank above the big dry wash, a terrifying, angry noise exploded out of the canopy on the other side. It was much louder than the first bull and sounded like some legendary monster out of the time of the gods in a Greek myth. It had to be another bull, but I’d never heard anything like it. I couldn’t see him, but he must’ve seen me.
The only thing I could do was keep fleeing down the canyon and hope that would satisfy the invisible monster. I skipped the crossings and stuck to my side, and before I knew it I was at the base of the trail up the slope.
Now it was sweltering, there was no shade, my knee was hurting, and the trail was really steep. So I took it slow, with short steps and frequent stops, and as I climbed, the wind blew stronger – that was the only thing that saved me. Somehow I made it back to the peak with the transmission towers.
I guess this is payback for failing to perform the solstice ritual…
