High Priced Views
Monday, July 8th, 2024: Black Range, Hikes, McKnight, Southwest New Mexico.
Sunday was forecast to be clear across the area, with a high in town of 95. I faced the same old challenge, finding a hike that would keep me out of the heat without crippling my knee. Reviewing the map of hikes I’ve already completed, I noticed there was a gap in the crest trail east of town. At over 9,000 feet average elevation, it should be cooler, and hiking it would connect previous hikes on the northern and southern segments, yielding a total of 21 continuous miles hiked on that crest.
The out-and-back distance would be ten miles with an accumulated elevation gain of 2,200 feet, which is about all my knee can handle now. The only problem was that the access road is the worst in our region, requiring all of my vehicle’s ground clearance in low-range 4wd to climb over 3,000 vertical feet of exposed bedrock ledges. I’d only driven the entire road once, and had sworn never to do it again.
Plus, I didn’t know what kind of trail conditions to expect – would it be cleared or blocked by logs and overgrowth? There had been two mega-wildfires across that crest – would I find shady forest or exposed thickets? Fortunately, there was a shaded option about an hour’s drive downhill if the crest hike didn’t work out.
I can take the lower gravel-and-rock-lined half of the road at an average of 30 mph, but my vehicle’s safe average on the second half – a distance of seven miles – is 5 mph, with much of it at less than walking speed. Still, I was feeling pretty good until I reached the 9,400 foot turnout for the trailhead, and the inside door handle broke off when I tried to get out. No problem, I just rolled the window down and opened the door using the outside handle.
Then I stepped out into the sunlight, and it already felt like the mid-90s at 10 am. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breeze in the air. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, but it’d taken me more than two hours to get here – I was committed whether I liked it or not.
Another reason why I’d chosen this hike was because it started with a descent, and hence ended with an ascent, which would be easier on my knee. At the beginning, it teased me with a patch of shady forest, then confronted me with a wall of New Mexico locust. The locust, the first wave of regrowth after the alpine mixed-conifer forest had been burned off, had grown to ten or twelve feet tall, and covered the ridges and slopes in virulent green as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by scattered patches of surviving forest.
My route forward was indicated by a shoulder-height corridor of younger growth through the mature thicket. Apparently a crew had cleared a path a few years ago, and new growth had completely fill it in since then. Virtually no one had used this trail in the past decade, so on the ground below, there was no tread – no actual trail – at all. There was only hard, uneven dirt. Not only did I have to push my way through a thicket of thorns, I was continually stubbing my toe or tripping over the stumps that the earlier trail crew had left, which were now hidden under the regrowth.
I’d had a lot of experience with locust thickets before, but never this much – this was probably a hundred times what I’ve encountered elsewhere. It shows how much we lost in these fires, that hundreds of square miles of forest were replaced by this. Of course the main impact is on the native ecosystem, but for me, it involves always hiking in long sleeves and long pants made from a rugged material, and holding my arms upraised in front of me, twisting from side to side as I push forward, to deflect the thorny branches.
Ridge trails wind up and down and around high points and saddles, and the thickets were interrupted often enough by trees that I could occasionally escape the burning high-altitude sun. I saw and heard lots of birds, and although my route was only sparsely scattered with wildflowers, butterflies and other pollinators were abundant.
After about a mile, I came upon what was obviously an old, long-abandoned forest road, and remnants of that would reappear over the next few miles. This led me from the 9,400 foot level to the 9,000 foot level, around which the remainder of the route would oscillate.
My main purpose in taking this route was to see unfamiliar parts of the landscape, to complete my mental map. But in this early stretch, I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen from other angles.
I’d brought a map, and after two miles I knew I was approaching a major saddle, a divide between east and west, at the head of a long west-side canyon. That would be a little more than halfway.
I reached the expected saddle and found myself looking down a long, wide canyon, eerily deforested by the wildfires and lined with bright green locust and Gambel oak. My map didn’t show the name, and it wasn’t until reaching the next big canyon that I realized this is the one hikers sometimes use to do a loop with the next trail. A cairn in the middle of the saddle marked the point where the canyon trail came up, and I followed it a ways down, but it seemed to be equally overgrown with even less tread.
From the beginning, I’d found big logs cut to make way for the trail, which I assumed had been done long ago, after the 2013 wildfire. But now I was beginning to notice logs that seemed to have been cut recently, often surrounded by sawdust. And past the cairn for the big canyon, the nature of my route completely changed. It was lined with cowshit, and occasionally horseshit, and dotted with the invasive grasses that cattle spread. Luckily the cowpies were at least a year old, maybe more.
And I found bear scat only a few hours old, and started making more noise to announce myself.
Past the saddle the route seemed to climb forever, once again through a wide swath like an old road, until it finally crested on a long plateau with expansive views to east and west. The view to the east was across a high, rolling basin, and at the southeast end of it was the 10,000 foot peak I climbed two weeks ago. I’d never seen it from this angle, and today’s hike was intended to link up with the trail I take north from that peak. The long plateau also brought the first breezes of the day, a huge relief in such an exposed position.
I was also joined on my right by a barbed-wire fence; west was cattle country, and east was federal wilderness – but the cowpies on my side proved the fence wasn’t holding.
At the end of the long plateau my route began traversing the west slopes of a series of hills. The old roadway ended and most traces of the route disappeared. I followed what looked like faint animal trails, always keeping the fence in sight below. The fence trended gradually downwards, so I knew I was heading for the junction saddle that would be my turnaround point.
I knew I was on the right track when I came upon a cairn, followed by a ponderosa with a blaze in its bark – neither of which were accompanied by a trail. After a mile and a half, the barest vestige of a trail appeared, and I emerged on the rim of the next big canyon, and saw my old familiar trail descending the opposite slope, with the high peak behind it in the east. That peak is an old friend, and I was now seeing the back side, which I’ve hiked so many times, in perspective for the first time.
Below, I could now see my current route continuing down to the saddle, but I’d visited that saddle many times and it held no attraction. This canyon rim view provided a much better turning point.
It’d taken me four hours to go five miles, fighting through that locust. I dreaded the hike back, especially since it involved more uphill in this heat. It seemed to take forever to reach that midway saddle, but I was so tired I wasn’t even aware I’d passed it, so that in the end, I suddenly found myself facing the final ascent by surprise. That last stretch was the hardest, especially knowing I had that nerve-wracking drive left to do.
With so much locust to push through, I was constantly reminded of how important my hiking clothes are. You can’t get clothes like this at REI – they make outdoorwear as if wildfire never existed, using thin synthetic fabrics that are expensive and wouldn’t last one day in these conditions.
My shirts are made from chambray, a lightweight but tough cotton weave, and my pants are canvas. Thorns do tug at them and they don’t last forever, but they do last at least a year, which for me means up to 1,000 miles of hiking. There are tougher fabrics, but they’d be too hot in our summers.
After seeing dozens of logs sawn through recently to clear this route, I was puzzled that the trail crew didn’t attempt to clear the locust thickets. At home that night, I found an online report that a Forest Service crew from Montana had cut those logs in April. Apparently they were only equipped, or only had time, for sawing logs, so they just pushed through the locust like me. Or maybe they were horseback, and made their horses endure the thorns?
I made much better time returning – five miles in three hours – but the drive down the mountain took 50 percent longer. I hope I never try it again.
