The Epic of the Icefall
Monday, February 10th, 2025: Basin, Chiricahuas, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
This one’s for those of you who are tired of hearing about my knee…and for those, including me, who’ve been wondering if I’m ever going to do another spectacular hike. In fact, the last spectacular hike I did was the one that damaged my knee, in early May of 2024.
I deliberated far too long over where to go this Sunday. I was still deliberating on Sunday morning, when purely by chance I re-read the description of a trail in the mountain range I hiked last Sunday, a trail I’d always assumed would be boring.
In the middle of a paragraph describing the beginning of the trail, the author of the online guide mentions that if you leave the trail at the first creek crossing and bushwhack two miles up the side canyon, you might be able to reach a waterfall. He added, “Note that it can be quite a rugged off-trail hike to get to the waterfall, especially after flooding has rearranged the area significantly and brought a lot of debris into the canyon.”
In this dry winter I didn’t expect there to be much, if any, flow over the falls. But this hike seemed the best idea I’d had yet.
I’d been planning on doing the smart thing – an easy hike on a well-maintained trail with moderate distance and elevation gain to keep my knee pain under control until I see the doc in a couple weeks. But there are so few easy hikes around here that result in entertaining stories and pictures! A canyon bushwhack would probably be really hard on my knee, but it would force me to go slow, and I imagined I could turn back if it got too gnarly.
It was forecast to be yet another unseasonably warm day, reaching the mid-70s at the foot of the mountains. On the highway south, two young whitetail bucks darted out in front of me, and I just managed to drive between them and the rest of the herd, which I glimpsed in the rearview mirror crossing behind me in a long line. It was pure luck that I didn’t hit one head-on like I did in 2022, resulting in $3,000 worth of damage to my Sidekick, which was virtually totaled. Of course I’m driving my pickup now, which has a steel grille, but this little incident reminded me why I should not drive the Sidekick until the armored bumper arrives in May.
Fifteen minutes later I was driving down out of the mountains into the big basin and saw the range of my destination spread out along the horizon, some 50 miles away. By then, I was constantly coming up with ideas for the new song I’m working on, capturing them while driving as video notes on my camera. I have a theory that road trips in basin-and-range landscapes are best for stimulating creativity – whereas massive, iconic mountain ranges like the Rockies or the Alps enclose and hem us in, vast basins scattered with smaller, widely separated ranges allow the mind and imagination to wander freely.
The trailhead, at just over 6,200 feet, lies in dense oak woodland along the winding, rocky road that leads over the crest of the range. It’s not a popular trail and I left my little truck alone in the small clearing just off the road. It only took me a few minutes to reach the creek, which to my surprise was flowing and clear. I realized this canyon gets a lot of shade in winter; there must still be snow melting up on the crest.
I’d gotten a late start and it was already in the mid-60s here, so I was comfortable in my long-sleeved shirt. Initially, I found the oak forest free of undergrowth but lined with embedded rocks, and for a short distance I could follow a vague trail that appeared to have been used mostly by the occasional enterprising bull. I also noticed partial tracks of another recent hiker that I continued to find farther upstream, until the going became too rough for my predecessor.
I was spending most of my time on the north bank of the creek and shooting pictures toward the southern glare, so for the first time, I started experimenting with the exposure dial, hoping to lighten the dark areas in Photoshop later while avoiding washed out areas now.
I was surprised to come upon an old wickiup frame above the creek with a stone campfire windbreak, apparently built long ago by someone experimenting with the old ways. It’s great other civilized people are doing this, but when it’s only a one-time thing, we should return the site to its natural state instead of leaving ruins like this.
The forested lower canyon widened out, big ponderosa pines appeared, and the cattle trail led away from the creek. I entered patches of burn scar, and expanses of exposed rock where algae was choking the creek.
From here on, deadfall, flood debris, and thickets of thorny locust and other shrubs made the canyon bottom and neighboring slopes increasingly difficult, slow, and often painful to navigate. I looked for cattle trails, but they always led upslope away from the creek. The creek itself was becoming so choked with debris that following it was often impossible.
The ridges above were getting taller, the canyon darker, and tall firs began to join the pines in the canyon bottom. Under their shade, I was encouraged to see dense stands of fir seedlings that had clearly sprouted within the past year or two. I found minimal cairns left long ago by some hiker – hardly necessary, since you couldn’t get lost in this narrow canyon with increasingly steep sides.
And despite the warm weather, in one shady stretch the creek was frozen solid!
As the canyon narrowed, the ridges above literally towered above me so that I was in shade much of time, and big firs – many of them three feet in diameter – began to outnumber the pines. The creekbed was dry for long stretches but always reappeared farther up. My toil up the canyon became truly epic – the creekbed was almost everywhere jammed with fallen logs, there was no floodplain, and the steep slopes to each side consisted of loose rock – talus – sometimes exposed, and sometimes covered by dense thickets of thorny locust and stiff-branched scrub oak. I stumbled often and fell many times, but was always able to catch myself without injury.
Climbing above thickets on the north bank, I ended up high in a hell of talus and scrub, climbing up a rock-lined ravine that actually required bouldering moves. In the end, I forced my way through stiff brush, and half-sliding down half-buried talus to the creek, I realized it had taken me a half hour to go only 50 horizontal feet. The whole time, I was trying not to think about how hard it would be going back.
Staying near the creek now, I clambered over sharp boulders and fought my way through more deadfall and thickets, past more snow patches and frozen creek. Suddenly, I realized I was surrounded by white aspen seedlings, standing like ghosts in the deep shadow of the crest above. I love aspens, but I hadn’t expected to reach their habitat on this hike – from my glance at the topo map that morning I figured I would only be climbing a thousand feet or so above the oak zone.
The air temperature in the shadows was now below 60, but I was working so hard I still didn’t need a sweater. Would I ever make it to the waterfall?
The sky, impossibly far above and mostly hidden by cliffs or canopy, now appeared white beneath a thin cloud layer, and the canyon bottom became even darker, with only occasional rays of sunlight penetrating. I was forced to climb higher above the creek, and kept peering ahead through the big firs for an end to my quest.
Suddenly, through a gap in the black tree trunks, far in the distance I spotted scraps of brilliant white. I approached slowly and carefully across the steep talus, made slippery by a layer of fir needles, until a frozen waterfall, fifty feet tall, began to reveal itself, gradually as if to increase the suspense, around a bend in the canyon wall.
I’ll warn you the pictures don’t do it justice. Maybe I was more appreciative after the ordeal I’d endured to get there – to me, it was one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever hiked to, and made all the suffering worthwhile. We’re all jaded by lifelong exposure to photos and video of the so-called wonders of the world, including waterfalls hundreds of feet tall or wide. I probably could’ve taken better pictures, but the space I had was cramped, the dark cliff totally dominated it, and the contrast between white sky and shadowed waterfall made photography a challenge that overwhelmed my limited skills.
And I was finally getting chilly!
I lingered in this cold, dark, beautiful place long enough to log a waypoint with my GPS message device. I was surprised to be able to connect with a satellite, down in that dark canyon. But when I checked the coordinates against the topo map back home, I found the satellite had recorded my location one third of a mile off – the cliffs and solid canopy of firs had apparently deflected and/or reflected the signal more than I would think possible. GPS users, be forwarned!
On the way back down, I tried to find better routes, sticking to the creek as closely as possible. The slopes above may appear more attractive but can quickly lead you astray. And eventually, I found more cairns and remnants of old trail blazed by other hikers – evidence I’d missed on the way up.
Those remnants of trail still led me astray as I approached the trailhead. And a sharp branch finally tore a big hole in my hiking pants. More than any bushwhack I’ve ever done, this truly was an obstacle course requiring full concentration at all times, where I never had the luxury of reflection or daydreaming.
It’d taken me more than four hours to bushwhack the four miles up that canyon and back. But when I reached the original trail at its modest creek crossing, I figured I still had an hour left. My knee would surely hate me for it, but I was so elated at reaching the waterfall that I continued up the trail. The online guide had claimed that in less than a mile you would reach a ridgetop with awesome views. Even walking slowly to protect my knee, I figured I could do that, and return, in an hour.
It was an often steep but smooth and well-maintained dirt trail, and it seemed to climb on forever. But after winding out and back into deep ravines amid dense oak forest, with the sun setting behind the crest, I finally reached the awesome views. But the sun had completely set by then, and the landscape was too dark to photograph well.
And I realized I would now have to hurry back down the trail, to reach the cafe before closing. When I plotted my route at home later, I found I’d only gone 5.6 miles total, but gained an accumulated 2,141 vertical feet – far more than was wise with this knee injury.
Nothing that lots of pain meds can’t fix – temporarily, at least. I hope you enjoy the epic even a fraction as much as I enjoyed the hike!
