Imperial Monument
Monday, May 5th, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Monument, Nature, Rocks, Southeast Arizona.
Not sure what it is that keeps making me want to venture far afield these days. I’m gradually increasing the distance and elevation of my Sunday hikes, but there are plenty of those near town.
The hikes take up less than half a day, so I spend more time driving than hiking. But I don’t mind the highway drives – they clear my head and allow my thoughts to wander freely.
I usually plan to grab an after-hike meal at some acceptable cafe near the destination. Since I get tired of cooking for myself, that’s an incentive in itself. But the main attraction may just be to escape from the stress that can overwhelm me at home. Driving two hours away seems like a mini-vacation.
For this Sunday, I picked an area based on a Mexican restaurant, then studied the map for nearby hikes. The most convenient was a small trail network in a National Historic Site that preserves the ruins of a pioneer-era fort. It’s hidden in foothills between two mountain ranges – the big one I hiked last week, and a much smaller one I’ve wanted to hike but can’t because most of it’s fenced and gated behind private land.
The access road continues over a pass toward my second option, a National Monument on the west side of the big mountain range. In almost 20 years, I’d never explored either of these places – they’d been just too far for my typical all-day hike. The Historic Site turned out to feature some pretty mid-elevation Sonoran habitat, but the trails didn’t look as attractive as what I expected in the Monument, so I filed this area away for future reference and kept driving over the pass.
The country on the southwest side of the pass is rich-looking high-desert rangeland around 5,000 feet in elevation. It feels protected by the mountains to north and east, and remote, although the Monument is served by a roughly paved two-lane highway.
Halfway there I saw an isolated grove of tall conifers just off the highway. I immediately knew it was a cemetery – white colonists of European ancestry identify evergreens with eternal life, and will plant them if suitable habitat is not available. These trees appeared to be Arizona cypress, relocated outside their natural montane habitat. The sight evoked a wave of youthful memories; high school lovers are attracted to cemeteries for both privacy and the romantic pastoral setting, and the first night I spent with my high school sweetheart was in a tiny hilltop cemetery far out in the country, under a grove of pines much like this. Guess you could call us proto-Goths.
Back home, I actually found a web page about this cemetery, which belongs to a ranching family that has been prominent here since pioneer days. Two children of the founder were the first buried there, in 1885.
It’s a small Monument, roughly five miles square, encompassing some of the spectacular rock formations on the west side of the range. I normally avoid National Park Service properties, disagreeing with Ken Burns and the whole “American’s Best Idea” philosophy. The NPS view is that nature is best developed and managed for tourism, but the habitats they manage were actually stolen from native people who used them for subsistence in harmony with native ecosystems.
The tourists who visit national parks subsist on anonymous commodity food and other resources from distant habitats that have been destroyed by industrial agriculture. So National Parks are an integral part of the industrial society that destroys natural habitats and enriches elites.
Another reason I avoid NPS properties is the crowds. I normally encounter other hikers on roughly one out of ten hikes, but today I passed ten other hikers in less than half a day. And this is a remote Monument with much less traffic than most.
The weather was perfect – temps fluctuating between the 70s and 60s, depending on cloud cover and wind, which increased throughout the day.
Getting a late start, I took the first available trail, which started up a canyon bottom through the shade of a riparian forest of tall ponderosa pines, Arizona cypress, and big oaks – white or Emory. Unlike the narrow, overgrown, often abandoned trails I normally hike, this was a wide, laboriously built and heavily trafficked tourist trail. It soon climbed above the canyon bottom and I got my first views of the famous rock formations atop the opposite slope.
After a mile and a half I came to a junction with a branch that headed toward a side canyon. As developed as the first trail had been, this junction was even more impressive, with trail signs in massive stone foundations and dry-stone steps and retaining walls leading up the new trail. Frequent park visitors take features like this for granted, but to me they speak strongly of imperial power and entitlement, like the pyramids of Egypt and Central America. I assumed they had been built by the young men of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
Turning into the side canyon, the trail took me directly under spectacular rock formations that were often obscured by forest.
In less than a mile, the trail crossed the head of the canyon and began to climb switchbacks toward the crest. And approaching the crest, the trail became a series of stone steps, constructed with enormous effort by those young men, a hundred years ago. The final climb through the rimrock formations was like something out of the Lord of the Rings movies.
Storm clouds were rapidly covering the sky, and I had to pull on my shell in the sudden cold.
The trail topped out on a rolling plateau where fanciful outcrops rose sporadically out of pine and oak forest. I figured I’d gone about three miles, which, doubled, would be the maximum I wanted to put on my recovering knee – so I turned back, hoping for rain along the way.
As usual, I was paying more attention to my immediate surroundings on the way back. I realized that this would be a perfect place to drop acid – one of the two best I’ve ever seen, along with Arches in Utah.
I noticed how bedrock features had been used or even reshaped by trail builders, and marveled at long drystone retaining walls that had been built below steep sections. Crossing a talus slope, I estimated that many of the stones that had been moved and meticulously placed weighed over three hundred pounds. That long-ago CCC effort was truly like the building of the pyramids! As a kid, I’d taken park features like this for granted, but now I could only see them as reflections of imperial might, the will of the nation imposed on the landscape “for all time”.
I prefer to live lightly on the land, hoping to “leave no trace”.
The final group of fellow hikers that I passed was a family of three with a dog – on leash. Reviewing the NPS trail guide later, I noticed that dogs are not allowed on this trail. That family was training their preteen son to disregard both laws and the common good. Best to start them early, I guess.
On the drive to town for my Mexican meal, I could see rain falling over the pass, and ahead, dust storms had been stirred up by high wind. My little vehicle, taller now with the suspension lift, was hard to keep on the road.
It was even harder crossing the playa the next day, when the wind suddenly carried a dust storm across the freeway, briefly eliminating visibility and driving some vehicles off onto the shoulder. By the time I reached town, I had just missed our first rain in months.
