The Wildest Road
Friday, May 29th, 2026: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Pine Creek, Southeast Arizona.
Planning to end my birthday trip, check out of the hotel, and start driving home today, I was in a quandary. I was in no rush to get home, where more problems awaited me. Normally, on trips to the city like this, I try to fit in another restaurant meal and maybe a museum visit. But I was leaving on a Thursday, normally a hiking day, and the drive home offered potential hikes. In the end, I simply couldn’t decide between the options. I realized I just needed to hit the road, and let the drive clear my mind.
Back in the hotel room, an enroute hike was clearly a bad idea – it would require a long drive out of my way. I would end up with about six hours of hard driving, for less than three hours of questionable hiking. I might even need another night in a motel, a shabby one at that.
But on the road, my powerful desire to explore new territory overcame reason. I didn’t even stop for lunch – I had snacks left over from yesterday. I turned off the interstate and headed on long back roads toward that hidden canyon.
I’d passed this dead-end forest road once before – and I read about a hiker who’d driven a short distance on it, seven years ago. This is an incredibly obsessive hiker – someone like me who wants to hike every trail on the map. Coming from Phoenix or Tucson, he was in search of an abandoned trail, one of five parallel north-south trails that lead through the most remote part of the wilderness area in the less-visited west-central part of this mountain range.
The big-city hiker had driven less than a third of a mile on the forest road, finding it so rough that he “could walk faster than driving”. The road, with a locked gate eight miles in, was catastrophically washed out by debris flows after the 2011 wildfire, and is now only maintained by rare campers or hunters on UTVs. And apparently, none of the trails has been cleared since the fire – the big city hiker managed to bushwhack the route of the first trail, but found little remaining of it or any of its connecting trails.
I assumed I had a more robust vehicle, and indeed I was able to go much farther on the road – over a mile – but only by stopping frequently to spot lines across debris piles and past foot-high boulders. At first I followed a single recent set of UTV tracks, but eventually I was driving on ground no vehicle or hiker had seen in a long time. It was a fun test of my lifted suspension, but after a while I realized, like my predecessor, it would be easier to walk.
Much of the original forest road had been bypassed since the fire, due to debris flows or deep erosion. So far, I’d driven beneath a canopy of tall ponderosa pines, glimpsing rimrock high above eroded into dozens of hoodoos. When I finally parked, I expected to hike nearly another mile on what was left of the road, before reaching the trail the big-city guy had bushwhacked.
Since I hadn’t planned this hike, I hadn’t printed any detailed maps. And walking off, I forgot to bring any of the area maps I always carry in the vehicle. I remembered the trailhead as being easy to find, with the remains of a signpost, and I simply assumed I would find it along the road, somewhere near the mouth of the canyon.
The road did get worse, but I could’ve probably continued driving it. The creek was still running alongside, which was nice. I came to a closed gate that wasn’t even latched, and I never saw any sign of cattle. Then I came to a fallen snag that blocked the road, which I would’ve had to saw through to get my Sidekick past, and I was glad I’d parked and walked. And then I came to another big creek crossing – the creek was dry at this point – and the canyon widened into a valley.
The canopy stopped here, and I could see a big side canyon opening off to my left – the canyon of the abandoned trail. So from here on I needed to watch for the signpost.
Once I crossed the big dry creek, I was exposed between solid oak thickets – the 2011 wildfire had clearly burned at high intensity through here. I was traversing a floodplain or bank, and the oak on each side was on average a dozen feet tall, but I could often see the rimrock high above on both sides of the roadway. Someone on a UTV had ridden up here, I assumed from the locked gate far down-canyon – and I could occasionally see where they had cleared logs or branches away with a saw.
Lacking a map, I was puzzled about the trailhead. The big creek crossing had been the east end of the mouth of this side canyon, and the main creek was now far to my left, between me and the broad side canyon mouth. Canyon trails normally start where a road crosses the mouth of that canyon, so I wasn’t really expecting the trailhead along this part of the road.
And eventually, I reached another pine forest, and a big dry creek crossing. This had to be the main creek – the mouth of creek from the side canyon had to have entered somewhere that was now upstream of me, meaning the trailhead had to be somewhere upstream of the road. Through the pines, I could clearly see the slope of the downstream wall of the side canyon. I had completely passed the mouth of the side canyon, apparently along with the trail I was looking for. I was totally confused.
The only thing I could do was make my way upstream, hoping to find the confluence where the side creek came down out of the side canyon. But I only made it about a hundred yards before reaching a logjam, where I climbed a steep bank looking for a way up-canyon.
All I found was a truly impenetrable thicket.
So I scrambled back downstream, up the opposite bank of the main creek, into the pine forest, where I likewise found nothing that looked like a trail. I forced my way back to the road and connected my GPS unit to a satellite for a waypoint.
That night, with connectivity, online maps, my GPS waypoint, and the detailed 2019 trip report of the big-city hiker, I discovered to my chagrin that I had stopped and turned back a hundred yards short of the trailhead, which is located in a totally nonintuitive spot. The abandoned trail follows an old roadway which I might’ve noticed when I crossed the main creek after being stymied by that thicket, if I’d been oriented across the slope above instead of along the bank of the creek. I’d passed less than a hundred feet from the old roadway.
The sky had been mostly cloudy all day, but it was a hot trudge back past those oak thickets. In all, it took me 1.75 hours to walk less than three miles down that road and back to the vehicle.
And to add insult to injury, I drove off without logging another waypoint where I had parked. I didn’t think of it until I had crossed the big debris flow where the main canyon turns sharply south. So I parked in a clearing there and walked nearly a half mile back, connected the device, and waited another ten minutes. But unlike earlier, the system never logged a waypoint, so I ended up having to estimate my parking spot using the vehicle’s odometer and a formula based on the difference in tire diameters between stock and the much bigger tires I installed last year.
On the way back to the vehicle for the second time, I spooked a whitetail –moving too fast to tell the gender. And after I resumed driving up-canyon and around the bend into the narrows below the rock spire, I spooked a mature adult black bear, which ran upslope to my right. I stopped when I reached that point and watched it continue across and up the steep slope – this was my second sighting so far this year, and my first in this mountain range.
Dedicated backcountry campers have cleared and maintained six or eight campsites in the easier stretch of road above the big debris flow, even stocking some of them with saw-cut firewood, but the road has partly collapsed into the creek near its beginning at the access road. I can drive past it easily with my little Sidekick’s narrow track, but there’s no way you could safely get one of these new full-size pickups past it. Probably not even a new Jeep. And no vehicle wider or longer than mine could’ve negotiated the detours through the forest, farther down, which zigzagged sharply back and forth between tall pines.
In all, this is an impressively remote and hard-to-access canyon – a wildlife paradise. I was right to make it a priority, but I’m going to need more time and more fitness to explore it the way that guy from the big city did seven years ago. He claims to have made a 13-mile loop out of it, going up the abandoned canyon and down the nearer canyon I hiked partway up last year, in an 8-hour speed-bushwhack that I doubt I could manage even at peak fitness.
The drive out, and over the mountains to the cafe and lodge, was as nerve-wracking as ever. And as expected, I had to stay the night and finish the drive home in the morning. Hopefully I learned my lesson – whatever that means.
