Treefrog Chorus, Pine Perfume
Monday, August 24th, 2026: 2026 Trips, Animals, Mogollon Rim, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips.
Stress and trauma may have made me more heat-sensitive, but this feels like the hottest summer yet. I can only work mornings – by afternoon my workspace is too hot, it’s too humid for the swamp cooler, and I can’t work on music with a fan blowing. The only practical solution requires a major investment, and for various reasons, the timing is bad and I can’t commit. So throughout each week, I get more and more uncomfortable and frustrated, until by Sunday I’m desperate for another getaway to higher elevations.
After last Sunday’s takeover by birders, I was hoping my next attempt at solitude would succeed. Today’s destination is called a mesa because much of it is fairly level, but it’s really more like a gently sloping plateau sprawling down from the crest of a small mountain range.
The range, topping out at 9,000 feet, is densely forested, and has mostly escaped recent wildfires. It’s become one of my favorites because it’s so remote, little-known, and seldom-visited. You can’t see the central part of the range from any highway, the forest blocks views outward, and there are no campgrounds or any other features that would attract recreationists.
The highway crosses the range in an 8,000-foot pass, but the turnoff onto the crest road is easy to miss and appears just to lead to a fire lookout. I could hardly have designed it better myself, to keep out the crowds.
The crest road is steep, rocky, and often deeply eroded, but another barrier is weather. I’ve learned never to go there in the windy season or when storms are forecast, because there will always be blowdown blocking the road in multiple places.
The road skirts the mesa at 8,600 feet, and from there, the mesa spreads out and gently steps down to its farthest edge at 7,800 feet. Turning off onto the mesa road, a rough dirt track which was flooded near the junction, I immediately spotted a pickup truck with popup campershell and a freestanding tent, back in the big clearing where I’ve seen lone campers once or twice before. Thankfully, you need a pickup or off-road vehicle to get up the crest road – RVs and camping trailers can’t handle it. Their camp seemed vacant, and they clearly hadn’t brought a UTV, so I assumed they were off walking somewhere, either down the network of meandering 2-tracks or bushwhacking through the parklike forest.
I drove a few hundred yards farther, to a side trail that bumps down over embedded boulders into the basin below the big dammed meadow. There are a couple of fire rings here, but I found no sign of recent visitors as I backed into shade between a couple of spreading oaks. With a high of 91 degrees at home, I expected temps here in the 70s. It was blissfully mild, but what struck me most powerfully was a smell in the air – sweet and slightly tangy, like vanilla. Here in the forest there were only a few tiny, widely scattered annuals blooming, so I sniffed the bark of a nearby ponderosa, and found that they were giving off the perfume which pervaded the entire area. I’d never noticed that before – it was barely believable!
I’d been wondering if the big meadow would hold any water, and I could already hear croaking from far away. A chorus somewhere out in the middle of the meadow, then an answering chorus closer, behind the low earthen dam. Walking over through the big trees, I spotted a shallow pool no more than 20 feet wide, and next to the dam, a deeper one. I ate a snack for lunch, then carried my chair and a book to a spot in the shade where I could watch the entire meadow, while breathing in the seductive fragrance of ponderosa bark. I couldn’t see or hear anything from the distant party of campers, and the only sounds were from birds, and occasional waves of wind through the canopy, 80 t0 100 feet above.
The frogs in the ponds were quiet for long intervals, then suddenly started up again. I learned later that they’re Arizona treefrogs, the state’s official amphibian. Scientists only recently changed their genus, and many online publications haven’t caught up yet, resulting in a bit of confusion.
I wondered where they came from, to end up in these ephemeral pools high on the mountain, miles from any perennial stream. And where they go when the pools dry up. All I could find online is that they’re “dormant” during dry seasons.
I had planned to drive farther up the highway for a midafternoon burger before heading home, but I was really reluctant to leave this spot. Going easy on my foot, I followed a barely visible 2-track trail south into the forest. I didn’t have a detailed map and wondered where it went. All throughout the forest were pines and firs wearing rings of orange paint about six feet off the ground.
After a little over a quarter of a mile, I reached the end of the trail in a small clearing anchored by three big, old stumps. I finally realized that the 2-tracks forming a maze across this mesa are logging roads. A website associated with a nearby national forest says the orange paint designates trees that are not to be logged, which was a relief, because they must’ve painted tens of thousands of trees along this crest alone.
Of course, that makes me wonder what blue paint means – I see that much more often in our regional forests.
Two hours of peace beside that meadow had made me sluggish, and I had to force myself to drive farther up the highway, only to be served a mediocre burger – one more reason to avoid that alpine village of Mormon Trump-supporters. From there, it was a long drive home, especially on the twisty stretches where I ended up trapped between pickups towing UTV trailers and city drivers pretending to be racers. I may have to rethink this weekend getaway thing.
