Max Carmichael's Blog, page 10

Road in the Sky

This weekend was forecast to feature what I hoped was the last of our seemingly endless Southwest heat wave. Ironically, Sunday, my hiking day, was forecast to reach 90 in town, while highs in the following week were predicted to drop into the 70s.

I’d already done all the high-elevation hikes in our area, except one – the crest hike that requires a two-hour drive and traverses a moonscape burn scar with hundreds of logs across the trail. I was grimly determined to deal with both the drive and the logs, when at the last minute I remembered another crest route – a route I’d never considered because it’s not wilderness, and most of it consists of a road instead of a trail. At this point, even if I didn’t get much hiking in, it would be worth it just to escape the heat.

This route is approached from the west side of the north-south range east of town. I’ve delayed exploring this area until the past six months, because all the hikes must be accessed via long drives up long ridges – “finger” mesas – on rocky roads. After several tries, I’d given up – none of the trails have been cleared in the wake of two mega-wildfires, one in 2013 and one in 2022, that burned almost the entire crest of the range.

At 10,020 feet elevation in the south half of this range, the second-tallest peak hosts an active fire lookout, and I’ve climbed that many times on what is probably the best-maintained trail in our area. But in the north half of the range, there’s actually a forest road that climbs to a cabin less than two miles from the 10,165 foot summit.

It’s almost 18 miles from the highway at 6,200 feet to the cabin at 9,500 feet. I’d driven the lower 9 miles twice – the last mile of it is over sharp ledges of bedrock with a sheer dropoff and is very nerve-wracking. The upper 9 miles is widely reported to be one of the most brutal roads in existence, completely undriveable without high clearance and low-range 4wd. Since I was looking for more hiking and less driving, my plan was to try to drive within 7 or 8 miles of the summit, but I didn’t even know if that would be possible with my vehicle.

Since the road follows the crest of the range and spends about three miles traversing a burn scar up there, I would be exposed for most of the hike. I wasn’t worried about sun, since there would likely be a breeze across the north-south crest, but we were forecast to get clouds in the afternoon, and although I hoped for rain, lightning would be a real concern.

The vertiginous upper road climbs over 2,000 feet in the first six miles, and it turned out to be barely driveable in low-range with my 9 inch ground clearance, as I slowly pushed the little vehicle up a seemingly endless series of sharp bedrock ledges. Including the easy stretches, I averaged about 6 miles per hour.

I did bash the undercarriage pretty good in one spot, but the payoff was the views. Approaching the crest, I was facing the highest points in the range across a wide canyon that had been burned to a moonscape. I was looking for a saddle with a surviving stand of conifers where I could park in the shade, and I finally found one, at the site of a SNOTEL – a snow telemetry site maintained by the National Weather Service.

From the snow telemetry installation, I had about a four-mile walk on the road to the cabin, followed by about two miles on a trail I was sure was unmaintained and overgrown. But first, I was curious about the junction with the northbound crest trail, a trail I’d hiked many times from the south, and tried to reach recently from a canyon that parallels this road, below on my right.

The first thing I noticed was wildflowers – they were probably peaking now at this elevation, helped by the little moisture we’d received in the past two weeks. Then I reached the trail junction. I suddenly realized that although I’d be walking a road, the road here is actually a segment of the crest trail. That made me feel better – I wasn’t choosing to walk the road, it was actually the only route available.

Since the trail junction marks the beginning of the crest, it also marks the crossing to the eastern watershed. This is a huge watershed in which three long creeks cross a broad basin to merge into one at the bottom. The surrounding ridges and slopes are topographically diverse, ranging from cliffs and pinnacles to shallow slopes blanketed by annuals. I’d never seen any of it before so I made slow progress as I stopped to study the landscape opening out below me.

Walking the crest, I hadn’t expected much elevation gain or loss, but this is where I realized it would actually be a rollercoaster. My whole day would be spent ascending and descending hundreds of feet, crossing back and forth between eastern and western watersheds, over and over, up in the sky.

After about two-thirds of a mile with that eastward view, the road crossed to the other side, where I could view that badly burned canyon I’d seen on my way up. The stands of aspen and fir that had been killed in the fire created bands of black and tan on the slopes that alternated with white outcrops of volcanic conglomerate and green regrowth of locust and Gambel oak.

There are always hawks along a crest, and I encountered the first of the day here.

Finally I reached the cabin, and the end of the road, in a small forested basin facing east. I remembered seeing photos of this cabin on InciWeb, wrapped in foil to protect it during both of the big wildfires. Structures like this are where firefighters invest most of their effort.

I could barely discern the trail leaving the cabin for the peak. There was no sign, but there was a vague disturbance in the annual ground cover, heading up in the direction of the ruined outhouse. When I followed that, I noticed a branch veering off into the forest. No one but animals had used this trail in the current growing season – it was almost completely overgrown and blocked repeatedly by deadfall. But it had been used heavily by firefighters last summer, so there was enough tread left under the vegetation that I could read it by going slow.

Before approaching the summit, the trail climbs to a 9,800 foot peak – it’s actually hard to identify the summit from a distance because it’s surrounded by peaks that are only slightly lower. The almost invisible trail first crossed to the eastern slope, then at the top of the lower peak, crossed again into a new watershed that was tributary to the big canyon I’d seen on the drive up. I was crossing so many watersheds it was hard to keep track!

Past the lower peak, the trail traversed a steep slope that had been badly eroded and colonized by thorny locust. Here, I flushed a small hawk, not much more than a foot long, probably a Cooper’s or sharp-shinned. This was the slowest part of my hike, and the hardest to follow. But again, the trail crossed watersheds, and I was facing east again on an even steeper slope, where the trail seemed to be maintained by deer and elk. I’d seen no evidence of humans on this trail, probably not since the summer 2002 wildfire.

The last stretch crossed back to the west, and climbing through dense ferns, entered a young stand of aspens, fir, and spruce. A wide corridor had been cut through these, and a few small peaks rose on my right, but I had no idea if any were the actual summit, so I just kept following the open corridor.

Finally I emerged from the trees, and could see another peak about a quarter mile away across a low saddle. My trail seemed to continue downwards to the east, looking more like an old road. I checked my map, but still wasn’t sure, so I started up the opposing peak, and soon found myself stopped by regrowth and deadfall with no easy way forward. Checking the map again, I became convinced I’d passed the actual summit – it was probably one of those little bumps I’d passed in the forest.

I returned into the corridor through the forest, and eyeballed an easy way up.  Sure enough, I soon emerged on a little rocky bump, where a rusty can covered a jar with a record of ascents. I had no interest in that, but just below the bump, a grassy ledge offered a 360 degree view, a view I’d only dreamed about.

Clouds had been forming for the past hour or so, looking like a storm in the north, with wind rising and temperature falling. Now I could see curtains of rain to the north and east. I tried to absorb these views, but was most captivated by the view of the big eastern basin. I became more and more convinced that this was the most beautiful landscape I’d ever found in this area. It was worth walking that long road, just to reach this view!

Returning, I could see rain ahead in the west, and as I emerged from the corridor in the forest, there at 10,000 feet, I was hit by showers blown by a strong wind, and had to dig out my rain poncho.

From the next couple of hours it would rain on and off, with temps in the 60s, occasionally clearing here and there. I’d definitely escaped the heat wave!

After leaving the cabin and rejoining the crest road through the burn scar, I came upon two hawks, soaring together and apart, hovering, diving and briefly grappling mid-air. My views of the landscape were an ever-changing pageant of monsoon weather.

As I left the western watershed and re-entered the eastern for the final segment before the trail junction, it was great to be able to see the southern peak that I’d climbed so many times, from this angle. When descending the back side of that peak I’d been facing this road, but at nine miles it’s just too far to pick out with the naked eye.

It hadn’t been a long hike, nor entailed as much elevation gain as I prefer, but I couldn’t have gone much faster – the unmaintained peak trail made it challenging and slow. The drive up the road had taken two hours, and the hike, with many stops, had taken six-and-a-half. With the two hour drive back home, it turned into a ten-and-a-half hour day.

And the agonizing drive down that road, where I bashed my undercarriage on rocks twice, convinced me that I shouldn’t be doing this anymore. Comparing the way my vehicle drives on rocky roads vs paved highways, I finally realized that the MacPherson struts that make it handle well on pavement, are definitely not designed for off-road use. They have little give, producing a stiff ride, which is just miserable on rocky roads, where I have to drive extra-slow.

This is more pronounced when I see others driving the same roads in more capable vehicles. On this Sunday evening, I was surprised to encounter a young guy driving a pickup with camper shell up the upper part of the road, obviously intending to camp out at the cabin. We met in a rare level clearing with plenty of room to pass, but as he continued, it suddenly dawned on me that if I’d met him at most places on this road I wouldn’t have been able to back up for him without destroying my vehicle. My road clearance is so marginal I need to scope out a precise line to get over these rock ledges, which I wouldn’t be able do in reverse. In some situations I’d be obligated to back up for the other driver, and there are plenty of rednecks around here who would sooner shoot me than give way.

Old Reliable

I didn’t feel like driving this Sunday, but the day was forecast to be hot and I wanted to keep working on my conditioning. There was really only one option near town, the eighteen-mile crest hike that utilizes part of the national trail. It’s not wilderness, it’s close enough to town that I often meet casual hikers near the lower and upper trailheads, and cattle occasionally use the upper part, but it allows me to achieve serious mileage and elevation on a reliable trail. And even though it’s not wilderness, it proves how healthy our mountain habitat is in general, compared to public lands near urban areas.

The approach is on a sporadically maintained primitive forest road up a narrow canyon. There were two other vehicles at the trailhead, but the only track I found on the road, and on the upper trail, was from a single mountain bike. The upper trail is so steep and rocky I assumed the biker took the gravel fire road to the crest from the opposite side, and rode down this canyon segment.

The habitat along most of this trail is lush even in a drought, but we’d gotten enough rain recently that wildlife was really thriving. Heading down though dense regrowth past the shoulder of the 9,000 foot summit, I noticed a hummingbird working the flowers ahead and froze where I was. The bird also stopped, to perch on a low branch beside the trail. I waited several minutes, then slowly moved a couple yards closer and froze again. I kept moving closer in stages like this until I was literally only a yard away, and the hummingbird – probably a female broad-tailed – hung in there, staring back at me with what appeared to be curiosity.

That experience was so cool that I kept stopping in flower-dense areas during the rest of the hike, hoping pollinators would ignore me and approach. It generally worked, but I was paying so much attention to what was happening above the trail that I slipped on a rock and tweaked my ankle at one point. My reinforced boots allowed me to keep hiking, but it was swollen and sore the next day.

The lower part of the trail is mostly shaded, but burn scars and scattered clouds along the crest meant that I was moving between hot sun and chilly shade for most of the day.

The last two-and-a-half miles are very seldom used, running just below the crest through wildfire burn scar and remnant forest on a steep and rocky slope. I heard whooping and hollering behind me, and the grinding of tires on gravel, and was glad the mountain bikers were sticking to the fire road.

There’s always at least one hawk working this slope, and today there were three, along with many other birds closer to ground. But finally, I heard tires behind me, and scrambled to find a place to safely get off the trail on this steep slope.

It was a group of three mountain bikers, the first of a convoy of twelve. The leader, the oldest, stopped to placate me, warning about the others to follow and wishing me “peace and tranquillity”. He said they were riding to honor the race which had been cancelled this year – a downhill race where they get a permit to close off one of our most popular trails, and competitors bomb down in full body armor on $10,000 bikes.

The other riders were spread out over a half mile, and from then on I kept having to quickly find a safe place to step off the trail so they could pass. The last group was a duo, and the young female rider lost her balance on a loose rock so I had to wait patiently while she figured out how to get going again.

Riding high on their machines, they were obliviously disrupting all the wildlife I’d been enjoying in my frequent stops. Our natural habitats were just a colorful backdrop for their adrenaline sport.

When I reached the “park”, the shallow natural basin at the end, I stretched out on pine needles in the shade and rested for a full half hour before heading back. The next day, lying on the sofa with an ice pack, I found myself wondering how much longer I can keep doing these punishing marathons!

Eighteen miles is a long hike, even on a good trail, and I was getting pretty sore by the time I reached the shoulder of the peak. That’s an important milestone because it’s all downhill from there.

And by the time I reached the trail crossing four miles from the end, I was limping. I collected some trash left by hikers or bikers during the day, and I finally took a pain pill to get me through the last two miles on the canyon road.

Sweaty Canyon

I’d been waiting all summer for the weather to cool off enough so I could hike the canyon trail over in Arizona that had finally been cleared. According to the forecast, it still wouldn’t be cool enough, but we’d been having monsoon weather for past week, and I was hoping I’d have cloud cover, and possibly even rain, in the afternoon, to cool things off.

Over the past four years, I’ve been exploring every trail that climbs from the accessible northeast basin of the range, through the wilderness area to the 9,000 foot crest. Every trail, that is, except this one – so this was now my holy grail.

I’d actually tried it a year and a half ago, and found the final 1.3 mile stretch seriously impassable. But a professional trail crew had finally cleared it this year – twelve years after the 2011 wildfire.

Not only would this complete my exploration of the northern canyons, but it would be the longest hike I’d ever done in this range. What limits me is the distance from home – the long drive means less hours available to hike. So today I would leave early.

About thirty miles south of town, a pronghorn crossed the highway in front of me. Hadn’t seen one for a few years – I took it as a good omen.

Despite the early start, air temperature was already in the 80s when I reached the 5,240 foot trailhead at 8:30 am. And despite our summer-long drought, and the fact that the creek started out bone-dry, I was soaked with sweat and swarmed by flies within the first mile. These northern canyons hold moisture – from our wet winter and a few rains in June – and unlike in our canyons back home, I found an impressive display of wildflowers and pollinators.

One or more bears had preceded me on the trail this morning, leaving scat all the way up. The first stretch is a steady four-mile ramble at a shallow grade, under red cliffs and spires, through riparian forest dominated by sycamore, cypress, ponderosa pine, and oak. The creek was running intermittently, but often choked with algae. I saw no human tracks anywhere – presumably the heat’s been keeping hikers away.

There’s supposed to be an apple tree on the trail about three miles in, but I hadn’t found it before and didn’t find it this time either. The heat combined with humidity were really exhausting and discouraging.

Moving slower than usual due to the heat, I finally reached the junction where the big side canyon comes in from the west. Beyond here, the trail becomes very rocky and very steep, climbing continuously at an average grade of 21% for the next three miles, but it also enters dense mixed-conifer forest that provides more shade. Scattered clouds were forming so I was hopeful for cooling temps.

But it was so muggy, even occasional shade failed to provide relief. I couldn’t remember when I’d been this physically miserable on a hike. The only things that redeemed it for me were the beautiful forest, the rock formations, the flowers and the pollinators.

Finally, after a mile and a half, I reached the end of the forest and the edge of the burn scar. It was taking me much longer than expected, and I hated to think I might fail to reach the crest.

I had to at least confirm that the upper trail was accessible. On my previous attempt, I’d gotten lost in a deeply eroded ravine choked with deadfall and regrowth. The ravine remained a nasty place, but big cairns on each side showed where to cross, and clear tread continued on the opposite side.

This restored trail had already been colonized by annuals, responding to moisture that remained in the soil from last winter. But I quickly learned to just ignore the annuals, striding through them as if they didn’t exist. I could see the narrow drainage above this burn scar, where a band of forest had escaped the fire. That was my next destination – I’d failed to bring a map, but assumed it led straight to the crest.

Cloud cover was now almost complete, and the air temperature was dropping, but I kept sweating just as hard. I was relieved to reach the intact forest, only to discover it led to upper slopes that had been completely cleared by fire. The ground here was white gravel, and as far as the eye can see, it was blanketed with ferns and thorny locust, in some places shoulder-high. The trail showed as only a vague disturbance in the dense vegetation.

In this treeless landscape, that 21% grade felt Sisyphean. From my perspective, I couldn’t tell how near I was to the end – I assumed much of what I was looking at were false peaks. I was pushing my way through waist-high annuals, climbing a seemingly endless series of long switchbacks toward the ever-darkening sky, stopping often to catch my breath.

Here in this alpine burn scar where you could almost touch the clouds, wildflowers were lush and pollinators were working as hard as ever – I even saw hummingbirds.

Finally I was high enough for a view east, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. And then it felt like the last switchback was approaching a saddle. My clothes were drenched with sweat and my whole body ached, but I’d reached the crest!

It had taken me 5-1/2 hours to go seven miles, climbing almost 4,000 feet, in tropical humidity. I’d felt a few sprinkles on the last switchback, but that would be it for the day. I was rewarded with a view into a new watershed, but this saddle wasn’t a place to linger. And I had to make much better time on the way back, to reach the cafe, burrito and beer before 6 pm closing.

I expected to be cooler on the way down, but even the effort of descending kept me hot and sweaty. I’d allocated nine hours for the entire hike, and I thought that would leave me plenty of time, so I made plenty of stops, especially enjoying the sight of a couple of beautiful Englemann spruce trees, isolated here in one of their southernmost habitats.

I’d been drinking plenty of water and adding electrolyte supplement, but in the next two miles the leg cramps hit, eventually paralyzing me. I rested, I stretched, I pushed through them, but they took a half hour to subside. And air temperature was rising as I descended.

Suddenly I noticed three apples on the ground beside the trail. Then I looked up – the famous apple tree was right next to me! I never would’ve noticed it if I hadn’t seen the apples on the ground first.

Finally, within the last two miles, I took off my shirt and rinsed both it and my hat in the stream. It didn’t stop me from sweating but it felt better having a shirt soaked with creek water instead of sweat! I arrived at the vehicle with just enough time to change clothes and drive to the cafe right before closing.

Heat Wave Helping Wildlife?

My twice-weekly hiking routine had been disrupted since April, and the Southwest heat wave had mostly prevented me from hiking for a month and a half – the last serious hike was during a brief cool-off a month ago.

An old friend had taken her life last week, and no hike was going to overcome the melancholy, but the forecast showed the heat wave fading during the next couple of weeks. I re-checked the online trip reports for my old favorite crest hike on the west side, that had been blocked by a massive blowdown in March, and found one from a lady who’d hiked through there at the end of May, mentioning only a few trees down. So with no expectations, I decided to give it a try. It’s a challenging hike and I knew I’d lost a lot of conditioning, and depending on the weather, solar heating might be intense on the exposed crest. But the day was forecast to be windy – that might help.

As I approached the trailhead, I was glad to see a cloud bank over the mountains – wondering how long it would last?

Unsurprisingly, there were few entries in the trailhead log during the past two hot months, and the farthest anyone had gone was the spring at 4-1/2 miles. But one hiker thanked the Forest Service for trail work, which was encouraging.

And a few yards up the trail there was a new wooden sign, to replace the metal “Warning: Trail Not Maintained” sign that’s been there since the 2012 wildfire. This permanent-looking sign announced the trail is unmaintained past Camp Creek Saddle. That suggested two possibilities: first, that the eight miles to the saddle might actually be cleared now, and second, that the remaining twelve miles to the crest trail have been permanently abandoned.

I was excited about the first possibility. Despite being in poor shape, if the trail was clear I was determined to make it to the saddle, a 16-mile round trip with over 5,000′ of elevation gain. I would do it if even if it meant coming back in the dark.

The second possibility was depressing, since this is the last potentially maintainable link in the vast network that used to enable backpackers to traverse the crest of the range.

Unsurprisingly, again, the creek was dry when I reached the canyon bottom, but vegetation was lush in the old burn scar due to our wet winter. And even without running water, I encountered a painted redstart as soon as I left the burn scar and entered the riparian canopy.

Then, two miles into the hike where the blowdown had started, I found that the dozens of big logs across the trail had indeed been cut, probably in May after I called the ranger station to report it.

The work had been done by the equestrians, and I was grateful, but it still bothered me that they were using this to promote their own agenda, going so far as to brand one of the cut logs with their acronym.

Normally, at this time of year, there would be thunderstorms with rain and hail and lots of wildflowers and fungi. In this drought I found only a few flowers and no fresh fungi. Buy the wildlife seemed to be thriving – in rapid succession I came upon an Arizona/Sonoran Mountain Kingsnake, a whitetail deer buck, a Downy Woodpecker, and a rattlesnake.

Panting with effort as the grade got steeper, I made it to the bottom of the switchbacks and found that the big tree across the trail there had indeed been cut. But that’s where the equestrians’ trail maintenance had ended.

Quite a bit of new blowdown slowed me down on the switchbacks, and the wind increased as I trudged upward, exceeding 40 mph in more exposed sites. But clouds still drifted across the sun, and both the wind and the shade really helped. I even felt a chill when under a particularly dark cloud, but as soon as the sun returned it felt like the mid-80s again. The spring at 9,100 feet was still flowing, and I wondered if I would run out of water trying to reach the distant saddle. Nice to know fresh water was available here.

Finally I rounded the corner of the last long switchback and the crest was in sight. I hadn’t seen human tracks anywhere on this trail, and I figured I might be the only person to make it up here since last fall.

I crossed the 9,500′ saddle on the shoulder of the peak and headed down the trail on the back side, through the burn scar dense with regrowth of aspen and locust. The wind was coming from the south, and when I reached the first small stand of intact forest a big limb snapped off and fell a couple yards to my right. I stopped, then figured I’d be safer in the midst of the forest, so I kept going. But then another limb snapped off and fell a few yards to my left. I was pretty sure the wind here was exceeding 50 mph, so I was paying a lot of attention to the canopy.

https://maxcarmichael.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Wind.mp4

As usual, the trail down the back side, leading to a long ridge and eventually Camp Creek Saddle, was an obstacle course of thorny locust and blowdown. Virtually no trail work has been done here for at least five years. The burn was patchy, and small stands of alpine mixed-conifer forest alternate with jungles of regrowth. I’d fought my way to the distant saddle almost exactly two years ago, but I knew I wasn’t up for that today. I was just trying to make it to a tiny saddle, the first low point in the ridge, where there was a stand of forest on the south side where I could stop and rest.

But about halfway down I came upon a pile of really fresh bear scat, and started making a lot more noise. Then I saw the first hawk, circling around the little peak above my destination saddle, and heard it screech. Soon it was joined by another, and they poised together in the face of the wind and were joined by a third. The wind was fierce but they kept trying to hold a formation together, right over my head. They stuck around for ten or fifteen minutes before drifting away together.

I had a nice rest in the shade of the forest, while staying vigilant on the wind in the canopy. I was deep enough I felt somewhat protected. I also noticed a pine that wasn’t ponderosa – you have to be really focused to tell the difference, and it’s common to just assume the only conifers in this habitat are ponderosa and doug fir.

Finally I made my back up through the jungle, to the shoulder of the high peak where I climbed to the little rocky overlook. I knew the wind would be at its worst here, but I always love the view, over the heart of the range on the east and the open country to the west.

When I finally reached the long switchbacks down from the crest and got some relief from the wind, I was lucky to encounter a solitary swallowtail butterfly. And I stopped to examine a small pine that had blown down across the trail recently enough that some needles were green. I figured it was the same species as the trees I’d seen on the crest – probably a Southwestern White Pine, which must be fairly common here if you know to look for them.

Steller’s jays had been harrassing me all day, but partway down the trail in the canyon bottom I sensed something rising in the corner of my eye, and noticed a shadowy form settling on a low branch, only 30-40 feet away. It was an owl! A small one, only about 12-14 inches head to tail, but when I got home and looked it up, I found it was almost certainly a rare Mexican Spotted Owl, probably a young one. It just sat there and watched me, obviously curious, until I finally had to go.

Shortly after that, I heard a screech overhead, and the hawks returned, swooping low through the canopy this time. I’ve seen young migrating eagles behaving like this, traveling in flocks and showing off their acrobatic skills. What a day for wildlife! I began to wonder if the heat wave and corresponding absence of humans has allowed wildlife to flourish more in these habitats. Despite the displacement of indigenous peoples, wilderness designation is valuable if only to keep us civilized people under control – we just can’t be trusted not to destroy nature.

Sunburn Ridge

For the past week, our forecast had predicted the afternoon high to dip below 90, beginning this weekend. So I was looking forward to more hiking options – I wouldn’t be limited to the now-mostly-impassable trails above 9,000 feet.

But the ranges over in Arizona would still be too hot, and as I studied my list, I realized the remaining local trails were either too exposed or spent most of their time at elevations where temps could still exceed 90. I was about to give up when, a half hour before departure time, I remembered the trail I’d tried to reach a few months ago, only to be turned back by a road flooded with snowmelt. Snowmelt! Those were the days.

I’d forgotten to add this trail to my list. It climbs out of a narrow canyon to a ridge that it follows to the 9,000 foot crest, where after five and a half miles it connects with a two-and-a-half mile southbound trail to the 9,800 foot peak I pass on one of my old favorite hikes. Of course, it crosses the burn scar of our 2012 mega-wildfire, but the first three miles had been cleared last fall, and the rest was scheduled to be cleared this fall. So maybe there were enough clues left for me to be able to puzzle out. If I could reach that southern peak – unlikely in this heat – it would be a 16 mile round-trip with 5,700 feet of elevation gain.

Deciding at the last minute, I got a late start. And amazingly, although it was Sunday, a road crew was busy at the halfway point on the highway north, delaying me another fifteen minutes. I had plenty of time to recall how this has long had one of the best road surfaces in our region. But the creek crossing, a raging flood a few months ago, was now bone dry. The trailhead logbook had been removed, but a rocky section of the road requires high clearance so I figured this trail sees few visitors.

Choosing this trail had involved some denial and wishful thinking. The trailhead lies at 5,100 feet, almost a thousand feet lower than my home, so today’s high was likely to reach 95 there. And most of the climb up the long ridge would be exposed, through scrub and open pinyon-juniper-oak woodland. It’s a continuous climb from the trailhead, and at an average 14 percent grade, it would be the steepest trail I know of anywhere. I’ve done steeper bushwhacks, but trails are generally routed with gentler grades. I was surprised, but also pleased – this is the kind of trail I like, and the steeper the ascent, the more rewarding the descent.

The trail begins by climbing two hundred vertical feet out of the narrow canyon to the top of the ridge, which is near the lower edge of a dissected alluvial bench. This bench forms a broad, gently sloping skirt below the western wall of the range. Parallel streams dissect it, either into flat-topped mesas or long, narrow ridges like this one.

The sky was clear, the air was still, I was totally exposed and sweating like a pig as I labored upwards, wondering when I would either get too hot and turn back, or reach the shade of a ponderosa forest above 7,000 feet. The ridgeline consists of a series of little peaks or humps, each of which the trail climbed over at between 20 and 30 percent grades. And from these, the 9,000 foot peaks and ridges above beckoned.

Reading the trail, I soon confirmed no one else had been up this trail besides cattle, probably not since the trail work last September. The cattle sign was really old, but the trail was in great shape, and while suffering in the heat, I looked forward to an easy descent later.

Eventually I left the totally exposed scrub zone behind and began passing between pinyon pines and junipers where I could step off occasionally into some momentary shade. Radiant heat was my nemesis – it felt like the low 90s on the exposed trail, and the mid-70s when I stepped into the shade. Finally I surmounted the steepest grade yet, traversing a prominent hill, and came to a saddle with a big cairn.

Past the saddle was another steep hill, and traversing the north slope of that I encountered my first ponderosa pines. But then the cleared trail ended at a shallow slope covered with bunchgrass and strewn with charred deadfall.

After some scouting, I found some pink ribbons that had been hidden by charred snags falling after last year’s trail work, and eventually picked up a faint trail on the high side of the clearing. The trail crew had continued up the ridge, cutting some brush but leaving the deadfall, and soon I came to oak thickets where the old tread had been completely obliterated by the erosion of post-fire sheet flows.

Miraculously, I was still able to find an occasional pink ribbon that beckoned me forward. Most of these ribbons were in the midst of thickets, so you couldn’t see them until you pushed your way in. Some of them led to impenetrable blowdown that I had to back out and circumvent.

Finally I reached the last ribbon. Beyond it was what looked like the ghost of the old trail, but it was completely blocked by low shrubs and deadfall for as far as I could see.

I turned back, descending a hundred yards or so through the maze of scrub oak. It was still early, storm clouds were forming over the crest and providing occasional shade, along with breezes, that cooled me off. I still had plenty of energy and wanted to keep going, but the slopes above were getting steeper and rockier, and without a route, I would soon be lost and blocked by a rock wall or boulder pile.

I kept checking the topo maps I’d brought, but the landscape I could see from this thicket seemed nothing like the topography shown on the maps. I began to suspect the trail workers had deviated from the original route.

There was an opening in the maze that led south over the ridge. I explored that for a couple hundred yards, but was no wiser for it. I turned back and hiked back up to the last ribbon. I’d pushed through thickets before, so I chastised myself and began forcing my way up the trace that I thought might be the old trail. After climbing over a bunch of deadfall, I reached a point where the “trail” became a deeply eroded drainage, ending in a wall of shrubs that was just too dense for me.

So I gave up and, with difficulty, found my way back down through the maze. But I wasn’t happy, and when I reached the point at the lower edge of the oak thicket where the trail crew had stopped clearing brush, I stopped again and started feeling guilty about not trying harder.

So for a second time, I turned back, re-climbing the two hundred vertical feet and fighting my way back through that quarter mile of maze. Along the way, I picked up bits of pink ribbon I found lying on the ground, so I could add my own ribbons past the last ones tied by the trail crew, to guide my return.

I’d seen quite a few birds, but nothing unusual. Flocks of ravens were circling, vultures rocked on thermals, and finally I saw a big raptor hunting among the peaks far above. When a hawk appeared to give the bigger bird scale, I realized it had to be an eagle. It hunted up there for quite a while but was too far for a picture.

This time, I climbed a deeply eroded slope crisscrossed by deadfall, above the thicket that blocked the gully where I’d stopped before. I climbed to the base of the steep slope above. I saw two peaks above me, where my map showed a level ridge. They looked to be at least a thousand feet higher, and I assumed one was the named peak on the map. The slope ahead of me looked impassable, and I had no idea where the old route went, or if I was even close to it. This was as far as I would get.

On the way down, I untied my ribbons so as not to mislead anyone. I became convinced the trail crew had deviated and was hacking a new route up this ridge, one which was likely doomed. I’d captured some GPS waypoints with my messaging device and at home, would compare them with the trail shown on the maps to see how far off they’d gone. I planned to notify USFS as well as the equestrian trail crew.

But in the meantime, the clouds were dispersing and a fierce heat was radiating off the trail onto my face. I figured the ground, which was gravel and hard-packed dirt, had stored and accumulated heat throughout this record heat wave. It was like walking across the crust of an active lava flow, so I descended the steep, treacherous surface as fast as was safe. My only consolation was the broad vista ahead, from the valley 3,000 feet below me to the series of blue mountain ranges on the far side, ending on the horizon at the barely visible Mogollon Rim.

Finally I reached a point where I could turn around and get a view of the crest I’d been climbing toward. Now I saw that the landmark peak and most of the crest had been hidden from me when I was in that oak maze. And when I got home and checked my GPS waypoints, I learned I’d covered much less ground than expected – 7 miles in 6-1/2 hours. I’d been on the right trail until that last pink ribbon – from there, the trail turns 90 degrees left and begins winding its way up toward the hidden peak, far north of where I’d gone. I’d gotten stuck below slopes that hid the upper landscape, so there was no way I could’ve found a route on my own, let alone reconnecting with the old trail.

In the canyon bottom, even though I’d parked it facing west with the reflective sunshade over the windshield, my vehicle was like a pizza oven. I opened all the doors and left the AC on high for a while, but even so the sweat was pouring off me as I drove out to the highway.

It was after 5 on a Sunday, but the road crew was still at work, resurfacing a highway that didn’t need it. The national bureaucracy and infrastructure most of us believe we need is actually a juggernaut of habitat destruction and waste. But people cling to the evil they know, imagining the only alternative is chaos and suffering.

When 90 Degrees Is Cool

Our daily high temperature was forecast to drop from 98 to 90 this weekend – a significant cool-down from the past three weeks. But the humidity remained high, and I still needed high elevations and shade for my Sunday hike.

And after last Sunday’s routefinding and bushwhacking, I wanted an easy trail. The mountains in Arizona were still too hot, so there was really no choice – I had to do the crest hike near town that I’d already done only two months ago.

There’d been a brief storm yesterday, the canyon was dripping with dew, and the flies were out in force. I was sweating heavily from the humidity even before the air warmed up. I found lots of tracks from yesterday on the canyon bottom stretch of this popular trail, but as usual they dropped off in the first couple of miles before the climb to the crest. The only tracks that preceded me on the climb were from a mountain bike sometime in the past weeks.

I wound my way up through the mixed-conifer forest on the south side of the 9,000 foot peak, and just below the crest noticed an older couple sitting in the shade fifteen or twenty feet above the trail. We exchanged pleasantries about the cooler weather and the beautiful day, and I pointed out we were lucky the wildfire that cleared forest from the north side had left this side intact.

The woman immediately launched into a lecture about fire suppression and the importance of fire in the ecosystem. I smiled, letting her finish, then I said that for years, my hikes in this and other national forests had been amateur studies in fire ecology. I said one thing I’d learned is that hiking trails like this are unsustainable in wildfire habitat. The man said “Yeah, they’re actually abandoning a lot of trails!”

“Yep, habitat will just have to recover without us,” I added.

“And that’s a good thing!” the woman maintained, sternly and emphatically. “Nature is better without humans!”

I smiled again. Here they were enjoying a day in nature, and she was resenting it.

I asked them where they’d hiked from. Like others I’ve met recently here, they’d driven all the way up the fire lookout road to the crest, and hiked less than a mile to this spot. They’d actually spent the night there on the road, battered by yesterday’s storm, and would drive the twenty miles back to town today.

The man asked me where I was hiking from, and after I’d told him said “That’s a big hike! How far do you go from here?”

I told him about the shallow basin with old-growth conifers and a grassy meadow three miles farther out the crest. “Wow!” he said.

“Yeah, eighteen miles out and back, but on an easy trail, which is what I need at this point.” I told them about the bushwhack I’d done last week, when it took me seven hours to cover seven miles. I recommended hikes over in Arizona where trails were better maintained, but got the impression they were only interested in van camping and short walks near town.

The remaining three miles went smoothly, but I was hot, sweaty, and plagued by flies even on the crest. Such a relief to reach the shallow basin and collapse on a bed of pine needles in the shade.

Flowers were more subdued here than on previous hikes – many had already gone to fruit. But the pollinators were still busy. I was really feeling the heat on the way back, stopping to drink my still-cold water in every patch of shade.

The big milestone on the return is the saddle below the peak. At that point you’ve done twelve miles, and what remains is all downhill. I was wearing my best boots and my feet were doing better than on other recent hikes. And bigger clouds were forming, so I had intervals of darkness and cooler air in addition to the shade of the forest. The flies continued, worse in some parts of the forest than others, seemingly without rhyme or reason. But my head net allows me to ignore them.

On the final descent into the canyon I began seeing tracks of people who’d walked a few miles in while I was hiking on the crest. My left heel was acting up. I stopped to stretch, but was still limping intermittently on the last two miles in the canyon bottom, where I found more footprints and hoofprints of horses.

And when I got home, I discovered my whole lower body was covered with a rash that burned like fire in some places. So ironic that what keeps my heart, lungs, and mind healthy is causing skin problems, at the same time as trails become less accessible.

Puzzle in a Hot Canyon

Thanks to the wonders of technology, everyone with their face glued to a screen knows the Southwest is experiencing a dangerous heat wave. Unfortunately, my regular high-elevation hot-weather hikes have become impractical due to forest loss, blowdown, regrowth, or flood damage – all except for the one I did last weekend. The temperature in town was forecast to reach 98, and without a storm to cool things off, I could expect temperatures in the mountains to reach the high 80s. I was almost ready to give up on this Sunday’s hike.

But I’ve done serious hikes in the desert in the high 90s – I’d feel like a real wimp if I let this heat wave whip me. I kept thinking about the beautiful, shady mixed-conifer forest at the start of the abandoned-trail hike I’d done two weeks ago. Another equally-abandoned canyon trail started from there, and even if it turned out to be a dud, at least I’d be in nature, and ten degrees less hot than at home.

There was absolutely no information available online – even before the mega-wildfires, this had apparently been an unpopular trail. Like its companion trail, it had been subjected to two wildfires in a decade, and I could expect deadfall, blowdown, deep washouts, boulder-strewn debris flows, logjams, and thickets of thorny locust. But I found the post-fire remediation map from last year’s fire, and it seemed there might be slightly less severe burn in this canyon, and hence more shade during a heat wave. On the map, it reaches the 9,000 foot crest in only five miles – if I was lucky, I might find significantly cooler weather up there.

I was driving my little 4wd this time, so I could make it down the steep, deeply-eroded, incredibly rocky approach road onto the 7,200 foot floodplain to park in the shade of the old-growth. There was a flood warning sign, but the catastrophic post-fire flooding had already occurred last fall, and I figured enough regrowth had occurred in the meantime to forestall anything like that now. A storm would actually be really welcome today, to cool things off.

I’d gotten a late start, and it was already too hot in the sun when I got out of the vehicle. The creek had shrunken to an occasional algae-choked trickle, but my friends the flies were still there, swarming my head net. I climbed across the debris flows, deep washouts, deadfall and blowdown of the old forest road to the junction of two canyons where I’d started the previous hike. Today’s hike would continue up what was left of the road – mostly nice and shady.

The Forest Service map shows this road ending after about another mile, where it climbs the right bank of the creek and the old trail begins, climbing about 200 feet up a slope to bypass a rocky narrows in the canyon. On the ground, the road had mostly been obliterated by catastrophic flooding and regrowth, but I was able to read and follow its traces, finally arriving at an overgrown clearing on the right bank.

Straight ahead was a little erosional gully that might be the remains of the trail, and when I pushed through shrubs on the easier left bank of the gully, I sensed the vaguest indication of an old cleared corridor climbing the slope. I climbed a hundred feet or so up a rounded shoulder, repeatedly checking the topo maps I’d brought. They were the highest resolution I could get, but still omitted most of the actual topography I was seeing on the ground, so I had a really hard time figuring out where I was.

But before the shoulder merged with the higher slope, in a place where there was no other surviving evidence of a trail, I suddenly came upon a big cairn. The map shows the trail making a left turn two hundred feet above the canyon bottom, and a cairn often indicates a turn or crossing point, but when I looked left, a little thicket blocked my way. So I continued up the slope, imagining I was following the ghost of a trail.

Just before the shoulder merged with the main slope, I did come to some kind of trail that approached a steep gully. But I couldn’t see its continuation on the opposite slope, so I kept climbing. It was now impossible to judge how high I was above the canyon bottom, and the map just wasn’t detailed enough. I climbed another fifty feet or so, before giving up and heading down the gully. There was no sign of a trail anywhere, so I just began laboriously sidehilling across the very steep slope in loose dirt.

Eventually I emerged high above the main canyon again, and came upon a path that was so nice I assumed it had to be the remains of the old hiking trail, now used only by game. The map showed it leading back down to the creek after a quarter mile, but suddenly it ended in a dense thicket of thorny locust. I spent another twenty minutes or so scouting for a route through, above, or below, finally giving up and heading straight down the slope toward the canyon bottom. That’s where I found another cairn, hidden behind a big blowdown log, and looking back saw the old hiking trail leading up the slope far below where I’d been hiking. Talk about trial and error – I’d used up almost an hour routefinding in only a half mile of terrain.

The canyon bottom was fairly narrow here, alternating between surviving sections of floodplain where there were faint game trails, and washed out sections where I had to walk in the creekbed. But within another quarter mile I came to another cairn, pointing to an overgrown corridor up the floodplain. I was really encouraged – I hadn’t found anything like this near the start of that other canyon hike.

It was still hot in the sun, without a whisper of wind, but there was enough surviving forest to offer intermittent shade. What remnants of trail I found were overgrown and only maintained by game, but I continued to find cairns every hundred yards or so – until I came to a badly burned basin where side canyons came in from left and right. This basin was filled with debris, including logjams I had to make long detours around.

The map shows a point where major side canyons come in from left and right, with the trail making a sharp left into one of them. But I didn’t think I’d gone far enough. There was nothing to do but laboriously climb through the long debris field. And once past it, I did see another cairn, all by itself out in the middle of the boulder pile.

From there, I found a route up the left bank, and re-entering forest, soon came to a steep side drainage where I spotted another cairn, high on the slope to my left. And below it, the faint trail I was following ended.

The map shows the trail climbing the left bank of this side canyon, but the cairn beckoned me up the right bank. There was so little evidence of a trail up there I had to imagine it, but the canyon turned out to be so narrow that I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

After the late start and all the routefinding and bushwhacking, I was running out of time. But this climb up a side canyon was the beginning of the ascent to the crest, so I was excited to keep going. And although I seldom had a clear trail to follow, I kept finding cairns – much better than the previous hike in this area.

After about a quarter mile, I came to the convergence of several side drainages, some of which didn’t show up on the map. There were two little cairns in the convergence, but they didn’t indicate which way to go. I guessed that my route should go up a little shoulder and began climbing it, through an open forest where I had to detour around a lot of deadfall. There was no evidence of a trail, but squinting up the slope I finally spotted another big cairn.

A second cairn above this one led me around a rocky narrows in the next drainage. I even found an old, sun-bleached ribbon tied to a burned snag. This whole hike was like successfully solving a puzzle, using familiar clues in an unfamiliar landscape. I’d wasted a lot of time on unsuccessful forays, but if I ever wanted to come back, I now knew enough to avoid those.

I came to another stopping point, where a big gully came down from the right, with a very steep and rocky slope on the opposite side and impassable thicket on my side. I was out of time, but studying the opposite slope closely, I thought I could see a couple of cairns way up there. I zoomed in with the camera so I could confirm them later.

Returning, when I reached sunny stretches in the main canyon I figured it had to be in the high 80s. So I took it easy, drank lots of water and used my electrolyte supplements.

A few big cumulus clouds had formed and drifted over at times, but unfortunately no storms. I’d started the day with two trays worth of ice cubes in my uninsulated water reservoir, and the water was still blissfully cold eight hours later. Even so, I was repeatedly paralyzed by bad leg cramps, and my foot was hurting even in my best hiking boots. A worrying development since last winter.

The county road that leads to this trail may be the rockiest in our entire region. There’s a little signpost along the scary traverse out of the canyon, commemorating a guy who drove off and bounced down hundreds of vertical feet, probably ending in a fireball, in 1980.

It’s not so bad in my pickup truck with its leaf springs, but in the stiffly-sprung little Sidekick it feels and sounds like World War Three. So I had to take much of the 8 miles at less than 10 mph, and it was a huge relief to reach the paved highway.

Checking the map at home, I found I’d made it to within a mile and a third of the 9,000 foot crest. Now I’m familiar with the route, if I start the day on time I can probably go all the way. But as I’ve found elsewhere, the route on the ground deviates significantly from routes, including GPS, shown in mapping databases. So there are no guarantees.

I’d gone 7.15 miles out and back, with little over 1,100 feet of elevation gain, in seven hours. A pretty pathetic pace and a far too easy hike by my usual standards. But not bad for a hike in a heat wave when people are probably dropping dead elsewhere in the Southwest.

Day of the Pollinators

We’re having the kind of weather we have if the monsoon doesn’t start on time – highs in the mid-90s in town. In the past, it would drop into the 60s overnight, I’d run the swamp cooler to fill the house with that cool air, and the interior would never get above the mid-70s.

Now, it’s only dropping to the low 70s overnight. It’s too humid inside for the swamp cooler to work. The interior of my house gets up to 90 in the evening and never drops below 80. On today’s hike, I was really looking forward to getting above 8,000 feet.

But first, I had to chase these deer out of my backyard, where they threaten my apple and pear trees.

When I reached the pass at 8,200 feet, it was clear, sunny, still, and hot. The Rio Grande Valley to the east lay under heat haze. This is the old familiar trail that follows the crest to a 10,000 foot peak in 5-1/2 miles; I sweated during the long traverses and relished a light breeze when crossing saddles. Finally, after about three miles, I reached the relief of the shaded mixed-conifer forest.

I’d been missing birds on recent hikes. Sure, I’d always see jays, ravens, and vultures. But this has always been the best place to see birds, and today there were a lot of different kinds active on the crest, from flocks of bushtits in the understory to woodpeckers squabbling over tree trunks in the canopy.

After I crossed over the peak and started down through the alpine meadows of the back side, through the burn scar of last year’s mega-wildfire, I began encountering the pollinators. They seemed to be loving this hot, still weather, they were swarming tiny, dull-looking flowers we’d normally ignore, and in the windless quiet the buzzing of the bees could be heard from far away.

No one had been down the crest trail past the peak since my last hike here in October of last year. The trail, which had been cleared last year, was now almost completely obliterated, from post-fire erosion, blowdown, and overgrowth. I was only able to follow it because I know it so well.

As usual, I was hoping to continue the full nine miles to the junction saddle, but I was stopped at seven miles by blowdown in a spot where I knew the overgrowth would keep getting worse.

I was okay with turning back at this point; even truncated, this would be my most challenging hike since the first week of May, with 14 miles round-trip and over 3,200 feet of elevation gain. And I was mesmerized by the swarm of bees on a shrubby, dull-green annual that surrounded me on this hillside stopping point.

So I started paying more attention to flowers and pollinators, and all the way back up to the peak, I kept stopping to watch them at work. I literally had to tear myself away from each little patch of flowers along the trail.

Some of these photos are like those puzzle pictures that challenge you to find all the hidden objects. Can you find all the pollinators?

I’d been praying for rain all day, and storm clouds had gradually been gathering, finally producing thunder, breezes, cooler temps, and a few drops here and there. It was perfectly timed to keep me cool on the last three miles of exposed crest.

I drove through some heavy rain on the way home, and my house cooled down a few degrees more overnight. Hopefully we’ll get more monsoon weather this week!

Changes in the Heartland

Emotional Rollercoaster

My visits with family in Indianapolis are always emotional rollercoasters. We grew up in the farming country south of there, and visiting always reconnects me, not just with family baggage, but with those childhood roots, and the memories flood back, both bad and good.

I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, I saw a lot of the city on this trip, and I had a lot of time to think about what I’d seen. My observations should resonate with anyone who’s spent time in other old Rust Belt cities, like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St Louis, and Kansas City.

Aging in Exile

I never got to know our state capital until my mom and stepdad relocated there in the mid-1990s. First renting a studio in an old factory building alongside other artists and small entrepreneurs, they then bought a renovated Victorian carriage house in an old inner-city neighborhood that was becoming a cosmopolitan mecca. They opened the first fine art photography gallery in the state, and became prominent members of both the art scene and the small business community, meeting regularly for happy hour at the neighborhood dive bar where young artists served drinks as small business people unwound after work. Contrary to the state’s media image as a racist redneck backwater, their community was politically progressive and every bit as diverse in gender and race as my West Coast milieus.

The closing of the gallery, widowhood, COVID, and the aging process have exiled my mom from that community. She misses her old friends but, like me in my remote small town, seems reconciled to isolation. Her home is her memory palace – on the walls of every room, she can see work made by her, the internationally-known artists she studied with, and the local people who were once her friends.

Single-Family Homes

At home I’m blessed with mountains ranging from 5,000 to nearly 11,000 feet, supporting over 5,000 square miles of national forest and over 1,200 square miles of designated wilderness. The wilderness in my backyard is three times as big as the county that surrounds Indianapolis. So forgive me if I start to lose my mind in the congested cities and plowed cropfields of central Indiana. The closest undeveloped area is over an hour from my mom’s house, a state forest featuring a sandstone rockshelter and hills up to 250 feet tall (!), and I always drive down there for a day hike. On this trip, with a drive lengthened by freeway construction that seems to have been going on for at least a decade, I only had time for an 8 mile walk through the lush hardwood forest.

The grounds of the art museum include a nature preserve with a lake and a loop trail that I always walk – a little sanctuary in the city where I can get away from the noise, traffic, and stress.

But after that, I just walked the streets around my mom’s house, almost every morning.

All of these old industrial cities feature the opposite poles of old money and a rooted but increasingly desperate blue-collar working class. The old-money mansions line a narrow corridor northwards from downtown, while the shabby, soot-stained single-family homes of blue collar neighborhoods form a ring around the city elsewhere, and it seems that at least one house on each block is abandoned and boarded up. The conservative middle class and those with children mostly live in the distant suburbs, while more cosmopolitan and childless professionals choose gentrified inner-city enclaves like my mom’s neighborhood, again in single-family homes on streets shaded by giant hardwood trees.

Rainbow Flags and Strollers

The focus of Mom’s neighborhood has always been the commercial street to the south, so at first I instinctively headed north through residential neighborhoods to avoid traffic. But my way was soon blocked.

After the industrial collapse of the 1970s, the city eventually recovered into a state of constant reconstruction. Despite attempts to create “greenways” and more walkable neighborhoods, the massive freeways surrounding downtown and spreading outward keep getting bigger, noisier, and dirtier – hence the soot from vehicle tires falling on everyone from rich to poor. As the home of the Indy 500, the “Racing Capital of the World”, it’s a driving culture, with drivers conditioned to treat freeways and streets alike as race tracks, unconsciously reckless and mostly oblivious to pedestrians, yielding an ever-increasing rate of traffic fatalities.

Enduring the hammering din of overhead traffic through a dark, filthy underpass, I meandered northward through a preserved historic enclave where stately three-story Victorians set back in big lawns share shaded streets with generic postmodern townhomes. As a Westerner raised on visions of organic Midcentury design and enlightened by indigenous lifeways, I find both traditional Euro-American and postmodern architectures repugnant. But every yard is lovingly landscaped, every lawn manicured by dark-skinned gardeners, many of whom were working as I passed. And to counterbalance the state’s right-wing reputation, every other property bears rainbow flags and posters promoting diversity and tolerance.

The farther north I went, the less ostentatious the homes, and the more I encountered nannies, and occasionally young parents, pushing babies in strollers.

Postmodern Apartments and Cobblestone Streets

Midway through the Old Northside, I passed a cheap-looking high-density development that was under construction twenty years ago. It must’ve been designated for low-income residents, because it’s already turning into a little slum amidst all the spotless middle-class properties, graffiti spreading across its courtyard walls and trash filling interior corridors.

In the following week I explored south, where, twenty-some years ago, a few disused multistory factories were converted to “lofts” – not the DIY artists’ lofts I knew in coastal cities in the 1980s, but upscale condos for affluent young professionals. Lowrise commercial buildings in this area have since been rapidly replaced by postmodern apartment complexes for the millenials who’ve been attracted to most of these Rust Belt cities by emerging tech jobs. Here, the big employer is Salesforce. It’s hard for me to imagine young people who would aspire to a career surveilling and manipulating consumers, but apparently schools are churning them out by the millions.

I could only walk a few more blocks south before I ran into light industry, but just before that I encountered the tiny, quaint enclave of Lockerbie, with a cobblestone street and the brick Victorian home of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” and a literary pop star at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Alongside more sophisticated fare, I was raised on his homely works – “Little Orphan Annie” and “When the Frost is on the Punkin” – which can still evoke our shared roots.

Sponsorship City

Next, I headed west on the Cultural Trail, a work of landscape architecture partly designed by my mom’s former friends and neighbors who have spearheaded the city’s ambitious greenway corridors. Like sidewalks, all these corridors are used primarily by riders rather than pedestrians – cyclists, riders of e-bikes or e-scooters – so people who walk need constant vigilance to avoid getting run down. Cities are getting more and more dangerous for pedestrians – cyclists and riders of e-bikes and e-scooters almost universally disobey laws prohibiting them from sidewalks, and laws go unenforced. Cyclists at least have the excuse that sharing the streets with cars and trucks is suicidal.

Wheeled transportation is necessary because despite gentrification, cities like this have evolved away from walkability. In New York and San Francisco, you’re never more than a few minutes’ walk from a bodega or corner store, and most neighborhoods still have hardware stores. Corner stores and neighborhood groceries are long gone from Indianapolis; my mom’s supermarket and pharmacy are each a mile away in opposite directions.

On my five-mile round-trip across downtown to the historic canal with its ducks and geese and the big river with its rim of flood debris, I was reminded that like the professional sports it’s crazy about, this is Sponsorship City. It seems that every public building, monument, sidewalk, stairway, wall, and overpass is permanently engraved with the names of rich white sponsors.

Several of my friends, like the designers of the Cultural Trail, have accepted philanthropy as an integral part of their institutional careers, but I find it deeply troubling that poor people face constant reminders that their environment belongs to the rich. Philanthropy, sponsorship, and the private naming of the public environment are just more examples of our obscene wealth disparity and the fundamental injustice and unfairness of our society.

With its early auto industry, Indianapolis was a major destination in the Great Migration of Black folks from south to north, hence its reputation as a breeding ground for jazz sax players. Its population is now half nonwhite and 30% Black, but you’d never know it from the sponsors’ names inscribed in the urban landscape.

My mom’s neighborhood has changed dramatically with high-density development and the influx of thousands of young office workers. Most of my friends in West Coast cities live in single-family-home residential neighborhoods which haven’t changed visibly since they moved there decades ago. I suppose one reason Indianapolis has changed so much is that the economy was so depressed for so long, and when it began to recover, inner-city neighborhoods were in ruin, but the old low-density pattern was no longer profitable for developers.

Digital Experiences

For decades, the city’s art museum, a few miles north of my mom’s neighborhood in a park on the banks of the river, was my refuge. Many works in the permanent collection moved or inspired me, they occasionally hosted impressive temporary shows, and there were a couple of contemplative contemporary installations that could always calm my troubled soul. But as usual, I was apparently in the minority. They were losing membership, attendance, and revenue, and like most urban museums, they’ve transformed the entire vast property, first to prioritize entertainment over art, and now to “add wokeness” to their collection. The art museum is now just one component of a sprawling family recreation complex.

I was shocked and saddened when they replaced an entire floor, a third of the exhibition space containing all the contemporary works I loved, with the kind of generic “immersive digital experience” that’s become popular with Instagrammers everywhere. Whereas the old galleries offered hundreds of eclectic works by hundreds of diverse artists, the digital experiences feature a single old white artist – household names like Van Gogh or Monet. At the same time, they closed the small but excellent Japanese art gallery and the Renaissance and Medieval European galleries. The latter eventually reopened featuring yet another immersive digital experience.

Museum of Curation

The other European galleries have been replaced with a big roomful of works by a local Black collective, and a series of smaller rooms where a more limited selection of European and American works are surrounded by curatorial content to educate the viewer on their historical and colonial contexts such as slavery, imperialist looting, urban redlining, etc. Since my last visit, this curatorial content had been enhanced by another underrepresented, marginalized collective including LGBTQ artists and scholars as well as people of color.

For example, the museum has long featured paintings of Black folks by Black artists. To these, the collective has added detailed commentary on the injustices endured by the artists and subjects, sometimes in the form of additional paintings or poems of their own.

The net result of all these reforms is that most of the art formerly on display has been moved to storage and replaced by curatorial content – including wall-sized panels of explanatory text and dubious “interactive” experiences where visitors are encouraged to document their reactions to what is now more curation than art. The few works of art returned to the galleries have been selected to address curatorial themes, rather than based on their value as art, resulting in what should really now be called a museum of curation.

One-Sided Dialog

I was sympathetic with the new collectives and found their work competent and sometimes poignant. But the museum’s new curators, by selecting work from the collection on the basis of themes they’ve learned in academia, have relegated the collection’s most mysterious and challenging art to storage in favor of the didactic – work that can easily and instantly be explained to the undereducated viewer.

As a precocious white artist growing up with the privileges of my race, I was inspired to make mysterious work that challenges the viewer, rather than being primarily representational or decorative. But even purely representational or decorative work can raise questions. Instead of leaving the viewer to ask those questions – because they may be entrenched in a biased worldview – the curatorial content both asks the questions and provides answers for the viewer. It’s a false, static, one-sided dialog.

The viewer may end up being educated, but the original art tends to recede into the background as its mystery is explained. And what I consider the most important functions of art in society – to challenge and inspire – are sometimes lost in the process. The curators are unintentionally foregrounding their egos and careers, and the previously marginalized commentators are colonizing the galleries, but with reactionary rather than original work.

Who Knows Where It Will Lead?

As I was studying one of these “enhanced” exhibits, an elderly white docent came over and asked for my reaction to the new galleries. I briefly told her where I was coming from and how I’d followed the reforms over the years, put off at first but now understanding the direction they were taking. She nodded with a broad smile. “Don’t you just love it!” she enthused.

“It’s a start, but who knows where it will lead? Once they’ve started in this direction, the museum could turn into something completely different,” I replied. She seemed shocked and perplexed.

What I meant was that as an art museum, it represents a century and a half of selective collecting by rich white folks. The very idea of an art museum is a European institution which has been a tool of imperialism and colonialism for hundreds of years. For me as an underrepresented, marginalized white artist, the museum’s collection was a place of inspiration and solace. The biased and looted collection can’t simply be reformed to provide a similar experience for underrepresented minorities – it will have to be replaced by a completely different type of institution. All we can do is wait and see what that will be like.

Consumer Playground

Toward the end of my visit, I finally, reluctantly entered the massive new mixed-use real estate development near my mom’s home. They started by transforming a former low-rise art-deco factory – a soft-drink bottling plant – into a complex combining hotel, restaurants and food court, shopping, office space, and recreation. In rapid succession, they’ve added a cutting-edge virtual reality arcade, a taller office building housing a high-end restaurant and multiplex movie theater, and are now completing a high-rise apartment building. Having preserved the retro facades of the factory, they’ve appealed to both fashion-conscious millennials and nostalgic boomers. The complex has become a consumer playground, with a captive market of young people drawn by tech jobs to the thousands of new apartments that have turned this formerly quiet, single-family neighborhood into one of the most congested parts of the city.

This is exactly the kind of culture I and my artist colleagues were rebelling against in the late 1970s and early 1980s – the shallow consumer culture, partying amid the apparent collapse of the larger society, that inspired punk rock and transgressive performance art. It’s interesting to contrast this yuppie mecca with the new galleries at the art museum. I’m always mystified when women aspire to soul-killing jobs invented by men, when gays and lesbians aspire to destructive institutions – like marriage or the military – that have caused so much suffering among heterosexuals, and when people of color aspire to colonial institutions, like galleries and museums, developed by European imperialists.

Proud Hoosiers

Indianapolis is just the capital city for the state, which mainly consists of crop fields and small farm towns. Growing up in one of those, my friends and I had Black classmates and were shocked when one of those, a teenage girl, was stabbed to death in a nearby town which had been the national headquarters of the KKK. As rebellious young artists, my best friend and I couldn’t wait to get away from this backward place where there were no opportunities for us, but when we reached the West Coast we discovered our small-town Midwest origins – and especially the Hoosier state of Indiana – gave us a sort of awe-shucks authenticity the coastal people envied. So for decades, we bragged about being Hoosiers from the Heartland. After all, Abe Lincoln himself spent his boyhood and youth in our home state.

Then by the end of the 90s, politics had polarized everyone and everything, and our homeland emerged as a horrific backwater of racism and general intolerance. We had to rebrand ourselves as proud urbanites and Westerners, rejecting and suppressing our shameful redneck roots.

But now, our Hoosier friends are proud of the lives and freedoms they’ve been able to carve out in the midst of this state that’s condemned by the distant coasts. I’m proud of them, and especially of my heroic family as they struggle to survive, isolated in the midst of massive changes, the outcome of which no one can predict.

Another Abandoned Trail

I’d waited six weeks to be able to do a real hike – probably the longest hiatus ever. Sure, I’d walked over 50 miles during that interlude, but mostly on level terrain in the Midwest and the canyons of Utah. For my return to serious hiking, I didn’t want to overdo it at first, but I also wanted something interesting.

Since last winter, I’d been trying to find a way to the crest of the northern part of the long north-south mountain range east of here. I’d avoided that area in past years because the west side of the range consists of dozens of long east-west ridges divided by deep, narrow canyons. It’s anomalous topography; most ranges in the West are block-faulted (tilted), with a steep face on one side and a gentle rise on the other. The west side of this range is elevated and almost level, more like a high tableland cut over time by myriad parallel streams.

The canyons are generally too narrow to support roads, but a few of the east-west ridges are relatively flat on top – finger-like mesas – and dirt forest roads have been graded up these, occasionally all the way to the 10,000 foot crest. Hence most of the west side – the only side accessible to me – was left out of the wilderness area, and is still grazed by cattle.

The plus side of these roads is that theoretically, they offer access to high-elevation trails. But this range has also been deforested by two successive mega-wildfires, and I’m discovering, hike by hike, that the trails I hoped to follow to the crest have mostly been obliterated by erosion, deadfall, shrubby regrowth, and general disuse. Their remoteness has always made them less popular, hence they’ve been omitted from recent trail work. Like most trails in this new fire regime, they’re listed as “Open” on the Forest Service trail guide, but they’re essentially abandoned and increasingly impassable.

Today’s goal was an area near the high point of the range, where one of these “mesa” roads leads to the junction of two creeks, with trails leading up each of them to the crest trail, so that I could potentially do a loop, ascending one canyon, hiking a little over a mile on the crest trail, then descending the other canyon. It would be a total of 13 miles and 2,700 feet of elevation gain – an easy day hike by the numbers. But I had no idea what condition I would find the road or the trails in, and unusually, there was no recent information online. The last trip report dated from 2011, before the first big wildfire.

I’d tried to take this road in early April, but it starts with a river crossing that had been flooded then from snowmelt. Today I found the channel only about six inches deep, but past the crossing, the road becomes surprisingly rough and rocky as it climbs steeply to the mesa. My 4wd Sidekick needs work so I was driving my little 2wd truck, and I was really worried about how it would do on this unfamiliar road.

About 8 miles up the gently rolling mesa, the road begins traversing steeply down into the narrow canyon on its right, and here’s where the drive became really exciting. It’s a narrow high-clearance section over jagged bedrock – with a virtually sheer drop-off, hundreds of feet to the canyon bottom, at right – and the farther down I went, the more worried I was about my little truck being able to climb back out of it. Finally I reached the fork that led down to the creek, and a hundred feet down that I came to a steep section of white clay with deep erosional ruts I knew the truck couldn’t handle. But when I tried to back up the shallower slope to the landing at the fork, I immediately lost traction – the driving wheels are in the back while most of the weight is in the front.

I’ve been in this situation many times, and after blowing tires repeatedly on rough roads, I recently installed all-terrain tires, so with a little tricky maneuvering I managed to get back to the landing, where I parked, shouldered my backpack, and set out walking down the steep forest road.

I’d awakened this morning with a profound sense of impending doom, something that occurs regularly as part of my anxiety syndrome, and worrying about my truck and the road put me in a pretty black mood, but I expected the hike to cure that. I wasn’t sure of the elevation here – probably in the low 7,000s – but I was surrounded with beautiful, intact alpine mixed-conifer forest. I’d packed for weather in the 90s, but here and now it was in the high 60s and often shaded by drifting, partial cloud cover.

However, I’d been immediately swarmed by little flies when I first got out of the vehicle, and before I’d walked a hundred yards I had to dig out my head net. It was going to be one of those days.

The road wound down through the forest onto the floodplain of an intermittent stream, where it got sandy and passed the ruins of a cabin and corral. Shortly after that, I came to a five-foot-deep sheer washout. Nobody was driving past that anymore.

After scrambling over a long debris field and rejoining another section of the old road, I came to the junction of the two creeks. What was left of the old road continued up the left branch, so I began searching for the trail that led up the right branch. I’d read that there was a trail sign here, but there was nothing remaining of it or the trail – apparently victims of catastrophic post-fire flooding.

Exploring along the left creek, I eventually noticed a shallow dip in its bank, with a matching vague dip in the opposite bank. I crossed and headed up the far bank, where I found no trail, but continuing across a meadow, noticed the slightest sign of an old road cresting a rise, overgrown and littered with boulders. This beginning would set the tone for the rest of my hike.

This narrow side canyon had mostly intact forest in its lower part, but it had experienced serious flooding and erosion. Instead of a trail, I found remnants of an old road, most of which had been washed out, so that my hike alternated between stretches of climbing over and around deadfall on a gentle slope, and picking my way across debris flows and logjams in the creekbed. I found signs of cattle but they looked to be about a decade old. The creek was almost completely dry, but flies continued to swarm me.

It was slow going, and I soon gave up any hope of the 13-mile loop. I was looking for the first milestone, where the canyon would veer left and another “trail” would head straight over a low saddle. On the way, the slope at my right became a burn scar. I finally reached the left turn in the canyon, and saw the low saddle ahead, but I was bushwhacking at this point – I could see no trails anywhere. Then, squinting through charred snags in the canyon bottom, I thought I noticed a wooden sign on a dead tree trunk.

Like the abandoned cabins I occasionally find, this trail sign with no trails was a poignant reminder of how temporary our so-called “Anthropocene” really is. Everything we build is a future ruin.

A little more scouting revealed the scattered remains of a sign for the trail up the canyon. But before proceeding, I wanted to climb to the low saddle, hoping for a view into the next watershed. So I started bushwhacking up the drainage. It was a short climb, and in the saddle I found an actual trail and a cairn on the edge of the burn scar. This trail descends about five miles to a valley filled with spectacular white rock pinnacles I hiked to a few years ago.

Returning from the saddle, I found the remains of the old trail leading back down to within a hundred feet of the junction sign in the canyon bottom. It was so overgrown I hadn’t noticed it from below. Now I needed to find a way up the canyon.

The left slope was very steep and eroded, so I started bushwhacking up the right slope, where I soon found what appeared to be an old cattle trail, blocked often by deadfall. This trail, deeply pockmarked in loose dirt, climbed high above the creekbed, which was now flowing intermittently. In places, it even looked like the remains of a human trail, but I hadn’t seen human footprints anywhere all day, not even on the road.

The cattle trail descended to the creek, which was flowing over bedrock, and the intact forest ended. From here on it was all burn scar and dense regrowth, much of it thorny locust.

Rain clouds were massing over the head of the canyon as I picked my way up the creekbed, looking for more old cattle trails I could use to bypass debris piles and logjams. I often found one that would then disappear in a thicket of thorns or a mass of blowdown, but the deeply eroded creekbed had become impassable with flood debris and the right bank was too steep, so I had to keep fighting my way up the slightly more accessible left bank.

Eventually, after pushing through an especially nasty thicket of locust, I came upon what appeared to be a remnant of the old hiking trail. Now it was getting really dark, I heard thunder to the north, and before long it began raining. The old trail was often interrupted by erosion, deadfall, or blowdown, but it was still much better than fighting through thorns, and although thunder continued, the rain slackened by the time I reached a big level area at the head of the canyon.

Here, the map showed the trail veering left toward another low saddle. But the remnant of trail ended, so I simply headed off in what I thought was the right direction through low undergrowth and a maze of charred, fallen tree trunks. The level area continued for hundreds of yards. I finally saw the low saddle off to the left. The map showed the trail making a sharp right just below the saddle, then traversing the slope of the ridge that had been on my right while crossing the level area. This ridge would’ve been my route to the crest of the range, if I’d been able to make good time on an actual trail instead of routefinding and bushwhacking all day.

But at several points on this hike I’d thought to myself, this is just my kind of trail! My favorite kind of hiking is without a trail at all, but it’s hard to do that in densely vegetated habitat. A trail on the map suggests that there is a way to reach some interesting destination. And an abandoned trail makes finding that route a challenge – and potentially an adventure.

I could find no trace of the old trail anywhere below the saddle or on the slopes below the ridge. The ridge itself bore stands of intact forest but the forested slopes consisted of the earthen mounds and pits left by the roots of fallen trees, so traversing them was like walking across moguls on a ski run. I kept studying the topo map I’d brought, trying to guess where I was, but it was fairly low resolution – I was never sure exactly where I was on the slope.

Finally I reached the top of the ridge, where I faced a seemingly endless thicket of locust and ferns. It’d continued raining lightly on and off, and just as I started through the thicket the temperature dropped and thunder crashed nearby. I was on an exposed ridge in a thunderstorm, just inviting a lightning strike, but there was nothing to be done about it.

It was almost time for me to be turning back. I estimated I’d covered less than a third of the planned loop, and I hadn’t reached anything of interest that I could consider a satisfactory destination. But as the thicket got thicker, I found myself approaching some white rock outcrops, and behind them I sensed the saddle where my route would cross into the next watershed and begin its ascent to the crest.

Thunder crashing behind me, I pushed through the last of the thicket and found myself on a pretty little forested ledge surrounded by boulders, with a view of the crest in the east. I knew I was finally above 8,000 feet, but would later learn it was closer to 9,000. I’d found my destination, just in time, at the most dramatic time possible!

The storm was moving away by the time I left my little ledge and began retracing my route. After I traversed the level area below the ridge and rejoined the old trail, I found it easier to follow it and cattle trails all the way down the overgrown burn scar of the upper canyon. Easier to follow, but painful – an entire day of sidehilling in loose dirt in my more flexible dry-weather boots had been really hard on my problem foot, and I vowed yet again to add foot exercises to my weekly regimen.

The sky was clearing and the whole landscape was now so vivid I felt like I was tripping on acid.

The lower canyon was a different story. Although it was wider and often had an actual floodplain, it had been so torn up by flooding that I seemed to spend most of my time climbing through debris. Finally in the worst pile of logs and boulders I lost my balance and fell, bashing my elbow on a hidden rock. It was a pretty minor cut but surprisingly produced the most blood I’ve shed in these past five years of serious hiking. Especially considering that everyone warns me not to hike alone, and a friend fell off a cliff and died while hiking solo.

My anxiety returned and increased the closer I got to my vehicle. I mentally ran through the scenarios. If the truck wouldn’t make it, could I back it down to a wide spot? Walking up the ridge looking for a signal for my phone, or walking the nine miles to the nearest cabin, some of it in the dark, to call for rescue. Doubting whether AAA would send a tow truck out that marginal road. Spending the night in the truck – since I’d recently switched vehicles, I wasn’t carrying a sleeping bag.

But thanks to the new tires, the truck made it up the road – with a lot of hard bouncing.