Max Carmichael's Blog, page 21

Fright on Bald Mountain

We finally get a good monsoon, and it’s wonderful, but it just makes my already high-pressure life more complicated! Rain almost every day, heavy storms in the mountains, and while I’m only hiking twice a week, I spend the intervening days trying to get my muddy, water-logged gear – boots, pants, poncho, and hat – clean and dry. Everything ends up in good shape just in time to get filthy again.

This Sunday I knew it made sense to head over to the newly opened west side of the wilderness, but as usual I was looking for unfamiliar hikes to spice up my routine. After studying the map I settled on two options, each of which had a high likelihood of failing. The first was a super-challenging peak climb that involved an undetermined amount of bushwhacking which I’d already sworn never to do again, and the second involved a canyon hike on a trail abandoned for almost a decade. The hike might fail, but at least I’d be out in nature.

The forecast was for cloud cover throughout the day and rain in the evening, but I’d seen how that played out last Sunday – lightning, thunder, and hail in the afternoon. The canyon hike would be a safer choice – the peak ascent would be scarily exposed – but on the drive up the west side of the mountains I chose the climb instead. When I’d attempted it before, I’d emulated a young woman from Arizona who’d started at the nearby canyon trailhead. That route involved a nasty bushwhack up a steep, brush-clogged side drainage to an old mine. Now that I had my 4wd Sidekick back, I could drive up the old mine road and save myself a mile each of trail and bushwhacking.

From the mine, it wouldn’t be a long hike as the crow flies – I figured about four miles to the peak I was aiming for. But that distance could be almost doubled by bushwhacking and circumventing obstacles, and in the process, I’d be climbing over 4,500′ – half of which I’d have to ascend in less than a mile.

In retrospect, it’s clear that I was still trying to compete with that young woman. It still bugged me that someone half my age could scamper all over our wilderness without needing trails, while I found it so hard and such slow going.

But my first challenge was getting up that mine road. It turned out to be the roughest road I’ve ever driven in this area – not as bad as our Mojave Desert mine roads, but reaching the limit of what my vehicle will do. I was in low-range 4wd the whole way, but hell, that’s what this vehicle was designed for, it’s about time I put it to good use.

From the graded road, the mine road climbs 1,200′ up and over a series of small peaks forested with pinyon, juniper, and oak, finally entering the ponderosa zone. The track is almost entirely rock, either embedded or loose, except for some steep parts that are loose dirt. The mine entrance sits halfway up a small conical peak blanketed by pine forest, but the road continues past it, climbing to a saddle behind the peak. That’s where I was hoping to park and start my hike, but a quarter mile beyond the mine I met my nemesis – a rock outcrop across the trail that I tried to drive around, but lost traction even in low gear and couldn’t get over. There was no place to turn around, so I had to reverse a quarter mile down that narrow, heavily-eroded mountainside track all the way back to the mine. It took about 15 minutes.

In addition to the risks of the hike itself, in the back of my mind was whether I’d be able to drive down this road later, after a rain. There were some steep, deeply eroded stretches that would get muddy, and the rocks themselves would get slick. But I’d just cross that bridge when I got to it – worst come to worst I’d have to spend the night in my vehicle up on the mountain.

On the ledge outside the mine entrance, I got turned around, parked, and loaded up for my ambitious day.

My destination was a 10,700′ peak at the end of a southwest-to-northeast trending ridge, the ridge itself averaging 10,000′. The little peak above the mine lay at the foot of a much lower outlying ridge, and the obvious approach was to traverse up the side of that outlying ridge to the saddle where it connected to the base of the higher ridge. That higher ridge began with a distinctive 9,800′ “bald” peak, so that would be my first goal, and likely my biggest challenge.

On the drive to the mountains I’d seen a broad but shallow cloud mass hanging over the heart of the wilderness, and elsewhere only scattered clouds with lots of blue sky showing. During the approach, clouds drifted back and forth, I had alternating sun and shadow, and it wasn’t hot, but it was humid enough that I was sweating pretty good.

Since I’d first attempted this climb, I’d done a lot more bushwhacking. I knew at least the first mile of this hike would be mostly through dense brush, but at this elevation – between 7,000′ and 8,000′ – it would be oak and I could just push through it. So that’s what I did, aiming for patches of ponderosa forest higher up the ridge where the walking would be easier. It was much slower than hiking a trail, but it wasn’t particularly hard.

Up and up I went, rounding broad slopes and cutting back into drainages, in and out of chaparral and small patches of pine forest, until I finally reached the ridge top that connected to the saddle at the base of the bald peak. This ridge top had a mix of open pine forest and dense oak scrub, so it was intermittently fast and slow. Finally I reached the saddle and gazed up at the daunting bald peak, with long talus slopes radiating downward on all sides. I’d definitely want to avoid those, but I’d also want to minimize my time in the dense chaparral in between the talus. This climb would put me literally between rock and a hard place.

The right-hand (east) side of the peak featured nothing but steep talus and dense scrub. The left-hand, west side was more complex, divided into big rock outcrops and cliffs, smaller talus slopes, patches of brush, and patches of forest. Hanging far above me was a broad cliff that I’d want to avoid, so I planned to wind my way up on the left, between rock outcrops and patches of forest – the way I remembered the young Arizonan had gone – hoping to find a “ramp” on the back side of that cliff that would lead to the top. It would all be very steep, but I figured I could take it at my own pace. After all, I had 7-8 hours to do a hike that at best guess might be 12 miles in actual round-trip distance.

After climbing the first few hundred feet I faced the first major obstacle: a cliff, and blocking my way around it, a narrow talus slope, both sides of which were lined with dense thickets of Gambel oak. I lost some time exploring routes through the oak and across the talus, but finally found a game trail that worked. The other side was much steeper, but the game trail held, eventually taking me to a little forested shoulder with an outcrop that projected dramatically over the big canyon to the north, where I’d done so many hikes in the past three years. Then, I’d always admired this peak from below and wondered if I’d ever climb it.

From there, I could see rain falling over another part of the range, a few miles away to the northeast. This added some urgency to my hike. I wouldn’t want to be descending some of these slopes when they were wet.

This small patch of mountainside forest opened up the next view, around the corner of the mountain, but unfortunately it was not the view I’d hoped for.

At first all I could see was another big, steep thicket of Gambel oak. But as I pushed my way through that, struggling for footing on the broken rock underneath, a much more daunting obstacle appeared. The entire slope ahead of me, as far as I could see, was steep talus, with only isolated strips of trees and brush breaking it into vertical strands. Above me was the sheer cliff, so my only option was to make my way across this talus. And since I was aiming for the peak, unseen somewhere far above, at some point I’d also need to resume climbing.

Real mountain climbers deal with this stuff all the time, but my experience with talus has been fairly limited, and none of it good. I always find it stressful, if not downright scary, to cross loose, sharp rock at the angle of repose, each step threatening to trigger an uncontrollable, potentially fatal rockslide. The only thing worse than traversing or climbing up a talus slope is having to climb down one, which I would definitely have to do on the way back.

It only took the first nerve-wracking traverse of talus to convince me to try climbing instead. A narrow vertical strip of brush and pines divided this from the next rockfall, and I used that vegetation to stabilize my climb. A few dozen feet up I encountered a steep outcrop I could climb on all fours, and that took me to a thicket I pushed up through, eventually reaching a small cliff that I could climb on natural hand-and-footholds. And suddenly I emerged on a tiny ledge at the top of the cliff, with a view over the southern landscape and the next big canyon system below the peak on the east.

That little rock ledge was part of a knife-edge ridge that seemed to climb steeply up toward the bald peak, which was still hidden from my perspective. It would be hard to follow as a route, because the knife edge was formed out of rough, irregular rock outcrops and densely forested with brush and pine. And it felt totally precarious and exposed – not a place to be stuck in a lightning storm or gale force wind. But getting here felt like a huge accomplishment! I’d managed to avoid most of the talus that had worried me below, and at this point there was nowhere to go but upward.

I slowly made my way up the knife edge, winding back and forth between outcrops, oak thickets, stunted pines and junipers, and occasional deadfall logs. Working my way up a small rock exposure surrounded by dense oak, I suddenly heard a rattlesnake somewhere to my right, but couldn’t see it, so I just kept climbing. A little beyond that, I emerged from a thicket at the base of another big talus slope.

This one was even scarier than the ones I’d found below, because the rocks were bigger, and there was literally nothing else above – I was nearing the top of the peak. But on the right was a dense wall of oaks, so I kept close to that as I precariously ascended the rockfall, and eventually the rounded “bald” top itself loomed ahead of me.

Faint “trails” led upward through the loose rock – impossible to say if they were natural, man-made, or game trails left over eons of time. The whole dome was crisscrossed by them, so I wound my way back and forth up the dome until I finally reached its small, flat top. So small, and so bare – like a stage elevated into the sky. The only feature up there was a tiny stone ring surrounding a Forest Service benchmark.

Looking east I could see the undulating ridge leading to the 10,700′ peak I’d hoped to reach today. That peak was still two miles away and involved descents and ascents of almost another 2,000′. It’d taken me 4 hours to get this far – I figured it would take at least another couple hours to reach that higher peak. The return would be a little quicker, but with storms obviously forming all around, it would still leave me descending a wet, extremely dangerous mountainside well after dark, which was definitely out of the question.

Now I felt really in awe of the girl from Arizona, and humbled by her achievement. But on the other hand, her hike had taken almost 13 hours, and she’d highlighted the slope I’d climbed to get here as the hardest part of the whole day – she’d said her heart was skipping beats and she was praying while climbing that talus.

I have to admit my sense of accomplishment was still tempered by a lot of anxiety – if not outright terror – about descending those steep slopes and re-crossing that talus. It was becoming more obvious how my hiking obsession was getting out of control and exposing me to risks that were totally unnecessary and probably counterproductive. Nobody should be doing hikes like this alone, ever, regardless of age or physical condition…

As it turned out, the down hike wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. I had to be super careful, but I managed to survive the cliffs and the talus and reach the little forested shoulder unscathed. There, I found really fresh bear scat – it seemed I’d just missed the bear. Amazing what climbers these animals are.

At that point I could see rain closing in from all directions, but it didn’t hit me until I’d crossed the saddle at the foot of the peak and began following the lower ridge to the point where I could start descending toward the little mine peak. When the rain did hit, it hit hard, and I soon found myself slipping and falling down a slope of loose dirt and broken rock, getting thoroughly muddy and plastered with leaves and sticks, snagging my poncho on branches that yanked me off balance.

Again I found myself in survival mode, just trying to make it back without injury. But part of my mind was also on the drive down that mine road. Could I even do it in the wet? I’d soon find out.

Then I made a wee mistake. Where the ridge connects to the little peak, I saw a trail that seemed to be a shortcut down to the mine. That trail led through steep pine forest into a drainage that was obviously the drainage the mine road crosses just before you reach the mine. But I’d misjudged the topography. It wasn’t a shortcut – it was at least as far as the route I’d taken on the way up. And eventually the trail disappeared and I had to find a route down a steep slope of loose dirt between more oak scrub, in hard rain with every gully turned into a cascade.

So I wasn’t a happy hiker when I reached the vehicle, filthy and soaked, yet again, from head to toe. Amazingly, the return from the peak had taken only 2-1/2 hours – the steepness and thickets had made it much harder to climb than to descend. But that time savings was offset by the long, slow drive down the wet mine road. Although it was tricky when wet and had to be taken very carefully, the Sidekick’s deluxe all-terrain tires handled it just fine.

Back on the highway, I was filled with an incredible sense of relief. How amazing just to return from something like that, alive!

Trail of Many Weathers

For more than a month my favorite local trails had been closed due to a wildfire that had simmered in the heart of the wilderness for weeks, only to flare up and rapidly grow during the hottest, driest days at the end of the pre-monsoon. The active edge of the fire was embracing the area I’d just discovered in April, and most wanted to revisit, so I anxiously checked the map for updates throughout each day. I wanted to explore a canyon, deep in the wilderness, that arcs from north to south for about eight miles, from the 10,000′ crest of the range in the north to its junction with a larger creek 4,000′ lower in the south. You approach the canyon from the west, across a high, rolling plateau, facing the canyon’s east slope, a dramatic, precipitous, continuous mountain wall studded with cliffs and giant outcrops of white conglomerate.

The fire, growing from the east, was sending an arm over the rim of that mountain wall in the north, and another around its base at the creek junction in the south. But then humidity increased across the area, and our monsoon rains started early, and the fire burned out just before reaching the canyon. And on Friday morning, after a week with no more wildfire news, I called forest headquarters across town, and was told the wilderness closure would expire at 5 pm.

At that point we were having rain daily, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. Temperatures Sunday were forecast to reach 90, and most of this hike is exposed to full sun. Rain wasn’t predicted until evening, when I’d be driving home, drenched with sweat. But monsoon forecasts are notoriously unreliable, and this forecast was for town. Hopefully the mountains would produce some earlier weather, and in any event I was desperate – I was an addict suffering from weeks of withdrawal.

On the long drive up the flat, overgrazed mesa toward the trailhead, I saw not the faintest wisp of cloud in the pale sky. And when I stepped out of the truck at the trailhead, it was into silence, stillness, and already oppressive heat. The log book showed that someone had beat me here, yesterday, but they’d only hiked a mile down into the first canyon and back. Parties from Arizona and Texas had hiked a little farther back in June, ignoring the closure notices. One of them reported too much blowdown on the trail into the second canyon – the trail I’d hiked in April.

In monsoon season, it’s no longer “a dry heat” – our humidity climbs above 90 percent. I was drenched with sweat within the first quarter mile, and when I finally reached the first canyon bottom, the creek was bone dry. The next stretch is a 1,400′ climb up a precipitous wall on long, steep switchbacks, gaining a dramatic view up a canyon lined with rock ledges and outcrops to the distant crest. The view was hazy from the heat and humidity, and the climb in the still, hot air was exhausting and took almost twice as long as usual. The only thing that kept me going was the belief that there would be water in the destination canyon, and some cloud cover in the afternoon, when during our monsoon, the day’s heat typically generates cumulous clouds that may grow into storms.

At the top of the canyon wall, the climb continues, even steeper at up to a 40 percent grade, to a small peak which is the west end of the rolling plateau that leads to the second canyon. Sweat was dripping off my head on all sides and I had to keep swabbing it out of the way with my already soaked shirtsleeves. I was crossing a high, two-mile-wide divide between two deep canyons, but with no forest cover and without even the hint of a breeze. I kept surveying the skyline in all directions, but never saw even the tiniest cloud. The bleached dome of the sky felt like a giant heat lamp.

The eastern wall of the second canyon beckoned me forward, hazy like a mirage, as I trudged across the high parts of the plateau, with their broken white gravel and scattered shrubs, down into the red sediment and sparse pines of the hollows, and back up again.

Finally I crested the saddle above the descent into the second canyon. It’s a 1,400′ drop – mercifully, with sporadic forest cover – but I was already exhausted from the heat and humidity, and couldn’t imagine climbing back up it at this end of this sweltering day. But I’d have to – I couldn’t come this far, and pass up a dip in the water of the creek far below.

Heading down from the saddle, I first encountered freshly broken branches on trailside shrubs – a standard trail marker from the Arizonans or Texans – and a single bootprint. Then the trail gets so steep you almost have to slide down, and you reach the first deadfall – there’s actually no blowdown on this trail. Any sign of the out-of-state hikers ended – this is where they apparently gave up and turned back. But I knew the deadfall on this trail is actually minimal compared to other trails in the area.

The descent, seemingly endless and almost continuously steep and rocky, divides into several distinct sections, some through dense riparian vegetation, others through chaparral, others through open pine or fir forest. The dramatic eastern wall looms in front of you the whole way, and when you finally emerge into the intact, shady ponderosa forest at the bottom, on an alluvial bench above the creek, it’s like coming home.

I’d been planning to explore the creek trail upstream, but first I had to fight my way through the dense willows lining the creekbed, to reach that cool running water at last.

The descending trail joins the creek trail in a broad grassy meadow at the feet of big ponderosas. I sat there for a while in the shade, snacking and drinking water. All the ice I’d added to my drinking water had long melted and it’d almost warmed to air temperature. So I soon got up and began following the creek trail north.

It hadn’t been cleared since the 2012 fire, but it wasn’t in bad shape. Very little tread remained, but there wasn’t much deadfall. I quickly reached the end of the alluvial bench, and the trail simply began traversing the steep, forested slope, diving into and out of gullies, climbing higher above the creek, which I occasionally got glimpses of, snaking over a bed of white rock dozens of feet below, tinted green with algae.

Rock formations closed the canyon in, and the trail suddenly dove down toward the creek between giant boulders. I’d been eyeing that water, and as I climbed down through the boulders I thought I could spot a swimming hole downstream.

Yes! There was an overhang for shade, and a clear pool that looked to be a couple feet deep. I’d started out hoping to explore much farther – two or three miles up the creek trail. This crossing was less than a mile from the junction, but the heat had really slowed me down. This would be my destination for the day.

The first thing I did was take off my sweat-soaked shirt and rinse it several times in the creek. With my chronic foot injury, it’s hard and risky for me to walk barefoot on rocks, so taking a dip in a rocky pool is complicated, but that doesn’t stop me – I just have to take it slow and easy. The water felt freezing cold, and as soon as I submerged in the pool I stirred up masses of dead algae, so I had to rinse off under the little waterspout that filled the pool. It was only a quick dip, but it felt wonderful.

I soaked my water reservoir in the creek to cool, filled a bottle with creek water to drink during the climb out of the canyon, and dunked my hat so it would keep my head cool on the way back to the junction.

It was during the hike back down the creek trail that I saw the first hazy clouds growing over the eastern wall from the southeast. By the time I reached the junction in the meadow there was an actual cumulus cloud hanging up there.

Still, the air remained incredibly hot and humid, and the steep climb out of the canyon was an ordeal that I could only handle in short stints. I just resigned myself to a very long hike back, and all the benefit of the dip in the stream was gone in the first hundred yards of that climb.

I kept looking up hopefully, measuring the spread of the cloud mass westward toward the sun in degrees of arc. I was probably about 2/3 of the way up before they finally met and I got some sporadic periods of shade, for the first time all day.

When I’d climbed 1,400′ out of the canyon and reached the saddle, the eastern sky had turned a dark blue and I could hear occasional thunder.

Things changed quickly as I started across the rolling plateau. Still air was replaced by blasts of wind, and after descending hundreds of feet into the first red hollow and climbing back up onto the second white shoulder, sporadic drops of rain turned to the sharp impacts of hail. I pulled my damaged poncho over me and my pack, just as I could see hailstones bouncing off the rocky ground between the shrubs.

Suddenly a bigger hailstone fell at my feet, exploding on impact. Then another landed on the trail ahead, 3/4″ in diameter. I knew there was practically no limit on how big they could get, so I started looking for trees to hide under, but there really weren’t any on this exposed plateau. Lightning struck all around, thunder crashed, big hailstones rained down on me, and I kept going. And within ten minutes or so, the storm moved off.

Since I was on a high plateau surrounded by peaks and ridges stretching many miles off into the distance, I could watch the weather moving around for many miles. I could see columns of rain thousands of feet tall. Up in the recent burn scar on a distinctive peak several miles to my south, I could see a patch of what looked like snow in July – a spot where hail had fallen heavily and piled up on ground cleared of vegetation by the wildfire.

I got to a point where I could see north across several outlying canyons and ridges to where lightning had struck high up a distant slope, igniting a small wildfire that raised a narrow stream of smoke.

Finally I reached the little peak at the western end of the plateau and began my grateful descent into the first canyon. Despite the storm, the air was saturated with humidity, and I was still soaked and dripping with sweat.

The downside of this spectacular trail is how steep and rocky it is, and the final stretch, more than a mile of traverse up out of the first canyon, is like adding insult to injury. Slowed by the heat, I’d spent over nine hours on the trail to cover less than 14 miles, but fortunately there was a bottle of ice-cold water waiting for me in the truck.

Wet Enough?

What is it about this year? First, the summer solstice fell on my hiking day. And now, the 4th of July, the day Americans celebrate the violent founding of their colonial state by blowing things up.

There was no way I could get away from my fellow Americans on this day, they’d be swarming all over the backcountry – except for our wilderness area, which was still closed, despite the big wildfire having been snuffed out by monsoon rains. Almost all of my favorite hiking areas had been off limits for over a month now, and I was getting desperate.

One trail remained open, far to the north, another two hour drive from home. It traversed some of the worst burn scars from the 2012 wildfire, near the crest of the mountains, gradually descending into the headwaters of the longest and most dramatic canyon in the range. The Forest Service listed this trail as “cleared”, but I’d tried it a couple years ago and found it badly eroded and blocked by some nasty deadfall.

However, since then I’d hiked much worse trails, so maybe I should give this one another chance. In general, I prefer peak hikes rather than canyon descents, but the climb back out of this canyon didn’t look too bad on the topo map.

We’d had a week of cool days with light rain – typical monsoon weather, but a little too early. The old timers say “rain in June, poor monsoon”. Sunday was forecast to be warmer and drier, and most of this hike would be exposed on a south-facing slope, so I packed ice in my drinking water reservoir again.

However, when I finally reached the mountains, the air was cool and storm clouds were forming. The access road passes through the little ghost town, and then becomes a very rough, steep dirt track that twists through dense forest and climbs 2,000′ in a few miles. After the first mile or so I was surprised to pass a young woman dressed in a stylish fitness suit, hiking up the road alone, carrying a tiny day pack.

At the trailhead I found three young guys, probably college students, camping and having a party. They’d gotten there in a tiny, 20-year-old Nissan sedan – I’m often amazed by the vehicles people bring on these backcountry roads.

The hike starts with a super-steep climb through dark fir and aspen forest to the top of a ridge at 9,000′, followed by a long traverse across moonscape burn scar, dipping into remnants of intact forest here and there. The first mile and a half turned out to be easier than I expected.

A dark mass of clouds had been forming straight ahead, over the highest part of the range, accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder. When the rain began it was light, and I didn’t pay it much attention because the hike was getting harder – the farther I went, the more deadfall and the more thorny New Mexico locust filling in the burn scars and choking the trail.

But suddenly rain began falling harder, and I had to stop and pull on my waterproof poncho.

Now I was hiking in a downpour, and everything got much harder. The deadfall logs were slippery and the footing underneath – loose dirt and sharp rocks – more treacherous. I had to slow down and use a lot more caution. The trail came to a deep gully containing intact forest, descending hundreds of feet at between 30 and 40 percent grade, then climbing up the other side. I suddenly realized my boots were filling with water – I could feel it sloshing back and forth. They’re made of leather and GoreTex and should be water-resistant – how was the water getting in?

I tried to speed up, but the trail was getting much worse the farther I went, and the storm was really dumping. Locust thorns started tearing my poncho apart, so I tried to stomp them as I walked, but they were just too thick.

These monsoon storms usually only last 20 minutes or so. I was hoping this one would end soon, and I could stop in the canyon bottom, drain the water out of my boots, and put on the spare socks I carry in my pack. They would get wet, but they were wool so they’d still keep my feet warm.

The rain did eventually fade, but shortly afterward, I reached a point where the trail just disappeared into a jungle of thorns and deadfall. If I’d been dry, I might’ve tried to penetrate it, but with my poncho torn up and my feet sloshing in water I was frankly miserable. And my last view of the canyon had shown it to still be hundreds of feet below me. I wasn’t anywhere near my planned destination.

I stopped there in the jungle, used a deadfall log as a bench, and spread out the damaged poncho on the ground underneath. All my clothing was soaked. The only thing I had that was dry was the spare socks and three bandannas in my pack. I took off my wet socks and used two bandannas to dry my feet and sop as much water out of the boots as possible, then put on the dry socks, and had lunch.

I’d really been looking forward to reaching the canyon bottom – there’s supposed to be a nice meadow there where backpackers camp. This spot in the jungle was ugly and I hated to just turn back, but I really had no choice.

As I headed back up the trail, storm clouds were parting, opening up patches of blue sky, and re-forming in the distance to the west. I could see a veil of rain hanging over the mouth of the canyon, a dozen miles away. I knew I should be grateful we were having this rain, but I was just bummed about going home early from another failed hike.

While I was returning up the trail, and watching the weather developing to the west, another mass of clouds was forming behind me. For some reason, I’d assumed I wouldn’t have any more rain today, but I was wrong. Just as I began crossing the deep gully with intact forest, drops began to fall, and as I climbed the steep slope out the other side, the rain fell heavy on me again. I pulled the wet, torn poncho out of my pack and pulled it back over me and my pack. By the time I topped out of that gully, my feet were soaking wet again, and I still had a couple miles to go. I was not a happy hiker.

Between climbing over logs and pushing through locust thorns, I gazed down at my boots, and suddenly realized that the GoreTex on the “tongue” of the boot simply wasn’t working. When the boots are laced, the base of the GoreTex tongue forms a little hollow, and rainwater was funneling into it and directly through the layer of GoreTex straight onto my toes. So much for “water-resistant” GoreTex.

There was nothing to be done about it, so I just kept picking my way carefully through the maze of thorns and deadfall. Lightning was striking all around me, every few minutes, followed by cracking, rolling thunder. And there I was in the midst of a burn scar, totally exposed, high up in the sky.

Eventually I crested the ridge and began descending through the dark forest, back to my truck. The rain faded to a drizzle.

The partying campers had left, but as I approached my truck, a late-model minivan came careening down the steep, rocky road, where it encountered a convoy of three big pickup trucks heading up. The first of the pickups stopped beside my truck, and the passenger window rolled down. There were two teenage guys inside, and the driver said something – I could only make out the word “truck”, so I stepped around my vehicle and said, “What’d you say?”

He spoke again, but so quietly it seemed he must be speaking to his companion instead of me. I walked up to their window and repeated “I can’t hear you.”

The driver looked embarrassed. “Sorry, we’re looking for somebody.” He smiled and drove off, the other vehicles following.

I loosened my boots – everything I was wearing was wet, I didn’t have any more dry clothes with me, and I would just have to drive home that way – all two hours of it, including the scary one-lane road from the ghost town.

Fortunately I didn’t encounter anyone on the one-lane road, but I did pass through some apocalyptic rain on the highway – twice. It rained so hard the road was flooded and I had to slow to avoid hydroplaning. Wet as I was, I felt lucky to get home safe.

Over the Top

Muggy Climb

As we shared the heat wave covering so much of the West, most of my hiking options had dwindled. But our monsoon seemed ready to break. Rain was forecast over much of the region for most of the next week, beginning Sunday, my weekend hiking day. Even if it didn’t rain, surely clouds would form in the afternoon, bringing shade and much cooler temperatures.

My favorite trails in our nearby mountains were still closed by the now-dying wildfire, so I was anxious to return to the range over in Arizona with lots of exposed rock pinnacles, cliffs, caves, and waterfalls.

When I hike, I always carry a bird’s-eye-view of the landscape in my mind’s eye. You can get an overhead perspective on terrain simply by climbing to the highest peak in the vicinity, but of course I also study maps in order to pick a trail. The visitor center in the Arizona range also has an amazing large-scale relief map made by hand out of layers of wood, the size of a pool table, that you can walk around to view from all directions.

With north at the top and south at the bottom, the crest of the range is L-shaped, with a dozen major ridges and canyon systems reaching outward from the L in all directions. The upper right angle of the L encloses the inner canyons and ridges, with the trails I can access coming from the northeast. I’d hiked along the crest many times now, with a view down into the eastern and western canyons, but I’d never gotten a view into the south side of the range. After last weekend’s big hike, I sat down and calculated distances for hikes that would take me into that new world. I thought I could do it in a 16-mile round trip, especially in cooling weather.

Driving a couple hours one-way to hike in Arizona makes the day complicated. Regardless of where I’m hiking, I try to get back home before dark, to warm up leftovers and have dinner around 7. Hiking within an hour of home, that means I have 9 hours to hike. Driving to Arizona, I only have 7 hours. But now, with no mask requirement and most people vaccinated, I could stop at the cafe at the entrance to the mountains, and have my favorite red chile pork burrito instead of driving home for a late dinner – as long as I could finish my hike before the cafe’s 5pm closing time.

But as soon as I drove west over the low pass into the basin at the northeast foot of the mountains, and rolled my window down, I knew the day was starting hot. When it reaches 80 by 9am at home, it will be 90 here. The sun was burning down from a clear sky, but that’s often the way it is in monsoon season. Clouds usually don’t form until the afternoon.

With my high-clearance 4wd Sidekick having clutch problems, I had to take the little truck and park it at the mouth of the access road, at about 5,800′, and walk a mile and a half up the loose rock to the trailhead, which is really hard on my foot and knee. I’d also forgotten that with the monsoon ready to break, humidity would be high so temperatures that would normally be bearable would feel a lot worse.

The 1,900′ climb to the mouth of the hanging canyon is normally a fairly easy hike, but in that muggy morning it was a miserable slog.

Creek Relief

Body and clothes drenched with sweat, I entered the hanging canyon above the dry waterfall hoping for some relief. I could see small, isolated clouds peeking out from behind the high ridges beyond. And the creek in the canyon bottom is always one of the coolest places in these mountains. Once I got down in there among the lush riparian vegetation, I found myself unconsciously slowing down and making frequent stops to take pictures.

After damaging my good camera beyond repair, I’d reverted to the old camera, which had a broken display. So now I had to use the tiny optical viewfinder, which was barely usable itself due to dust somehow getting inside it. My experience of taking photos was now sort of a reverse version of the old heavy, bulky, time-consuming 19th century view cameras. I had this tiny device that might take decent photos if I could finess it properly, but with no camera monitor, I wouldn’t find out until I got home and uploaded the images to my computer.

By the time I traversed the old-growth pine-and-fir forest out of the creekbed to the Forest Service cabin near the crest, clouds were growing over the head of the canyon, forming intermittant patches of shade in the forest. My boots were feeling loose so I stopped for lunch at the cabin and tightened them. I checked my watch and found it was taking me 50% longer than usual to hike this stretch of trail. I doubted I’d be able to reach my planned destination – the morning heat and humidity had just slowed me down too much. I would keep going, but I’d lost my enthusiasm for the day’s hike.

New World

I’d noticed during the drive in that the whole area seemed to be devoid of people. Even the campgrounds, usually occupied by escapees from Tucson and Phoenix, had been empty. This trail to the crest was typically only used to reach the falls overlook below the hanging canyon, but the falls was dry now.

When I reached the crest trail above the cabin, with my first view west, I encountered recent boot tracks. Hikers typically drive to the 9,000′ crest at the north end of the L and hike southward along the ridgetop, because it’s much easier than the 3,300′ climb I do to get up there. The crest trail just gains and loses a couple hundred feet here and there throughout its 6 to 7 mile length.

Hiking the crest southward, I saw isolated storm clouds growing in the distance and passed through stretches of shade, and I enjoyed a little breeze, but the sun was still hot when it emerged from a cloud. Finally, traversing down across the west slope of the highest peak, I passed from the heat of post-wildfire aspen thickets into cooler fir forest, and suddenly saw a hiker approaching me up the trail ahead.

He was a tall, lanky guy with a mustache, my age or a little older, wearing a sweaty t-shirt full of holes. “You’re the first person I’ve seen all day!” he exclaimed with exhuberance, stopping to chat. We described our day’s hikes – like most people, he’d driven to the crest instead of climbing up, and had spent the day exploring side trails on a loop around the peak.

He excitedly described how on a previous hike down into the creek where I’d found relief from the heat, he’d heard something in a tree above the trail, looked up, and saw a bear resting in the canopy. The bear was just shifting in its sleep – it wasn’t aware of him watching from below. But as he hiked around the tree, the bear woke up, shinnied down the tree trunk, and bounded off through the forest.

I congratulated him on his good fortune, and we wished each other a good day and continued off in opposite directions.

I was running out of time – I already knew I would miss the cafe’s closing time, and would have to drive home in the dark for a late night dinner. I probably wouldn’t get any farther than I had in the past – the saddle south of the peak, just a tiny clearing in the forest, with no further views.

But when I reached the saddle, the trail beyond looked so easy, I just had to keep going. And it took me only a third of a mile to break out of the forest into a whole new world.

To my surprise, it was a world of rock. On my left opened a long, steep-sided canyon lined with sheer rock outcrops, and behind my left shoulder, at the canyon’s head, rose cliffs that formed the south face of the peak of the range. Straight in front of me was a distinctive rocky peak, and the trail ahead snaked through boulders that continued for some distance and studded the forested slope above at my right. Flowering shrubs and annuals decorated the crevices between boulders, and burn scars on the slopes of the canyon glowed a florid green with Gambel oak.

I hiked down through the boulders to a broad saddle below the sharp peak where I could get a panoramic view of this new canyon. Amazing how much a hike could change in such a short distance! And now clouds were coming together to form a dark mass over the range. I might even get lucky and hit some rain on the way back.

Out of Time

Returning up the trail to the crest, the race was on. Yes, I was already too late for that burrito, but I still didn’t relish driving home in the dark and eating leftovers at 9pm. My foot was feeling vulnerable again, and most of the trail was rocky and hard to maintain traction or balance on, but I did my best, traversing the crest trail and thumping down through the hanging canyon. Fortunately the clouds had cooled everything off, so heat was no longer a problem.

Hurrying down the creekbed, I suddenly came upon a little mammal rushing across a patch of sandy soil and into its burrow. About 4 inches long, fat and seemingly headless and tailless, with glossy dark brown fur, I’d never seen anything like it. Because of the hole I immediately thought gopher, but I thought they were bigger?

Drops of rain began to fall as I picked my way down the rocks of the creekbed, but they were sparse and ended as I traversed back out to the overlook above the dry falls.

Misty Mountains

There, I faced a strange view over the interior of the range. The cliffs that circle it were obscured by white mist – a fine rain falling over a large area. The mist gradually cleared as I climbed downward thousands of feet, my body feeling sorer and sorer all the way, until finally, traversing the forest above the trailhead, a light rain resumed.

At the bottom of the switchbacks, my phone began vibrating angrily. This time, it wasn’t a text alert – it was a voice alert: Dust warning! Visibility can suddenly drop to zero! This was for drivers crossing the playa on the interstate, more than 30 miles away.

My knees were really hurting, especially the left which is often a problem, so past the trailhead, lurching down the rocky road, I had to stop and strap on my knee brace. And opening up the knee brace, I re-injured my sprained hand, which happens at least once a week now.

Windy Night

I reached my little truck at 5:30 Arizona time, and unhappily reset my watch an hour later to New Mexico time, already hungry and thinking about that late dinner 2 hours up the road. Feeling exhausted, I drove slowly down the gravel road through the winding valley to the mouth of the canyon at the edge of the mountains. Lo and behold, there were still people seated at the outside patio of the cafe, and servers running back and forth. I pulled up and walked over, asking if they were still serving. “Yes, we don’t close until 6!”

Hallelujah! I got to enjoy my burrito, and a cold IPA on draft, at the end of my hike, instead of a hungry 2-hour drive. What a day!

As I was eating, a wind gust hit the patio outside, the high branches of sycamores whipping and people grabbing their napkins. And as I approached the interstate, I could see plumes of dust rising in a line across the broad valley. The interstate itself was mostly dust-free, but tractor-trailer rigs had slowed down and were struggling with a stiff crosswind. One had blown off the interstate down a slope and was surrounded with flashing emergency vehicles as a huge tow truck tried to drag it back up onto the roadway.

After sunset, I drove through another dust storm on the road to Silver City. And as I approached home, long after sunset, I could see the last light reflected in pools of rainwater beside the highway, and at intersections near my temporary rental. I was looking forward to the week ahead.

Longest Hike on the Longest Day

Shrinking Options

It was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the turning in the arc of the sun’s orbit. The solstices used to be sacred to me – my personal holidays, on which I tried to go somewhere elevated for my little rituals, often making a 3-day road-and-camping trip out of it. But life’s gotten progressively harder, and the past year’s been the hardest of all, with the solstices catching me unprepared.

Our heat wave continued, with a high of 99 forecast here in town, at 6,000′. I was used to hiking through the hottest weeks of summer, seeking shaded canyons and forests and the high-elevation crest trails where you could usually depend on a breeze, but this heat was a little extreme.

Miraculously, the solstice fell on a Sunday this year, and the least I could do was go for a solstice hike. I was also trying to get back on track after a month-long hiatus – a stressful month during which I’d missed my main form of stress relief – and last Sunday’s hike had been aborted due to smoke from the big wildfire in the wilderness to the north.

The problem was that all but one of our nearby high-elevation trails was closed because of the fire. And that one open trail was exposed to full sun for most of its distance. The only well-shaded trail near town was the last one I’d hiked, a month ago, so I wasn’t keen to hit it again. And the more scenic trails over the border in Arizona were lower elevation and would be ten degrees hotter – not an option at all.

As usual, when resuming after a break, I was torn between taking it easy on myself and gradually working up to my pre-break level, or challenging myself to try to compensate for the time off. The trail I was forced to take, the exposed crest trail, offered two levels of effort. I could hike over the 10,000′ peak and down the back side to the first saddle, returning for a round-trip distance of 13.5 miles and accumulated elevation gain of 3,200′. Or I could fight my way through blowdown and deadfall on the abandoned section of trail to the second saddle, for 15.5 miles and 3,500′. My current target for these Sunday hikes is 14-16 miles and 4,000′-5,000′ elevation gain, but considering the heat and the month off, I figured I’d be content with the easier option.

Hot Climb

I loaded my drinking water reservoir with ice and packed the little cooler with ice to cool an extra water bottle in the truck for the end of the day. On the drive to the pass I was surprised to find little traffic, and the shaded mountain picnic areas empty. Apparently everyone was staying home with the air conditioning on full blast.

Smoke from the distant fire had laid a low blanket of haze over southwest New Mexico, but so widely dispersed you could barely smell it. At 9am it was already hot at the 8,200′ trailhead, and the air was absolutely still. On hot days I unconsciously speed up to get past the exposed section of trail and reach the shaded part, and within a half mile of the trailhead I caught up with, and passed, a young couple and their dog. So far, I wasn’t feeling any loss of conditioning from my month off.

After another half mile I passed another couple, only a little younger than me, returning down the trail. I said they were smart to be leaving early, but the man bragged that unlike me, they’d gotten an early start this morning. Since it’s a 5-1/2 mile hike to the peak, to make it all the way they would’ve had to start their hike at 4am – so they likely hadn’t gone all the way. Those were the only people I saw all day on this popular trail.

It was such a relief to finally reach patches of forest after the first 3 miles, stepping out of the sun’s radiant heating into shade that felt 20 degrees cooler. This trail is normally one of the best for wildflowers and berries at this time of year, but the heat wave had accelerated the bloom and I’d missed most of it. One thing I hadn’t missed was butterflies – the mountainsides were swarming with them, especially the big yellow-and-black swallowtails.

Before 11:30am, still walking fast, I crossed over the peak and headed down the crest trail on the back side without stopping.

Thorny Descent

Two or three years ago I met a rare Forest Service trail crew clearing deadfall from the burned back side trail, but the successional thickets of locust and aspen are quick to overwhelm the trail. So I had a certain amount of bushwhacking to do to reach the first saddle. In fact, it was so overgrown, it was obvious that despite the trail crew’s work, no one besides me is using this crest trail anymore.

This is when I admit I had a hidden agenda. Trail work in the Southwest is typically done in April, and back in May, before my hiking hiatus, I’d checked out the latest map of cleared trails, and was surprised to see that the previously abandoned stretch of trail beyond the saddle was marked as cleared. This section is 2.5 miles long and ends at a junction of four trails in a saddle I’d reached more than a decade ago, where I’d encountered a “cinnamon bear” – a black bear with a patch of red fur.

If the trail to the junction was really clear now, I could hike it much faster. It would turn this hot day into an unprecedented marathon, but I’d get to see new ground and new perspectives on the range, and what was usually an anticlimactic, incomplete hike would finally get a real destination.

The Hard Part

I wasn’t too surprised when I reached the first saddle and discovered that the next section of trail hadn’t been cleared after all. The Forest Service map turned out to be in error. The initial hundred yards was still blocked by a big blowdown of old-growth ponderosa pine trees that had to be laboriously climbed over, followed by a broad, shallow bowl filled with soil loosened and crisscrossed by giant fallen Douglas firs.

But since I’d been hiking fast, the day was still young, and my body felt great, happy to be put to work again. I made my way down through the blowdown maze, then across the bottom of the drainage onto the traverse of a steep, narrow canyon, where smaller-diameter deadfall filled in by thorny locust creates a more dense obstacle course for the next mile, up to the second saddle, which is as far as I’d ever gotten in my available time.

As on the descent from the peak, the only tracks on this section of trail were from animals. I came upon a fairly recent pile of black scat which looked like mountain lion, then a large four-toed track that didn’t look like anything familiar. The piles of black scat became regular, and I realized it was probably from a bear instead. Bear scat can take many forms depending on what they’re eating, and since unlike a lion they eat continuously, they also poop frequently.

When I reached the second saddle, it was still relatively early, and I still felt good. Clouds were forming over the mountains and I was getting periods of shade. It actually felt cooler than it had in the morning.

A stretch of daunting deadfall blocked the unexplored trail head, but I figured I could at least go a little ways and see how bad it was.

New Ground

It didn’t seem too bad. Past the initial deadfall, a good section of trail continued for a quarter mile, curving into a narrow drainage and through a tight gap between dramatic rock outcrops. Any exposed rock improves my mood, so I kept going, despite feeling a little uneasy about the return hike. I knew I’d already hiked farther than at any time in the past 30 years. How was this possible, after taking a month off?

I kept encountering stretches of thorn thickets and deadfall to fight through, but never very long. The trail snaked through an even larger and more dramatic rock outcrop, which seemed like a reward for the effort I was putting in. And I came around a bend and a new canyon opened up in front of me, which I suddenly realized must be the one with the trail junction saddle. Unbelievable! I was actually going to hike the full distance, and this would turn into one of the longest hikes I’d ever done.

Unfortunately, after turning that corner I entered a seemingly endless, straight, steep traverse hemmed in by thorny locust and Gambel oak, like an overgrown green corridor that paralleled a fairly new stretch of barbed wire fence. Not the most scenic or pleasant way to finish an out-hike, but since I’d come this far I simply had to reach that junction.

At the bottom, when I finally emerged from the thicket into the broad clearing, all those long-ago memories flooded back. It was an ugly place, but I felt a sense of miraculous accomplishment. And my body felt fine. Clouds had filled the sky and were getting darker, and I anticipated no problems on the return hike. I might even get some soothing rain!

The previous visit to this saddle had taken place three years before the fire, and I could now see how the fire had taken a bite out of the forest on the east side. On that previous hike, I’d explored a few hundred yards down into that now-destroyed old-growth fir forest, spooking a hidden flock of big birds roosting in the lower branches that created a calamatous thrashing when I approached. I’d figured it was either turkeys or band-tailed pigeons. And then I’d encountered that bear browsing in a stand of ferns as I left the saddle. A blast from a magical past.

I took off my pack and sat for a while on a log left by backpackers at a fire ring, adding some hydration supplement to my water bottle. On such a long hike in hot weather I was likely to run short of water and get leg cramps, so better safe than sorry.

Taking a Fall

The hike back to the second saddle went fairly quickly, and I still loved those rock outcrops which created welcome breaks in the forest cover. With my solstice rituals interrupted it was easy to forget what day it was, but on that return hike I suddenly realized that my previous visit to that junction saddle had also occurred on the summer solstice, back in 2010. Unbelievable! I’d unconsciously returned to the same place on the same day of the year, but by a much longer and more arduous route this time.

Just past the second saddle is a really tricky maze of small-diameter deadfall that you have to slowly and cautiously clamber over and through using all four limbs. Midway through the maze my back foot got caught under a branch and the weight of my pack toppled me onto a pile of small logs with protruding dagger-like broken branches, one of which drove into my shin.

This is something I’ve always feared, and it hurt like hell, but I wear tough pants and heavy socks pulled up to my knees. No blood appeared immediately on the outside of my pants, so I just tried to ignore it, got up, and kept going.

Costly Mistake

By the time I reached the first saddle I was starting to get tired. I figured I’d gone 12 miles and still had over 6 miles to go. I laid down on pine needles and gazed at the darkening clouds overhead. Thunder was rolling from all directions, every few minutes, and I occasionally felt isolated raindrops on my face.

After ten minutes I got up, and suddenly noticed the flap over the pocket of my pack was loose. Back at the junction saddle, after taking out the hydration supplement, I’d forgotten to cinch that flap shut. My heart sank, because that pocket holds hundreds of dollars worth of stuff, including my GPS message device.

Sure enough, something was missing – my emergency bottle of prescription pain meds, recently renewed. I was sure it’d fallen out when I took that painful fall, a mile back near the second saddle. I could tell my doctor I’d lost it, but in the hysteria of our current War on Drugs, regularly encouraged by alarmist stories in both liberal and conservative media, it would put me under suspicion of abuse and put him in danger of criminal prosecution. And the highly restrictive law would probably require me to wait a couple of months before renewing anyway.

Now I was in trouble. I was already returning from a record hike, but going back to retrieve that bottle would make it the longest hike I’d ever done. And that was the hardest, most dangerous stretch of trail.

With thunder crashing all around, I retrieved a lightweight summer rain shell from my pack. I hung the pack from a branch and unfolded my rainproof poncho to cover it. Then I started back down through the maze of blowdown, deadfall, and thorny locust. I was so glad to be hiking in a long-sleeved shirt and thorn-resistant long pants, unlike most white folks who wear shorts and t-shirts on these trails. I used to be one of those, often going shirtless in hope of getting a tan, until I realized I was seriously risking cancer.

Knowing I had to do this, I’d switched into full survival mode, so my emotions were on hold, my mind and senses sharpened. Lighter without the pack, I could move faster, but was even more cautious than usual, knowing an injury now would really screw me up.

Sure enough, after fighting my way back down that narrow canyon, I found the bottle hiding under crisscrossing branches just below the trail, at the exact spot where I fell.

Challenging Bypass

Fighting my way back up to the first saddle and shouldering my pack, I took the fairly easy decision not to climb back up the peak as usual. There’s a bypass trail that circles the southwest side of the peak, returning to the main trail about a thousand feet lower. I’d been told it had been cleared two or three years ago, but I’d explored the first third of it last year and found it still pretty overgrown, with little or no tread. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t shorten my return hike, but it would save me the thousand foot climb.

I’d felt more light rain and heard frequent thunder during the retrieval hike, but now the storm had moved west, where I could still hear thunder far in the distance, as I picked my way through thickets and deadfall, traversing the steep flank of the peak on the bypass trail. There was so little actual tread across the steep slopes of loose dirt that at one point I put my foot down and it just dropped out from under me, and I slammed down on my side, grabbing a root to stop my slide. Air temperature had stabilized in the low 80s, and a strong wind was rising out of the west.

Home Stretch

The bypass trail joins the peak trail at a long, sharp north-south saddle, and there the west wind was so fierce my hat was blowing off despite the tight chin strap. I just had to carry it. That wind would continue to get stronger, all the way back home. What a day of weather!

I could see occasional bolts of lighting in the west, and suddenly noticed a plume of smoke rising, about where the highway to town approaches the big copper mine. Would my way back home be blocked?

My joints were starting to feel a little sore, but not as badly as on much shorter hikes, during the period when I was starting to build capacity three years ago. I thought about my previous longest hike, the “survival hike” we’d been forced into in the middle of the night, at similar elevation on my aboriginal skills course in August 1990. We’d walked 18.5 miles that night, and I’d been so depleted and sore that I spent three days resting afterwards. I was 38 at the time, and had thought myself in good shape, but now I realized I hadn’t prepared myself with any cardio conditioning back then. Despite being much older, I’m in much better shape now, with much more capacity.

Highway Home

There was almost no traffic on the highway back to town, so I wondered if I’d find the road closed by wildfire. It was eerie driving the empty road through that fierce wind. The fire turned out to be in low forested hills about a half mile north of the highway, and I only saw one emergency vehicle parked at the mouth of a dirt road with its lights flashing.

Amazingly, I arrived home feeling no more sore or exhausted than usual. My old computer and iPad are no longer capable of accessing the hiking websites with trail data, so I’ll have to walk over to the library to find out exactly how far I hiked and how much elevation I got, but I figure it had to be over 21 miles and 3,000′.

Bushwhacking Another Abandoned Trail

I’d taken the previous Sunday off after an injury and minor surgery, so today I wanted a long hike with a lot of elevation to make up. I decided to drive over to Arizona to hit one of my favorite trails in a range with a lot of exposed rock, but this time, instead of taking it to the peak, I wanted to explore an apparently abandoned trail that branched off from the crest and dropped along an outlying ridge into a distant canyon.

Air over the Southwest was very hazy today, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I expected temperatures at the trailhead, below 5,000′, to approach 90 at midday. But it would be cooler as I started out this morning, and hopefully I’d get breezes as I climbed higher.

I love this trail because of the golden granite boulders in the foothills and the white cliffs and pinnacles along the crest, but I always forget how steep it is. It climbs 3,400′ to a saddle on the ridge top in less than 5 miles – significantly steeper than the steepest trail near home. As a result, I’d never seen much sign of traffic – usually hikers went a mile or two at most before turning back. It’s a south-facing slope and most of the climb is fully exposed, so it felt much hotter than it was. I’d been missing sleep for several nights in a row so my energy was low, and unusually for me, I had to stop many times to catch my breath after the first three miles or so.

Near the top, you enter mixed-conifer forest, and the abandoned trail starts at the high saddle, in a small clearing. The only online trip report I could find from the last 10 years started at the other end, more than 6 miles away and 4,000′ lower. As I recalled, they’d given up about 3/4 of the way. But I’d be starting from the top, and on previous visits I’d glimpsed invitingly clear tread at the junction.

I hadn’t brought a map, but in my memory from the day before, the trail headed down a shallow ridgetop for a couple of miles before switchbacking down into the canyon. Setting off, I soon encountered some deadfall, but it wasn’t bad, and the good tread continued for a few hundred yards.

I was on a north slope well outside the burn areas farther west, and this forest of tall firs and Gambel oak was dense and lush with undergrowth. Instead of following a gentle ridgetop, the trail plunged down a very steep slope that was heavily eroded due to a lot of deadfall and rockfall. The good tread ended and I had to sort out a route through heavily disturbed ground showing only game tracks. But after finding a way through these stretches, I kept rejoining short sections of old trail that had built-up rock berms to protect them on the steep slope.

Eventually my route dropped into a deep side canyon with huge boulders and old-growth firs, where the trail was blocked by massive deadfall I had to climb through. In the middle of the drainage I found an old cairn, so I just kept going.

From here the trail climbed steeply. I saw dramatic rock outcrops far above and knew I’d misread the map the day before. This was nothing like what I’d expected. I almost thought I might be on the wrong trail, but I knew there were no other historical trails in this area, and I kept finding cairns, and even occasionally an old bleached ribbon on a branch. But definitely no human footprints, and no sign anyone had come this way in at least a decade.

This trail wound its way over and under rock formations that formed impassable cliffs, through what was basically a jungle of Gambel oak and thorny locust. It was all very impressive but not much fun, and there wasn’t enough wind to keep me from overheating and depleting my drinking water.

Checking my watch as I approached the bottom of yet another side drainage, I realized I’d more than used up my available time and would have to turn back.

It’s impossible to determine distances on a trail like this. It’s shown on the GPS-based, crowdsourced sites as about 6 miles end to end, but the routes plotted on those sites omit the dozens of meanders and switchbacks I encountered in my short exploration, not to mention whatever might lie beyond that. The direct distance from the junction to my turning point was about 1/2 mile, so I’m guessing I explored 3/4 mile one-way, which took me an hour in the slow conditions. Including the climb to the saddle, I achieved close to 4,000′ of accumulated elevation gain.

Now that I knew the route, the fight back to the trail junction at the saddle wasn’t too bad. And a breeze was picking up, so even though the air temperature was much higher than in the morning, it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Exposed on the crest in still air, it felt like 90, but in the shade of the forest it was clearly still in the 60s.

Unfortunately, on the way down I began to notice the trash. First, one of those giant plastic “big gulp” tumblers you get soft drinks in at fast food joints. I tried to reach it but it was embedded in dense brush down a steep slope of loose gravel.

About halfway down I found a spot where hikers had recently sat above the trail for a snack. They’d left orange peels and two plastic water bottles. About a mile beyond that I found another, older water bottle.

In the past I’ve very seldom had to pack out trash from other hikers – this was the most I’d ever seen, on a single remote, difficult trail that gets little use. I attribute it to Arizona – Arizonans are in general just more irresponsible than New Mexicans – and the fact that most hikers here come from Phoenix, which has a culture of irresponsibility.

I was really looking forward to the extra bottle of drinking water in my vehicle, until I found that it’d been heated to about 100 degrees. Guess I need to start bringing a cooler full of ice on these all-day hikes.

And on the interstate, I ran over a big snake that raced in front of me before I could react. That bummed me out almost all the way home.

Requiem for Andy’s Hat

The past week had been maddening, and I’d missed my midweek hike. Friday was incredibly stressful and hard on my back, and Saturday I’d barely had a chance to recover. I expected Monday to be another stressful and physically difficult day, so I needed to keep this Sunday’s hike relatively close to home.

After reviewing my options I decided to revisit the hike I’d unsuccessfully attempted 3 weeks earlier, on an abandoned trail into the head of a remote canyon system where there were supposed to be slot canyons, cascades and waterfalls. It featured a high concentration of exposed rock – cliffs and outcrops hundreds of feet tall – and some serious backcountry hikers called it the most beautiful part of the entire range.

There was a late-model Prius at the trailhead, which surprised me, because the road in is long, steep, and rocky – really hard on street tires. The trailhead log showed a party of 2 had started a five-day backpack yesterday, into the very area I was heading for.

Temperatures were in the 60s when I started out, and quickly settled into the 70s. The approach to the abandoned trail drops into the mouth of a canyon, follows it upstream for a few miles, then climbs 2,000′ to a saddle overlooking the next canyon. The modest stream was still mostly running, and the spring season was in full force, with brilliant new foliage glowing in the morning sunlight of the canyon bottom and the first riparian wildflowers opening. Unfortunately there was heavy cattle sign in the first couple of miles from the trailhead – including the biggest cowpies I’d ever seen. Then I encountered the bull. He was resting in the shade of a small meadow beside the trail, and watched me with only mild interest as I walked past.

The climb to the saddle always seems harder than I remember, varying between 15% and 30% grades. GPS on this section of trail shows 4 miles, but ignores the dozens of S-curves in the canyon, so I rate the actual distance at 5 miles – it takes longer than most 5-mile hikes I’ve done.

Finally I topped out at the saddle and could resume the unfinished business of a few weeks ago.

I watched the abandoned trail for the footprints of the backpacking party, but didn’t see any at first. Then I began to notice fresh, bright yellow plastic ribbons on trailside branches, in addition to the older, sun-bleached pink ribbons I’d followed before. These backpackers had flagged the trail themselves – hopefully they’d laid out a route I could follow beyond where the pink ribbons ended.

Now that I knew the trail, it was smooth going until I reached the “needle rock” where I’d bushwhacked off established tread 3 weeks ago. There, the new yellow ribbons followed the same route I’d taken, down and around a couple of outlying ridges, into the final side canyon that led to the bottom of the main canyon.

From my previous attempt, and a cursory glance at topo maps, I’d assumed it was an easy bushwhack down this shallow side canyon, with about 350′ of vertical drop. Boy was I wrong.

The new yellow ribbons ended and were replaced by new pink ribbons, but they didn’t mark out a trail – they just marked out a “route” – which led through thorn thickets pretty much straight down a slope that featured not only thorns but cliffs consisting of loose rock and long stretches of loose dirt at the angle of repose, finally reaching the log-and-boulder-choked gully at the low point of the side canyon – after dropping at least 300 feet and seemingly no closer to the main canyon. I knew this dangerous stretch was going to be super hard to climb on the way back, but once started I was committed.

The next stretch of descent wasn’t flagged – or at least not at first. I lost a lot of time scouting for non-existent ribbons, then tried making my way down the congested gully. That only worked for about a hundred feet. Then I had to re-enter the thorn thickets on the slope above.

Finally, nearing the bottom, I found more pink ribbons – again, with no trail, and leading directly through dense thorn thickets. Then a hundred feet above the main canyon bottom I entered dark conifer forest atop a section of cliffs and boulders that required some technical down-climbing. After that I came upon the stream, in a bend choked with logs. A cliff towered above, and I could barely see the entrance to the “slot canyon” a little ways upstream.

This stream was one of the most robust I’d ever seen in these mountains. It drains a huge area of the crest combining two main tributaries, each of which runs for 4-5 miles before reaching this junction. As in the divide hike I’d done a couple weeks ago, it felt incredibly remote, especially after that grueling hike down the side canyon, which had turned out to be twice as deep as I’d expected.

After all that hard work, I was already running about an hour later than planned. I should turn back immediately, but this place was really beautiful, especially in the dappled shade of the riparian canopy and those towering cliffs, with all that clear, cold water rushing down from the 10,000′ crest.

All the maps showed 4 trails converging here, but none of them had survived the 2012 wildfire. I tried scouting up the opposite bank but found nothing. So I started picking my way upstream using rocks as stepping-stones. Eventually I spotted a game trail on the opposite side that seemed to lead toward the “slot” canyon. I entered it – nearly as big as the main stream – and picked my way through thorn thickets and over stepping stones until I reached an overhanging cliff where I knew I’d have to turn back. I figured at this point I wouldn’t get home until dark, and would end up with a late dinner, quick shower, and bed.

But the bushwhack up the side canyon was probably the most brutal hike I’ve ever done. Overhanging brush kept pushing me back, thorns kept grabbing me, hidden branches kept tripping me, and I often slipped backward trying to climb steep slopes of loose dirt. It took me an hour and a half to go less than half a mile, and at the saddle where I rejoined the actual trail, I was essentially out of water and still had over 6 miles to go, including a climb of almost a thousand feet. I’d brought 3 liters of water as usual in warm weather, plus electrolyte supplement that was supposed to triple the hydration, and the temperature was still only in the 70s. Yikes!

Dehydrated from the climb, I had only enough water for the 2 doses of electrolytes in my pack. During the 2 miles of ascent to the divide saddle, I rationed the first dose of enhanced water, and was really thirsty by the time I reached that saddle. But at least I knew that after a mile of descending the steep trail into the next canyon, there would be a running stream.

I raced down the trail, and as soon as I reached the stream I filled my water bottle, and dug the SteriPen ultraviolet water purifier from my pack. I hadn’t used it for years, but I kept the batteries separate and they were still good. After a few minutes of stirring I had a liter of drinking water.

I drank it slowly to keep from getting sick. A mile down the trail I added the second dose of electrolytes. But I was still dehydrated. I realized that as hard as I’d had to work in that steep bushwhack, I’d end the day having needed almost 6 liters of water. Fortunately I’d brought an extra bottle in the vehicle for the drive home.

2-1/2 miles before the trailhead the cramps hit, in both thighs. I was immobilized with pain for about 5 minutes, then was able to continue stiff-legged until it mostly faded. The canyon was now dark, with only a rim of gold on the highest ridges.

I encountered the bull again, grazing only a couple feet off the trail. I tried to shoo him away but he just stared, so I walked right past him.

After another half mile the cramps hit again, just as I needed to cross a precarious washout at a narrow talus slope. Raising a leg to climb is what triggers these cramps, and that was the move I needed to cross the washout. I ended up stuck there on loose rock, with certain injury if I froze and slipped. I managed to lever myself up with my arms, but then collapsed in pain on the other side.

Finally I got moving again and gradually loosened up. I’d experienced some strong wind gusts at midday, and amazingly, I encountered three big trees that had blown down across the trail while I was hiking in and out of that other canyon: a maple, ponderosa pine, and alligator juniper. The sun was setting as I climbed out of the canyon toward the trailhead, and a large flock of swallows swooped overhead in the dusk, harvesting insects.

I reached the vehicle and drank all the water there. I figured I’d walked at least 14 miles and climbed a total of over 4,200′, which on trails would be a routine 6-7 hour hike. But because of that bushwhacking it’d taken me almost 10 hours. This was one of the hardest hikes of my entire life, and one I was not likely to try again, even as a backpack. At least until I forget how bad it was….

While unpacking at the vehicle, I discovered I’d lost my hat in the final climb out of the canyon to the trailhead. In recent years I’d taken to wearing a bandanna under it to protect it from sweat, but with the bandanna on it was harder to tell whether the hat was actually on my head.

That hat has been precious to me for 35 years, but I felt just about dead and there was no way I was going back. The hat was pretty much worn out anyway. I often wondered who would go first, me or the hat.

It was made in West Africa, and I inherited it in 1985 from Katie, who inherited it from her friend Andy, a filmmaker in Los Angeles. Having lost most its natural oils, it was stiff and tight, and the brim had to be moistened before wearing, in order to fit on my head. I went for years without wearing it, but kept going back to it, treasuring it more and more as I shared more history with it. Where will I find a replacement?

A Year’s Weather in a Day

Another tough choice over where to hike! Last Sunday I’d experienced an extremely painful strain of my Achilles tendon. I couldn’t use my left foot if the angle between the foot and the leg was less than 90 degrees. But in order to keep the foot at a 90 degree angle while climbing, I had to use my calf muscle and push off with the ball of my foot, which is the vulnerable part of my foot. I can do that at the beginning of a hike, but as the day wears on, the bones get inflamed and can no longer bear my weight.

I’d taken the intervening week off, resting my heel and doing gentle stretches 4 times a day. My second COVID shot was coming up – I expected to miss a hike or two afterward, and wanted to maintain my conditioning with a longer hike before. But we don’t have any long hikes that don’t involve climbing.

So in the end, I picked a hike I’d never done before – one that had been recommended to me by someone I’d hiked with in the past, someone who knew what I liked. It was a 14-mile round-trip that crossed two divides between three creeks, so it had some climbs, but I didn’t know how steep they were. It was definitely the wrong hike to pick for my heel problem, but I figured if it was too hard, I could just skip the climbs and explore at creek level.

We’d had unseasonably warm weather for a couple of weeks, but now there was an area-wide warning of a cold front that could bring thunderstorms. It was mostly focused to the east, but I always hope for weather.

The trailhead is harder to reach than most – it requires a 20-mile drive across a rolling plateau on dirt ranch roads. I’d avoided this trail in the past because it traverses a lower part of the mountains between 6,300′ and 7,300′, so I didn’t expect it to give me the elevation gain I normally seek, and I didn’t expect any spectacular views. But from a distance the terrain looked fairly rugged. Maybe it would surprise me.

The approach was fairly typical for trails on the western front: dropping from the plateau at the foot of the mountains into a deep canyon, through pinyon, juniper, and oak. It started with a “Trail Unmaintained” sign, but I’d heard that it had been mostly cleared in recent years, and the tread was good, besides consisting mostly of loose rock. Traversing farther up the canyon, I began to see cliffs and rock outcrops ahead. It was mostly sunny but cool. The cold front had cleared the air and I was feeling good and optimistic.

Past the creek, the trail began switchbacking up a very steep slope. I was conscientiously pushing off with my left foot, keeping the foot at 90 degrees, and the vulnerable ball of my foot felt fine. Taking a week off had seemingly helped. The view up the canyon kept getting better and better. This was definitely an area worth checking out – despite starting out lower, it was the most spectacular canyon I’d ever seen in these mountains!

About a thousand feet above the creek, I reached the first summit of the divide between the first and second creeks. This rolling divide is about three miles wide, and is split into several sections, each of which requires short ascents and descents. Most of it burned in the 2012 wildfire, so there are a lot of exposed, brushy sections. It looked like a long trudge, and it was. But as I moved across it, my view of the higher and more distant peaks kept changing, as did the cloud cover.

After the morning cool, the climb to the divide had been hot, and it was warm up there. I could see clouds touching the far peaks, above 10,000′, but it didn’t look like I was going to get any weather.

Straight ahead of me, in the east, was a spectacular wall of cliffs with a top like a straightedge. I knew that had to be the east wall of the canyon of the second creek. My plan was to drop into that canyon and climb the other side to the top of the divide facing the third canyon. That would give me at least 7 miles one-way, and a view into the third canyon.

I lost the trail a couple of times crossing that rolling divide, wasting up to a half hour. It meandered continually back and forth through the dense scrub, marked only by frequent cairns. Climbing over the final hump, I encountered a stretch where the “trail” consisted only of deeply eroded gullies and steep slopes of loose dirt, blocked occasionally by deadfall, and there were no cairns for a hundred yards or more. But taking my time, I figured out the route.

Finally I reached the rim of the second canyon. It was still mostly sunny and warm, and I was really stoked because of that spectacular wall of cliffs in front of me. It looked like another thousand-foot descent to the creek, and it started out so steep, it was one of those descents where once you start, you can’t stop. But my foot and heel were still feeling fine, so I started sliding down.

What seemed like hundreds of super-steep, rocky switchbacks later, I emerged in intact, parklike, fairly level ponderosa pine forest on the bank of the creek, with the cliffs dimly visible high above on the opposite slope. Screens of willows lined both sides of the creek. After pushing through the first, I stood on rocks mid-creek and looked upstream. This was an amazing canyon that stretched all the way up to the crest of the range.

This location, deep in the wilderness area, was completely hidden from the outside world. The trail I’d taken was the only route in. Another trail started here and followed the canyon all the way to the crest, but the Forest Service claimed it had been destroyed in the wildfire. I was so excited – it really felt like I’d finally penetrated into the mystery of the range. There were spectacular cliffs and rock outcrops all over this area. I was in heaven.

The trail up the east slope of this canyon was in worse shape, and I’d lost time scouting for trail across the first divide. Partway up I began finding old sun-bleached ribbons on branches, and I used those as well as sporadic cairns to find my way. Still there were sections where I had to spend time scouting, so when I had a clear trail, I moved fast.

Finally, after a mile and a half and nearly 500 vertical feet of climbing, I reached the saddle between the two creeks. It felt super remote, but as a destination it was a letdown. I’d reached my goal, but the next canyon didn’t look nearly as spectacular as the previous, and further shoulders of the outlying ridge blocked my view into it.

I was running late, so I sped back toward the second creek. Nearing the bottom of the east slope, I came upon fairly fresh mountain lion scat that I didn’t remember from the ascent. Then, after crossing the creek, I found a lion track superimposed on my own tracks, so I started looking over my shoulder.

Cloud cover had been increasing. When I got a view up the canyon, I could see precipitation veiling the crest of the range, several miles away.

The climb out of this canyon was brutal! Surprisingly, my foot and heel were still holding up, but I knew that even after reaching the top, I still had at least a thousand feet of climbing left crossing the rolling divide and climbing out of the original canyon.

About 300′ below the top there’s a little shelf with intact forest, and there I lost the trail yet again. I knew it eventually crossed a small drainage, so I just dropped into the drainage and fought my way up it, eventually reconnecting with the trail. But that lost me more time.

Cloud cover was now complete, it was raining lightly and getting cold. When I reached the top it turned to snow, so I packed away my shade hat and pulled on both my sweater and my hooded shell jacket.

After the steep, rough descent into the first depression of this long divide, the snow turned to sleet, and when I reached the next rise, it turned to heavy rain, so I had to break out my poncho. My hands were freezing – I’d put on wool glove liners, but once my hands get cold, it takes up to an hour for them to warm up again, so I was flexing them constantly to maintain feeling. I could hear thunder over the crest of the range. A year’s weather in a day!

Precipitation stopped by the time I reached the opposite end of the divide, but clouds still obscured many of the high peaks. The down climb seemed to take forever, and by the time I crossed the first creek and began the final ascent to the trailhead, my foot, heel, and calf were exhausted. That final climb, which is only a little over a mile and less than 500′ of elevation, seemed endless. I was literally cursing after about halfway. And then it began to rain again.

All in all, that was one of the hardest hikes I’ve done in this area, but also one of the most rewarding. I hope to return and explore up the second canyon, and maybe turn it into a backpacking trip. You could do a loop up this canyon, across the crest, and back down the first canyon, although much of it would probably be bushwhacking.

Fire, Part 8: Native Americans and Wildfire

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Americans and Wildfire

Both Sides of the Tracks

My ancestors were poor Gaelic farmers in the Scottish highlands and border country who were driven from their homelands and forced to emigrate to North America. Here, we didn’t become part of the power structure that founded the United States. We remained ethnic underdogs, independent and self-reliant, no friends of government.

I grew up in small rural communities within which Blacks had their own tiny enclaves, enduring racism but studying with us in school and becoming our sports heroes. Thanks to my parents’ cosmopolitan aspirations, I was raised not to look down on other races and ethnic groups, but to admire them – my dad idolized Black musicians like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and my childhood soundtrack ranged from Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte to African superstars Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and started college at the peak of the Black Power movement. Native Americans and their legacy had been thoroughly erased from my Midwestern county, but in high school, I supported the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and hung a poster of Apache leader Geronimo over my bed.

The University of Chicago was an island of whiteness surrounded by one of the world’s largest and most nightmarish Black ghettos. Its Eurocentric curriculum was designed to impress students with the towering achievements of the white race, but in a gesture to accommodate the Counterculture, the U of C had scrambled to hire a few token radicals like Bill Zimmerman, co-founder of Science for the People. He taught me how racism and imperialism are justified using myths about cultural evolution and the superiority of European culture.

Zimmerman introduced me to the anthropology of indigenous cultures and the work of Thomas Kuhn, often considered the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century. Kuhn showed that far from the objective search for truth it claims to be, science is a competitive political activity. Scientists routinely form prejudiced hypotheses, resist new ideas, and reject data which challenge their preconceived notions.

Forced to switch from the arts to science and technology, my social circle expanded to include Asians, who were accepted as “honorary white people” because they adapted easily to European values and institutions. But nowhere in those elite programs did I see a Black, Latino, or indigenous face. Those races remained in the background, working in inferior roles, safely segregated in impoverished enclaves.

After grad school at Stanford, I’d had enough of that white European bullshit. Needing cheap studio space for my art and music, I lived for decades in poor Black and mixed ethnic neighborhoods, while working day jobs with whites and Asians. I had a Mexican-American girlfriend with indigenous ancestry who became the love of my life. I had Black and Native American bandmates, roommates, and landlords, and even went to jail with them, where we all encountered racism and injustice.

I studied West African music and culture and the Native American cultures of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, and those became the main inspirations for my art and music. I studied aboriginal survival skills to understand how indigenous people had thrived in the arid Southwest. I spent time with the desert tribe’s most celebrated traditional craftsperson and their leading environmental activist, and got involved with a coalition of tribespeople preserving natural habitats as sacred cultural spaces – something our secular society can’t do.

All that firsthand experience led me to respect and admire traditional cultures and oppressed races more than the European civilization that had conquered, enslaved, and oppressed them.

Meanwhile, my brother and father – the rocket scientist who had once worshiped Black musicians – were being turned into racists by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the neo-conservative movement. And while I was living and working in poor neighborhoods and learning about other cultures firsthand, most of my friends in science and academia were gravitating more and more toward safe, clean all-white enclaves where they only encountered people of color in inferior roles, as gardeners, custodians, dishwashers in restaurants, and the like. They voted for liberal politicians, and praised diversity, while tacitly accepting inequality and segregation.

The Myth of the Noble Scientist

In 2004, two years into my research for Pictures of Knowledge, I was visiting an old friend, a professor at a large state university who conducts research and conservation on endangered species. When I tried to share what I’d learned about indigenous conservation practices, he interrupted me impatiently, citing a recent study in the popular scientific literature about a prehistoric tribe somewhere in the South Pacific that had over-exploited their resources, driven species to extinction, and experienced a population crash. “Indigenous people are NOT conservationists!” he shouted.

Later that year I joined some even older friends involved with ecological research and conservation at an elite university. Again on the topic of conservation, when I offered “In some traditional societies…” they began shouting in unison, “NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE!” I was never allowed to finish.

For more than a decade after that, whenever I raised the subject of traditional societies and indigenous practices with biologists, they were quick to interrupt, ridiculing me for “romanticizing the noble savage” and dismissing my observations before I even had a chance to articulate them. Most recently, when I tried to share anthropologists’ observations about indigenous conservation practices in an email exchange with friends in science and academia, a senior wildlife biologist immediately dismissed them: “For North America the evidence is the opposite. The myth was the noble savage.”

As mentioned above, I studied science at the University of Chicago and Stanford. I’ve helped my biologist friends collect data in the field and process it in the lab. I respect and praise their work and treasure our friendships. Why have they responded with ridicule and contempt to the very mention of the traditional cultures I’ve spent much of my life studying and experiencing firsthand? Why do they reject evidence of indigenous conservation without even examining it? And what do they mean by the “noble savage”?

This myth has had a murky history. To the extent scientists or academics are even aware of it, they attribute it to the Enlightenment-era Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But recently, in his book The Myth of the Noble Savage (University of California Press), Ter Ellingson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, has shown it to be the creation of a faction of racist anthropologists in the mid-19th century – the intellectual ancestors of today’s right-wing think tanks and reactionary academics like Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

It turns out the noble savage was actually never a popular fantasy in historical European culture. The racist academics presented the fake myth as a “straw man” which they could easily demolish – relying partly on Darwin’s new theory of natural selection – in order to condemn indigenous cultures and defend European imperialism and white superiority.

The mere repetition of the words Noble Savage sufficed to serve as a devastating weapon against any opposition to the racist agenda. The myth of the Noble Savage became a weapon in the Ethnological Society’s scientific-racist project of helping to naturalise a genocidal stance towards the “inferior” races. (Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage)

In this fabricated myth, indigenous people were falsely idealized as representing an original, wild, unspoiled state of humanity, living in peaceful harmony with nature. One of the worst mistakes a white European could make was to romanticize the noble savage – succumbing to irrational fantasies, idealizing nonindustrial societies and cultures, ignoring their negative traits and failings, fabricating valse virtues and successes.

In science and academia, the noble savage became a supremely effective insult, slander, and put-down for which there was no defense. If you said anything positive about indigenous people, you were immediately accused of romanticizing the noble savage, and you automatically lost all credibility. The slur was likely to cling to you forever, branding you as “too trusting” of anything that didn’t conform to institutional orthodoxy. Evidence of indigenous failures was welcomed, while evidence of indigenous achievements was dismissed.

Of course, none of my scientist friends had ever studied this cultural history. None of them knew what the original “noble savage” meant, let alone how it was manipulated by 19th century racists. My friends had simply copied the insult from elders and peers in academia – and sadly, I’ve even found them teaching it to their children.

Nor had any of my friends ever studied the conservation practices of indigenous cultures. From the way they heard the “noble savage” slur used in their milieu, they assumed there was conclusive evidence, somewhere, that all indigenous people had abused nature. When pressed, the best evidence they could cite against indigenous conservation was a widely publicized hypothesis that Pleistocene megafauna – mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, etc. – went extinct 8,000 years ago due to over-hunting by prehistoric humans.

As one of my friends noted, there are other isolated reports of indigenous over-harvesting. But scientists don’t cite these reports out of concern for objectivity – they cite them to discredit all indigenous people and those who seek to learn from them, and to dismiss evidence which challenges institutional racism and white superiority.

When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it…when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific “truths —then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for “real” knowledge creation or evaluation while Traditional Knowledge may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form. (George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Smithsonian Magazine)

The racist slander of the Noble Savage has ensured that seven generations of biologists have willfully ignored indigenous knowledge about the natural systems and habitats they presume to study, knowledge they’re only now beginning to catch up with.

The Ascent of White Men

The very things I admire about my scientist friends – their love of nature and commitment to field work and conservation – have given them a limited, inaccurate view of science. They’re lucky to make a living exploring beautiful natural areas, restoring habitat and collecting data to help preserve endangered species.

But growing up amid industrial farms, coal mines, oil and gas fields, and chemical factories, with a research chemist and rocket scientist for a Dad, studying the physical sciences and engineering and working in the electronics, communications, nuclear, entertainment, and internet industries – all that has taught me firsthand how the discoveries of physicists, chemists, earth scientists, geneticists, roboticists, and computer scientists damage natural habitats, pollute our environments, and endanger humans and wildlife.

It’s ironic that, while attacking me for “romanticizing the noble savage”, my friends have consistently romanticized science.

Scientists tend to judge non-whites by European standards, reserving their respect for “civilized” high-achieving Asians, and the few Blacks, Latinos, or Native Americans who’ve become scientific researchers, college professors, published authors, or national leaders. One of the most insidious prejudices in science, and our society as a whole, is the conflation of wealth, power, and technological progress with cultural evolution. In the 19th century, Europeans saw the increasing wealth and power they were gaining, through imperial conquest and advances in science and technology, as evidence they were progressing away from primitive savagery toward civilized Enlightenment. The defenders of European imperialism who introduced the noble savage as a racist insult also helped frame the theory of the “Ascent of Man”.

To white people, human progress is proved by our ancestors’ assumed progression from Stone Age hunter-gatherers – the Noble Savage – to the metal-workers of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, to the Discovery of Agriculture in the Middle East, the Rise of Civilization, the Anthropocene, the European Enlightenment, and the rise of science. Despite our contemporary rhetoric praising diversity and tolerance, white people of European ancestry, including our most celebrated scientists, share a tacit belief in the evolution of culture from primitive to civilized, and the superiority of civilized people.

But the Ascent of Man is proving to be just another myth. There was no time when ancestral humans wandered carefree in a Garden of Eden, all their needs provided without having to work. Human culture did not take a quantum leap forward through a “Discovery of Agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, launching a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Some societies – our own, and the historical examples we admire (Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Inca and Classical Maya) – are simply unable to manage their aggression. They expand, conquer, dominate, and ultimately collapse.

But many others take the path of peace and thrive by reining in aggression. Like other animal species, nonindustrial humans have always studied their habitats closely and worked with plant and animal populations in complex and sophisticated ways.

Indigenous peoples have been pigeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturalist,” obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers and limiting their use of and impacts on nature to the two extremes of human intervention…and it has led to a focus on domestication as the only way in which humans can influence plants and animals and shape natural environments.

Anthropology has changed significantly in the past one hundred years…but the basic elements of the nineteenth-century view of California Indians is still with us. The term “hunter-gatherer” is still used and still implies an evolutionary sequence of progress. The notion of the evolution of human cultures remains implicit in the layout of many current human ecology and anthropology textbooks and is explicit in recent anthropological journal articles that refer to this progression as “the ascent of man.” (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources)

Rediscovering Native Tending

At the same time those white scientists and conservationists were ridiculing and bullying me on the topic of indigenous conservation and the noble savage, University of California botanist M. Kat Anderson mustered the courage to stand up to anti-indigenous racism in the male scientific establishment. Her book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, published in 2013, was a meticulous, comprehensively researched study of the ecological practices of dozens of tribes across dozens of widely varying natural habitats, from coasts to river valleys and interior basins, from deserts to alpine forests, from thousands of years ago into the present.

By virtue of their daily use of plants, California Indians acquired extensive and special knowledge of the life histories of plant species, and they understood how different harvesting strategies affected natural regeneration…These [indigenous] harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries, possibly thousands of years…During the course of their long history in California, Indians so exhaustively explored the plant kingdom for its uses and so thoroughly tested nature’s responses to human harvesting and tending that they discovered how to use nature in a way that provided them with a relatively secure existence while allowing for the maximum diversity of other species…When historical indigenous interactions–both harvesting strategies and resource management practices–are investigated in depth, we find that by keeping ecosystems in a modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological harmony with nature. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

As I’ve found while researching Pictures of Knowledge, abundant evidence of indigenous conservation and sustainable resource management has long been embedded in the ethnographic literature, hidden from lay audiences and ignored by the broader scientific community. But in the wake of Anderson’s book, many similar reports on indigenous ecology have surfaced from around the world – North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa – confirming my insights and Anderson’s findings.

For instance, in the past two decades, archaeologists and environmental scientists working in coastal British Columbia have come to recognize evidence of mariculture—the intentional management of marine resources—that pre-dates European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, the ancestors of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Indigenous groups there created and maintained what have become known as “clam gardens”—rock-walled, terrace-like constructions that provide ideal habitat for butter clams and other edible shellfish…This resource management strategy reflects a sophisticated body of ecological understanding and practice that predates modern management systems by millennia.

These published research studies now prove that Indigenous communities knew about mariculture for generations—but Western scientists never asked them about it before. Once tangible remains were detected, it was clear mariculture management was in use for thousands of years. (Nicholas, Smithsonian)

These reports continued to accumulate until finally, long after the Black Lives Matter movement made racism a hot topic in white society, the predominantly white scientific, academic, and conservation establishments were forced to respond. In September 2020, Scientific American published a formal apology for its long-standing role in institutional racism. And The Conversation, a fact-based online news source supported by Boston University, the University of California, Penn State, Rutgers, Tufts, Vanderbilt, and many others, formally acknowledged the racism inherent in the environmental movement since its origins in the work of icons like John Muir.

American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. (Prakash Kashwan, editor, The Conversation)

Riches Squandered

I’ve described how I grew up amid the impressive earthworks of the prehistoric Hopewell culture. European culture is obsessed with monumental architecture – even the Black astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson used drone footage of skyscrapers to illustrate the highest achievements of mankind in a pro-science TV commercial.

But I also described how, 30 years later, I was even more impressed at finding stone tools, potsherds, petroglyphs and pictographs in my beloved Mojave Desert. My long, privileged education had revealed exactly how white Europeans built cities, skyscrapers, computers, and rocket ships. And my adventurous life had exposed the cost – global, catastrophic damage to natural ecosystems and traditional human societies. But the discovery that people had thrived in the desert, making everything they needed from scratch using local natural materials, with no lasting damage to their environment – that I found truly inspiring.

When the European ancestors of modern white Americans invaded North America, they encountered indigenous societies and natural habitats which had co-existed in dynamic equilibrium for thousands of years. Native cultures spanned a diverse ecological spectrum. Some – like the tribes Kat Anderson studied in California – were able to occupy the same habitat for countless generations, practicing a resilient blend of wild harvesting and agriculture that adjusted to changes in climate and other disturbances.

Unlike European colonists and modern Americans, these ecologically-adapted indigenous societies didn’t construct “permanent” homes, cities, infrastructure, or political boundaries in habitats where fire, flood, and other cyclical disturbances could be expected. When they encountered disturbances rendering local habitats unusable – like prolonged droughts – they adapted by migrating, carrying their resilient practices to other habitats where they could put down new roots.

A few native cultures, like the Cahokians of the Mississippi Valley and the Ancestral Puebloans of the Southwest, did come to rely more exclusively on agriculture, expanding and developing social hierarchies, seeking to dominate their neighbors and develop empires. Like empires in the Old World, these native empires rose and fell and faded away in a cycle of generations. None of these North American native empires survived at the time of European invasion.

Countless historical documents show that when they first arrived, and as they invaded westward, European colonists found natural habitats of almost unfathomable productivity which were the result of thousands of years of indigenous tending.

Every day of every year for millenia, the indigenous people of California interacted with the native plants and animals that surrounded them. They…achieved an intimacy with nature unmatched by the modern-day wilderness guide, trained field botanist, or applied ecologist …In the process, they maintained, enhanced, and in part created a fertility that was eventually to be exploited by European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs, who imagined themselves to have built civilization out of an unpeopled wilderness.

Coastal salt marshes were at one time much more extensive than today, forming important habitat rich in plant and animal life… Pure grasslands, including coastal prairies, valley grasslands, vernal pools, and montaine meadows, covered one-fifth of the state before 1850… Before dams and man-made levees, river boundaries surged and retreated with the seasons…Riparian woodlands, which before 1850 covered 900,000 acres in the Central Valley, teemed with animal life. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

Artisans of Wildfire

There wasn’t much of that richness left for me to see, generations later, as I made my own way westward into valleys trampled and overgrazed by cattle, deserts and coastal hills blanketed by invasive plants, mountains ravaged by mining and clear-cutting of timber. But as mentioned in previous parts of this series, I did occasionally stumble upon beautiful “parklike” stands of native Southwestern forest which can result either from “natural” fire regimes or from indigenous burning to clear undergrowth and excess fuel. And in remote, hidden corners of the desert, I was sometimes surprised by lush stands of honey mesquite, which my Indian friends told me had been planted and maintained by their ancestors – like the native water sources which their people maintain today.

The California landscapes that early explorers, settlers, and missionaries found so remarkably rich were in part shaped, and regularly renewed, by the land management practices employed by native peoples. Many of the biologically richest of California’s habitats were not climax communities at the time Euro-Americans arrived but instead were mosaics of various stages of ecological succession, or fire subclimaxes, intensified and perpetuated by seasonally scheduled burning. In a very real sense, some of the most productive and carefully managed habitats were in fact Indian artifacts. In many cases these landscapes experienced far greater degrees of managerial care and ecologically sophisticated manipulation than are found today.

It is likely that over centuries or perhaps millenia of indigenous management, certain plant communities came to require human tending and use for their continued fertility and renewal and for the maintenance of the abundance and diversity patterns needed to support human populations.

Countless studies have shown that fire has always been a primary tool in indigenous conservation, worldwide. In the forests of eastern North America, before the European invasion:

Over thousands of years, the American Indian became expert in using fire for various purposes, e.g., for hunting, to concentrate prey species in convenient areas, to encourage fruit and berry production, to keep the woods open along major corridors of travel, to fire-proof their villages, and other uses…Because of their farming and burning activities, Indians ensured that much of the eastern forests was in early successional habitats.

Indians often burned as frequently as twice a year, complementing lightning as an ignition source. Their burning extended the fire season beyond the “natural” lightning-fire season of summer. These frequent and often extensive fires, along with the wildlife foraging that fire encouraged, created and maintained open woodlands, savannahs, and prairies throughout the eastern United States.

In fact, much of the eastern forests at the time of Columbus could be regarded as a cultural artifact of Indian activities…The eastern forest at that time was a shifting mosaic of woodlands, savannahs, forests, and prairies, all in varying stages of succession. (D. H. Van Lear and R. F. Harlow, U.S. Forest Service)

In California:

Fire was the most significant, effective, efficient, and widely employed vegetation management tool of the California Indian tribes. The slow match gave them the technological capability to burn both small patches and extensive tracts of vegetation in a systematic fashion…In addition, most tribes had the ability to fell trees and large shrubs with fire for meeting cultural needs. They used this tool to create village sites and to convert riparian habitat and floodplain into farming areas in southeastern California.

Deliberate burning increased the abundance and density of edible tubers, greens, fruits, seeds, and mushrooms…enhanced feed for wildlife; controlled the insects and diseases that could damage wild foods and basketry material; increased the quantity and quality of material used for basketry and cordage; and encouraged the sprouts used for making household items, granaries, fish weirs, clothing, games, hunting and fishing traps, and weapons. It also removed dead material and promoted growth through the recycling of nutrients, decreased plant competition, and maintained specific plant community types such as coastal prairies and montane meadows.

Many wild plant populations accumulate aging parts (dead branches and shoots, leaves, cones, and seed pods) that may reduce plant vigor and productivity over time. Fires set by California Indians consumed this biomass and released some of the plant nutrients it contained.

Scientific studies have recently shown that nutrient movement can take a long time, relative to human life spans…In some ecosystems the nutrient storage compartment (e.g. the litter on the forest floor) can become a vault, locked against internal cycling…Like soil arthropods, bacteria, and fungi, fire is a mineralizing agent in forests and other vegetation types, but it works much faster than decay organisms and thus speeds up nutrient recycling and the return of sites to high productivity.

Freshwater marshes in the Central Valley of California were burned by the Wukchumni Yokuts, and in the Panamint Valley by the Timbisha Shoshone, to clear out old reeds, recycle nutrients, stimulate new plant growth, and provide open water for waterfowl…Deergrass, an important native bunchgrass for coiled basketry in central and southern California, was burned in chaparral, lower montane forests, and oak woodland plant communities by the Cahuilla, Foothill Yokuts, Kumeyaay (Diegueno), Luiseno, Sierra Miwok, and Western Mono tribes to clear away accumulated dead material and increase flower stalk yields.

Fire helped to control the pathogens and insects that would otherwise compete for the same resources used by native people…Ruby Cordero (Chukchansi Yokuts/Sierra Miwok)…recalls burning to eliminate insects that attacked shrubs that were important for basketry…Many Indian tribes in California burned in oak…woodlands and tan oak…stands to reduce insect pests that inhabit acorns and overwinter in oak leaf duff…According to Kathy Heffner…all of the tribes she interviewed in northern California (Hupa, Wailaki, Tolowa, Yurok, and Karuk) burned under the California black oaks and other oak species to destroy the insect pests…Fungi and bacteria also have the potential to decrease substantially the mast crop of oaks…Fire may have helped to curb these pathogens as well…The Luiseno in southern California burned regularly as well to destroy insect pests and diseases that damaged native food crops…

An extremely important reason for setting fires was to increase forage for wildlife…It has been shown that pruning or burning vegetation increases the forage value for certain wildlife and that the number of larger game animals increases after fire…Today elders from a number of tribes substantiate that the practice of burning is highly beneficial to wildlife. The Sierra Miwok elder Bill Franklin learned about burning from his father and grandfather: “They said the Indians used to burn in the fall–October and November. They set the fires from the bottom of the slope to decrease the snowpack, get rid of the debris so there’s no fire danger and they burned in the hunting areas so there was more food for the deer…”

Fire was also used in hunting many kinds of animals…Fire was a tool used often for driving rabbits…Many tribes captured ground squirrels, a reliable food source, by smoking them out of their burrows with the aid of a fire fan or burning them out…The larvae of wasps and yellowjackets were a delicacy eaten by many tribes, and fire was sometimes used to find them…Similarly, tribes throughout California used fire to capture grasshoppers.

In forests and woodlands, thickets of shrubs and small trees tended to accumulate over time, creating a potential wildfire hazard. Aware of the danger uncontrolled fires would pose to villages and collecting sites, California Indians regularly fired the understory in forests and woodlands “to keep the brush down” and promote the growth of wildflowers and grasses. After repeated burning, the fires were of low intensity and crown fires uncommon in many areas.

Heightened species diversity, abundance, and density have been associated with regular, intermediate-density, spatially heterogenous disturbance. Based on this relationship, it can be hypothesized that the disturbance caused by California Indians’ use of fire in a variety of ecosystems, occuring at intermediate intensities and frequencies, promoted a maximally heterogenous mosaic of vegetation types and increased species diversity. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

In the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest, the scene of my recent “burn scar” hikes:

In the last few decades, investigations of tribal traditions and research by historians, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and ecologists have revealed a wealth of evidence implying that fires ignited by Native peoples have influenced landscape vegetation for hundreds and probably thousands of years…Intervals between fires in these forests mostly ranged from an average of only about two years in parts of northern Arizona to twenty-five or thirty years at higher elevations and moist sites, with many areas averaging between seven and fifteen years. This pattern of frequent fires was instrumental in producing and maintaining parklike ponderosa forests with big trees and open, grassy understories. Fires thinned out saplings and shrubs and killed some of the overstory trees, particularly those with a scar exposing heart rot. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)

Next: Restoring Wildfire

Close But No Cigar

Spring had sprung – this would be my first warm-weather hike of the year, so I’d have to start carrying more water. My goal was to try a minor, apparently long-abandoned branch trail into the big canyon system in between two of my regular hikes, in hopes of exploring some spectacular rock formations.

The branch trail starts at a saddle, 4 miles and 2,000′ above the main trailhead. I’d hiked the main trail half a dozen times during the past 2 years, and seen the start of the branch trail, but avoided it because it was listed as impassable. But since then, I’d gotten used to climbing over deadfall and bushwhacking through thickets. And I’d found a website that claimed to have used it three years ago to reach some waterfalls. It was one of only two ways into that big, obviously spectacular canyon system, so it seemed worth trying.

The stream was running briskly on the approach – there was still a little snow on higher slopes – but this would probably be peak flow until the monsoon. Drought has been pretty severe, but in the canyon bottom, flowers were starting and butterflies were abundant. I distinguished at least 4 species.

About midway up the canyon I surprised a young man with a dog. He was in his early-to-mid 20s and was carrying a pack smaller than mine, but he said he’d backpacked over from the opposite side of the mountains – a journey of close to 40 miles. I wanted to ask him how he’d made it so far, carrying supplies for himself and the dog in such a small pack. But he was anxious to discourage me from going farther – he’d had to climb over the deadfall I’ve encountered in the past up on the crest. I think he assumed I was backpacking and I didn’t get a chance to correct him. We wished each other well and parted ways.

At the saddle, I crossed over into the big canyon system – a whole new unexplored world with abundant outcrops of volcanic conglomerate, ranging from white to black. I was immediately surprised to find the old trail abundantly “flagged” with pink ribbon every 50 feet or so. There was good tread, and somebody bigger than me had hiked it recently. But it hadn’t really been cleared – there was still plenty of deadfall and brush growing up in the trail itself.

Still, it was a pretty trail, crossing steep talus slopes, passing in and out of patches of forest that had survived the 2012 wildfire, yielding dramatic views of hoodoos and prominent outcrops.

After more than a mile, the pink ribbons suddenly stopped. I reached a point where deadfall obscured the tread, and the steep ground had been chewed up by elk going both up and down. I consulted the topo map I’d printed off the internet, but it wasn’t detailed enough to help.

I spent a half hour exploring in different directions until I finally found a cairn at the foot of a “needle” rock, 50 feet below the last ribbon. From there, what looked more like a game trail proceeded up canyon. But halfway to the next saddle I saw one more of the big bootprints, so I must be on the right track.

I followed switchbacks down and across the slope until I reached the next saddle, where I found another cairn. Past the cairn, what appeared to be a trail led steeply down to the left, along an outlying ridge. Slipping and sliding down that trail and climbing over a lot of deadfall, I had a view into the head of the canyon system, but the topography was complex and I couldn’t figure it out.

A couple hundred feet below the saddle, the trail was again obscured by deadfall. I spent another half hour exploring in all directions but couldn’t find a way to proceed. I checked the map again but couldn’t figure out where I was. I climbed back to the saddle, but couldn’t see anything better there. My time was up and I had to turn back.

Hindsight is wonderful. By the time I reached the main trail, I’d figured out the topography in the head of the big canyon. At that farthest saddle, where I couldn’t find a way forward, I’d been really close to my destination. If I hadn’t lost so much time scouting for tread, and if I’d done a better job of map-reading, I could’ve easily bushwhacked into the canyon bottom, where two creeks branch off into spectacular slot canyons with numerous waterfalls.

So at least I know what to do next time!

Somewhere in that trail-scouting I managed to strain my left Achilles tendon, so on the 5-plus-miles back to the truck, every uphill stretch had to be done one-legged. And all the loose rock in the trail had be negotiated very, very carefully. And if I forgot, there was severe pain.