Alcoves, Rock Outcrops, Nooks, and Crannies
Sunday, September 7th, 2025: Black Range, Hikes, North Star, Southwest New Mexico.
Our weather’s getting cooler – at least for now – but it still wasn’t cool enough for low elevation hiking. And since my knee is still (hopefully) recovering, I needed a level hike – which are hard to find at cooler elevations. But to narrow my choices even more, I wanted a decent lunch spot somewhere along the way. I’d already done the northwestern option last Sunday, and the northeastern option offered a couple of untried lunch spots that didn’t excite me at all.
But looking at the map again, I realized the northeast route offered the possibility of a shady canyon hike at over 7,000 feet, accessed via one of our most iconic backcountry roads. The map shows a trail running less than a mile down the canyon, but I figured I could keep walking to get my mile in. The Forest Service has a web page for that trail mentioning “alcoves, rock outcrops, nooks, and crannies”, but all I was interested in was the elevation and shade.
Not a cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see. But I was encouraged to find the river running – and actually in moderate flood. Amazing that in town we can still be in severe drought, while only thirty miles east they’re having a sustained wet monsoon.
Leaving the highway and climbing to the mesa, I found abundant wildflowers and lush grassy slopes all around, and actually began to get excited about the coming hike, despite the boring sky. This road starts out well-graded gravel, but as it dips into canyons it gets rockier – and it’s popular, so you gotta watch those blind curves and be ready for big pickups going too fast and tourists going too slow.
I parked in the tiny campground in the dark, narrow canyon that had seen a lot of debris after past wildfires. I saw a couple other vehicles back in the trees, but no people. The campground track had once crossed the now-dry creek, but floods had made it undrivable. There was no trailhead so I just followed what was left of the vehicle track until it ended and I found a trail sign.
Taking flower photos slowed me down a lot. I came to a spot where the creek held a little water in bedrock, then reached a cairn where the trail began climbing. I checked my map and found this should be the spot where the canyon trail branches off. But there was no tread through the new growth of annuals, so I just started finding my way down the banks of the creek.
Within a hundred yards or so I found the barest vestige of a trail – maybe just a game trail. It soon petered out, but short stretches would reappear at random. No worries, I’m pretty good at find the best route, and I couldn’t go wrong in this narrow canyon.
I saw some rock bluffs along the dry creek, and a formation on a slope above, but after a half hour I still hadn’t reached the “alcoves” etc.
Finally I saw something off through the trees that might be an alcove. And from there on, the slopes on both sides of the canyon became rockier and rockier, until I came to a narrows with an overhanging rock wall.
This is where the party began! I laughed, remembering how I had disregarded the name “Rocky Canyon”, thinking it would just offer mild temps. Little did I know it would turn out to be one of the most spectacular short hikes in our entire region.
Of course, the rocks were still mostly hidden behind trees, and up slopes that were a struggle in my knee brace. But even the canyon bottom was a beautiful, magical place.
No trail in this narrow, rock-walled stretch of canyon – I mostly stepped precariously from boulder to boulder in the creekbed, protecting my knee as best I could.
I’d spent more than an hour so far, on what was intended to be a one-mile out-hike, but I had to keep going until I ran out of rocks. In the end, it took me an hour and a half, and when I checked the map I found I’d hiked almost two miles and dropped over 400 vertical feet. No matter, I was in heaven – and the weather was perfect. I even had a breeze.
With less stops for photos, it only took me an hour to get back to the campground. Looking up, I spotted a few clouds through gaps in the canopy. The last remaining camper was just leaving, but others were arriving in a huge pickup.
Monsoon clouds were beginning to fill the sky as I drove up onto the mesa and headed back toward the highway. I had a late lunch at the less boring of the two untried spots – I was the only customer, not a good sign. But the huevos rancheros were actually pretty good, so I’ll be back.
Monday, September 1st, 2025: Hikes, Mineral, Nature, Rocks, Southwest New Mexico.
I invited my neighbor along for this short hike in one of our most spectacular canyons. We seem to be entering another active phase of our Southwest monsoon, and impressive clouds were spreading over the high mountains as we drove north. But the creek, normally running, was mostly dry.
I only went about a mile up canyon, and by the time I was halfway back the sky was pretty threatening. We both welcomed the rain, but this narrow stretch of canyon wouldn’t offer many escape routes during a flash flood.
The rain hit as we walked from the vehicle to the cafe for lunch, and continued steady all the way home – one of our best rains this season.
Saturday, August 30th, 2025: Hikes, Nature, Pinos Altos Range, Rocks, Southwest New Mexico.
This one’s for my mom. Just a stroll through a nearby canyon that’s normally one of our wettest places year-round, but is now bone dry, late in monsoon season.
Monday, August 25th, 2025: Cave Creek, Chiricahuas, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
I needed another short, level hike to continue my knee rehab. There are several of those within a half hour of home, but after last week’s three-day getaway, I had returned to problems that were just getting more acute and less surmountable.
I discovered that my favorite backroads cafe had reopened, and after studying the trails, realized that a short “nature trail” in the canyon bottom would be perfect for my knee. When I’m in shape, I avoid these easy, dumbed-down hikes, but now…
So I headed across the border to Arizona again, for an escape and a decent lunch as much as for a hike. Our frustrating monsoon was in remission, only a few small clouds lurked on the horizon, and the afternoon high there was forecast to reach 90.
It got hot there in the canyon bottom, with the paved road, and tourist cars, sporadically visible through the trees, just across the creek. But I immediately began noticing tiny marker labels at the foot of trailside trees, and became obsessed with finding them all – so that I had to periodically force myself to back off and scan the habitat around me, and up to spy the looming rock formations.
On this hot day I was alone, until on the way back I encountered a knowledgeable young couple who confessed they’d become equally obsessed with the labels – and had noticed, as I had, that whereas labels identified yuccas, sotols, beargrasses, cholla cacti, and even grasses, none of the abundant agaves or prickly pears had been labeled.
In the trailside plants and labels, several aspects attracted my scrutiny.
First, I was both amused and delighted that in many cases, they’d chosen to label potentially hard-to-identify specimens like seedlings or plants that were damaged or mostly dead.
Next, I have a tree guide, and for years I’ve been struggling to identify the trees here, from the canyon bottom at 5,000 feet to the crest at almost 10,000 feet in elevation. So I was glad to see some of the harder-to-identify trees labeled via widely varying specimens.
And since I’ve barely scratched the surface of shrubs here, I was pleasantly surprised by labels on some of those.
Finally, especially after seeing the Apache pine, I began to wish they’d included Apache names for these…
Friday, August 22nd, 2025: Baldy, Hikes, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
My doctor had unlocked the knee-immobilizer brace three weeks ago, recommending I take it easy for a couple weeks, then start doing occasional short hikes. But I re-injured it somehow a week later and iced it for another week. And now, on this road trip, with one of my favorite trails nearby, I decided to finally try it out.
It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful hike anywhere. There are two routes to the peak, converging up neighboring canyons, with a “crossover” trail between them at bottom. I’ve been hiking parts of it for many years. Four years ago I finally did the full 18-mile loop, at the peak of a wet monsoon, finding a hallucinatory diversity of fungi. And two years ago I hiked the best part of it in snow, which if anything made it even more spectacular.
But today I could only do the first mile, and I was hoping that would get me to a view of the unique, iconic sandstone formations up on the ridge.
This is the most popular trail on the plateau, and even on a weekday the parking lot was nearly full. But everyone was spread out and I was alone almost all of the time. I did meet a man my age on the way back, starting a final hike before surgery.
Halfway in, the trail leaves the tiny river and begins climbing. To protect my knee, I followed an informal trail that led directly up the valley toward the interior meadows. It was these meadows that finally freed my mind of the anxiety that had driven me here. I was at peace, just looking and breathing, if only temporarily.
