Monday, October 26th, 2026: AZ Summits, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
Long hiatus since my last hiking Dispatch. Trying to rest the ball of my left foot, chronically inflamed as a result of error by clueless physical therapist last January. Still getting twinges, so I believe foot is simply fucked, but I’ll give it a shot with, as usual when recovering, short hikes on level ground.
In recent trips to my new favorite area, I’d glimpsed a broad, winding wash down in the canyon bottom below the mesa road, with a distinctive conical peak rising on the other side. It’s a scenic spot, and from above, it looked like our broad sandy washes in the desert – very inviting for someone who needed an easy walk.
There’s a two-track turnoff from the mesa road just before that section of canyon, and the old topo maps show it leading down to a corral on the bank of the wash. I didn’t know if my low-clearance, 2wd pickup would make it down and back, but it was worth a try. I’ve been hoping to do a canyon walk in the “hidden maze” farther in the backcountry, so this could hopefully be a trial run.
The sky was mostly clear with clumps of cumulus on the horizon, and at these elevations – just above 4,000 feet – the high was forecast in the mid-70s.
I reached the turnoff and found it rough and little-used, with the grade doable until I reached a ledge halfway down. Past there it was steeper, with big loose rocks – not ideal, but I figured the little pickup could get back up if I built up some speed.
I made it to the big corral, where an impressive solar array pumped water that overflowed a couple of large steel stock tanks. No sign of cattle, though – recent rains had filled potholes in the volcanic rock all over this landscape, so the beeves were widely dispersed.
I walked a short distance in powder sand to the big wash, and was immediately shocked and discouraged by what I found: ridges and gullies of loose, coarse rocks driven down and built up by powerful floods, with humped bedrock formations lurking in between. Imagine walking on that while trying not to put weight on the ball of your foot! I’ve done it many times before, and it’s neither fun nor ultimately effective.
But I was here. Maybe it would get easier upstream – hah!
Of course, a few hundred yards upstream was the narrows, which was even worse. But the rock formations were impressive, drawing me onwards in my slow, painstaking fashion.
Past the narrows, the canyon bottom widened, and I encountered short, narrow stretches of loose sand – not ideal to walk on either – but mostly I found long fields of rock and coarse gravel that had to be taken slowly and carefully.
I’d hoped to at least reach the mouth of the first big side canyon, two miles up. But it took me nearly an hour to go a mile, and despite the mild temps, I was exposed, sweating, and having no fun, so I gave up and turned back.
One pleasant surprise was the creosote bush, blooming and looking really healthy all over this elevation range.
Returning up the two-track toward the mesa road, my little pickup did get bogged down on the steep grades of loose rock. Twice I had to back up to level spots, get out and rearrange the bigger rocks, and gun the engine, bashing the undercarriage to get past the grades. Hope to get my high-clearance 4wd back soon, but that’s not guaranteed either.
With my canyon hike cut short, I wanted to investigate another two-track shown on the map that crosses the canyon farther upstream and leads to mining prospects tucked away in the rugged foothills. The clouds had moved over, improving what is already a spectacular landscape.
The mesa road descends toward the canyon bottom where it emerges from between two mountains, and that’s where I found the next two-track. I turned off on it and was immediately hemmed in between high banks with no place to pull over or turn around. After a few hundred yards the trail entered the dry wash itself, and I stopped. I knew my pickup couldn’t handle the loose gravel and rocks of the wash, but there was no place to turn around. I literally had to back up for hundreds of yards, to get back to the mesa road. Live and learn.
Monday, September 21st, 2026: 2026 Trips, Gila, Regions, Road Trips.
It worked last Sunday – why not try again?
This time, I would return to the hidden, spectacular area straddling the border. Far from cities, known to few, overlooked by most. Where rogue roads have been cut by miners and ranchers – some of them show up on old topo maps, but many are omitted on modern GPS.
The gateway is a rimrock mesa and a series of rock spires, all called Twin Peaks. On my first visit, I’d followed the road that runs east of the spires, and found it marginally passable, running partway up a narrow, boulder-strewn wash. This time, I wanted to try the road that passes the west side of the little peaks. I actually hoped to reach one of those roads missing from GPS, to cross the hidden basin all the way to road’s end on the slope of the mountains that hem the basin’s eastern edge.
It’s the edges of the basin that really attract me: the gateway of rock spires on the west, the maze of deep canyons and forested peaks on the north, and the lower, rockier peaks and narrow canyons on the east. The north is the least accessible, requiring a challenging bushwhack from the nearest road.
The forecast for our region was warm and dry, and the sky was mostly clear when I left home. Elevations in the hidden basin range from 4,600 to 5,600 feet, with the eastern mountains rising to 7,500 feet. I expected temps in the mid-80s there, but on the way, I’d be descending to the river valley at 3,500 feet, where it would likely hit 90.
From the highway in the river valley, the long, graded gravel road climbs to the mesa at 4,600 feet, where I got my first view of the rock spires. And on their left, I noticed another, more dramatic spire I didn’t remember, deeper in the roadless maze of hidden canyons.
The backcountry ranch road descends into and out of a big canyon before climbing toward the rock spires. Anticipating the left turn to the west side of the spires, I turned by mistake onto an earlier ranch road, which leads to a big ranch in the next canyon north. I quickly realized my mistake, but continued because the road led toward the distinctive rimrock mesa that forms the western boundary of the hidden basin, and I wanted a closer look.
First, I found a spur road to an abandoned stock tank – a road missing from all the maps. The rimrock towered above me, and now, I could see a narrow gap where it would be possible to scramble to the top.
I drove over the saddle between canyons, and descended to the next spur road, which appears to have been a mine road originally, and now leads to a water tank on a hill. This road was well-graded, and I found a new-looking county road grader parked at the turnoff. Ahead, I could see the road descending into the big canyon to the north. And continuing up the opposite slope of the canyon – another detail omitted from all the maps.
I had no interest in visiting the ranch, so I returned to the main road.
This road – the road I’d taken before on my hike to the mouth of a spectacular box canyon – was originally built to serve mines, and now solely exists to serve remote, backcountry stock tanks and corrals maintained by the rancher who holds the lease on the hidden basin. Hence it gets only sporadic maintenance and sees regular erosion and washouts. I had no idea what to expect from the turnoff that passes west of the rock spires, but I soon found out!
This is a true, abandoned mine road – like our abandoned mine roads in the Mojave Desert. Running over bedrock ledges and up steep slopes of loose rock, it hadn’t been graded in decades, and showed no vehicle tracks at all.
As usual, I hadn’t paid much attention to the topo maps, and discovered that this road climbs over the high western shoulder of the rock spires – hundreds of feet higher than the road I’d taken past the east side. And without maintenance, higher means steeper and more eroded. I switched into low-range 4wd, and had to stop and get out repeatedly to scout lines over ledges and past deep ruts, but I was excited to be breaking new ground.
Before crossing past the rock spires into the hidden basin, I was looking for a turnoff north into an even more hidden canyon. An old topo map showed this turnoff descending past mines to a dead end with a windmill, past which the canyon narrows and drains into the main canyon north – at the roadless entrance to the maze of deep canyons and high mountains that I really wanted to explore on foot.
This dead-end spur road looked like it hadn’t been used in many years, so I was even more cautious, peering ahead for washouts, deep ledges or ruts, never driving beyond where I could easily back up to a wide spot and turn around, stopping more frequently to scout ahead. The often-vague two-track climbed over a low ridge, where bushes taller than the hood of my Sidekick were growing from the crown of the road, then began descending steeply on loose rock down the left slope of the narrow canyon.
Nearing the canyon bottom, I could see deep erosion and a potential washout, so I stopped and walked all the way down to where the road crossed the damp creekbed. The bottom was mostly exposed bedrock and was passable, and from down there, I could see a way of getting past the erosion by straddling one of the foot-deep ruts. So I climbed back up and carefully drove down.
Past the crossing, the track got narrower and crossed the dry creekbed repeatedly. There were scattered pools from recent rains, and some interesting-looking rock. I could see the canyon widening ahead and got even more excited. This is truly a hidden paradise, and I was clearly the first person to venture into it, possibly for many years.
Finally I rounded a bend and spotted the windmill ahead, its blades bent out of whack by powerful gusts down the canyon. Big spreading oaks dotted the broad, gentle slope, and I emerged into a clearing with abandoned metal and plastic watering troughs. I parked and followed overgrown tracks down into the shady canopy of a wide wash, where they ended in flood debris. What an amazing place this would be to have a cabin!
Returning to the vehicle, I realized I didn’t have my sunglasses, and remembered hooking them in my shirt when I got out to take photos, a hundred yards above the clearing. Would I be able to find them? Had I driven over them? They were cheap, but still.
I drove back through the mesquite scrub to a small grove of oaks, where I sat in my folding chair and ate a snack. Paradise.
But I hadn’t reached the day’s ultimate destination – past the rock spires and across the hidden basin. On the way up the canyon I drove slowly and scanned the roadway for my shades. When I reached the place where I’d stopped for the photos, I got out, and sure enough, I’d just driven over them. An earpiece had broken off, but I used some of my drinking water to rinse them off, and amazingly they were relatively unscratched and still usable.
Approaching the next creek crossing, I spotted something on the opposite slope – a solar panel, and the top of a ladder. What the hell?
It turned out to be a vertical mineshaft, with a fully-extended 20-foot extension ladder just reaching the top. In the bright sunlight I couldn’t see down past the midpoint of the ladder, but I had a powerful urge to climb down it.
The ladder was tied to the wooden rim with thin, rusted wire. Safety depended on whatever it was footed in at bottom, out of sight. Holding the thick wooden crossbeam, I put a foot on the third rung, and it felt plenty solid. I couldn’t even shake it. Still holding the crossbeam, I brought my other foot onto the rung and took another step down. But I still couldn’t see farther than halfway down the ladder – and no, I don’t have a smart phone that doubles as a flashlight.
I was alone here, and I hadn’t even brought my GPS message device from the vehicle. Reason took over and I climbed out. Damn! I really wanted to explore that mine.
Good thing I didn’t – when I enhanced the photo, I could see a second 20-foot extension ladder directly below the first. Long way to fall…
Approaching the next creek crossing, I spotted something else through the dense riparian canopy – the ruins of a cabin! None of this had been visible earlier, coming down the road.
I parked above the next crossing and crossed the creek – the cabin, high on the bank, was completely hidden.
Constructed of dry stone, it was both cruder and more complex than the drystone miner’s cabins in the Mojave, with a built-in fireplace on the east side. Intriguingly, its two rooms, roughly equal in size, had no connecting doors. Two miners living next to each other?
Returning to the Sidekick, I noticed the collapsed remains of their outhouse on the bank above the creek. And now that I knew the road, the drive out was both faster and easier.
Now for the drive past the rock spires into the hidden basin. I could see the road climbing ahead, even rockier than before. But I’d used up a lot of time exploring that canyon, my enthusiasm was waning, and I seemed to have less patience for stopping every dozen yards to scout lines past obstacles.
I made it up another step in elevation, past a little outcrop and across a tiny saddle, and found myself driving up yet another series of rock ledges, where I had to get out yet again to scout a line. But after that, I reached a spot where the road got steeper just as the surface turned to loose rock, which had been eroded on the right into a deep rut, at the edge of a perilous drop-off. I seemed to be approaching the high saddle below the rock spires, where I would get my first view over the hidden basin.
So I stopped and got out to walk ahead. It was just as bad as it looked from below. I walked most of the way to where the road turned left out of sight, and presumably got better. But this was just too much. Not only was I loosing patience, I was losing confidence. Rationally, I was sure I could’ve driven it, but emotionally, I felt too alone and too stressed out. Adding insult to injury, driving this abandoned road was now actually slower than walking it.
Worried about my foot on the incredibly rough and unstable surface, I didn’t even try hiking farther up to get a view – a missed opportunity I regretted on the way out.
Unfortunately, my vehicle was now parked facing upslope, with nowhere to turn around. Behind me were those rock ledges, and a narrow spot where the road was being eroded away into that perilous dropoff. I would have to back down for about 150 feet to that little saddle. Even worse, I found I was unable to shift into gear – a condition that plagued me in hot weather for years until I finally replaced the clutch cable. I could only get in gear by turning off the engine.
Backing down was really scary – I ended up tilted way over at the pinch point above the dropoff – but I made it to the saddle, turned around, and by shutting off and and restarting the engine repeatedly to shift gears, I finally made it down to the main road, and switched back into 2wd.
Changing gears was almost impossible, even at higher speeds, on the way out, and the force required triggered my shoulder pain. But my god, what beautiful country!
I stopped for a big afternoon feed in the Mormon farming village, and returned home well before sunset, the whole road trip taking me only seven hours.
Part of me never wanted to drive those roads again, but I couldn’t stop dreaming of that lush, abandoned, dead-end canyon. Next time I would take the lower road east past the rock spires, and hopefully explore the hidden basin.
Monday, September 14th, 2026: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Still trying to rest the foot. Not as easy as it might seem, but the only other options are (a) at least a year of laborious, time-consuming daily ultrasound treatments, or (b) giving up hiking completely.
And by this Sunday I’d gone nearly two weeks without a day in nature. My plan was to drive to the remote ghost town, up in our high mountains, for lunch, and explore a potential hike on the way.
I’d passed the turnoff for this hike, an hour north, hundreds of times. The Forest Service has prominent warnings that the trail is completely inaccessible and impassable due to washouts after the 2012 wildfire. It makes sense, because both the access road and the trail ascend a steep, narrow canyon, gaining nearly 5,000 vertical feet in less than 7 total miles.
I could find no reports of anyone trying to hike it since 2012. But of course, all those obstacles are what makes it attractive to me. The old, long-abandoned trail tops out near the crest – at my favorite spring, just over 9,000 feet on the trail that first introduced me to our vast wilderness, back in March 2019. There’s virtually no tread at that end, but a few years ago, by guessing at corridors through the mixed-conifer forest, I had traversed to the upper rim of that steep canyon. Looking across and down, I could tell it would be a spectacular hike, with plenty of tall cliffs and massive rock formations.
Our heat wave has transitioned to milder days, with near-daily forecasts of rain, but little actual precip. The sky was mostly clear when I left home, but despite being unable to hike, I dressed in long sleeves and hiking pants in case I should get stuck somewhere and have to walk out.
I’d been studying the access road on topo maps for months. Starting at 4,600 feet in a river valley, it climbs nearly 2,000 feet in 3-1/2 miles, with an average grade of 10% and maximum of 30% – which would be one of the steepest roads I’d ever driven. I figured there was little chance of it being drivable, but until my foot recovers, it was worth a try.
The GPS-based online topo maps show the road ending on a ridge above the canyon, with the trail continuing down from there. But the older Forest Service map shows the road continuing down, crossing the canyon bottom, then traversing the steep west face of the range for another mile and a half, past a corral, to some unlabeled structure high on another ridge.
Right after leaving the highway for the sandy two-track, I passed a couple of young guys moving gear in and out of a Prius. I’d gotten a late start – it was already 11 am – so I wondered if they were planning to park here and backpack up the road.
Past the Prius, the road entered a narrow, sandy wash, and truck tracks led right up it, meandering between low banks, over and around small boulders. After a few hundred yards I reached another narrow wash merging down from the left. Vehicle tracks led up both drainages, so I got out and walked up the tributary, and after a hundred feet or so could see tracks climbing a bank ahead. Based on the Forest Service map, this appeared to be my route.
The Forest Service map shows this road climbing a long ridge – but it’s hard to get an idea of how that happens just by reading the map. It had clearly been graded by a crawler – a bulldozer with steel tracks rather than rubber tires – very recently, since the last decent monsoon rain. And my first challenge was one of those 30% grades in loose dirt, so I immediately engaged low-range 4-wheel-drive.
At the top, I emerged onto a long rocky stretch, a narrow ridgetop between deep ravines, with an increasingly better view of the mountain wall ahead. The ridgetop kept making further steps upward, each with another 30% grade. I passed a water pipe running beside the road, and a metal water tank with runoff.
Finally I reached a large, cleared plateau with scattered cattle sign, an earthen dam at its upper end. There was no water in the old “stock tank” behind the dam – it had filled with sediment. Water was draining into the shallow enclosure from a plastic pipe, supporting a lush carpet of annuals. The road continued above the dam, getting much rockier, and the pipe seemed to follow the road down from above. There was a story here, if I could piece it together from the signs.
Past the dam, the rocky road climbed to the rim above the canyon – where GPS topo maps show it ending. An ancient Forest Service sign warned “Trail Closed Due to Hazards Caused by Fire”. But there was no trailhead, and the newly graded road continued down into the canyon.
What I could see ahead was much rockier and more deeply eroded than what I’d driven so far. But that’s why I’d spent a bundle on this vehicle during the past couple of years, so I eagerly started down it.
It was as steep as any other grade I’d encountered today, and toward the bottom it switched from rock and gravel to rock and loose, deeply eroded dirt. I entered a riparian canopy, and suddenly I was in the narrow, shady canyon bottom, facing a sharp left turn across the dry creekbed. I stopped and got out to walk it. The graded road continued as predicted by the old Forest Service map, but a short spur climbed the steep slope at right, dead-ending in a tiny clearing, about where the map showed the old canyon trail starting. No trail sign anywhere.
With some tight maneuvering on a road surface made of boulders, I backed my Sidekick up onto the spur. Then I got out and did some scouting for sign. The only clear tread led up from the left, into a side drainage, but after a hundred yards it turned out to be an obvious cattle trail leading away from the main canyon.
The map showed the canyon trail starting in the dense pinyon-juniper forest opposite where I’d parked. I bushwhacked through that, but it just got denser until it was blocked by an erosional gully, forcing me into the dry creek bottom, where I saw about a dozen black plastic water pipes leading down-canyon, like bundles of spaghetti.
I bushwhacked up the creekbed, diverting back and forth to avoid deadfall and boulders, following water pipes where they seemed to indicate a better route. Often, I found broken pipe ends, but there were always more intact sections of pipe upstream. I concluded that as always happens in these remote drainages, pipes were run after wet years, destroyed in the next big storm event, then abandoned, leaving a growing, near-eternal legacy of trash. I found one short stretch of narrow tread at the base of a south slope, but there were no cairns or other signs of human intervention, so I assumed it was another cattle trail.
So far, the canyon had been so narrow, and the banks so steep, that you wouldn’t want to get caught there in a heavy rain. But after nearly a quarter mile, I emerged into a wider stretch below talus slopes. I shouldn’t really be hiking, so I went no farther. But I’d convinced myself this is worth returning to when my foot feels ready. This canyon bottom is much easier to bushwhack than the bigger canyon I’d hiked into a few months ago, where a perennial stream, riparian thickets, and massive old-growth deadfall made for excruciatingly slow going.
As I said, I didn’t expect the access road to be drivable. And the grading had clearly only been done in recent weeks. I figured I might be the only person in the world, other than the local rancher, who would even try driving this road. So imagine my shock when I got back to the road and saw a big old pickup truck parked just below my Sidekick, blocking the road to the corral.
There was nobody in it. I opened the Sidekick to dig my chilled water bottle out of the cooler, and when I turned to face the road below, two guys were approaching.
“What are you boys up to?” I asked.
“Oh, just out exploring,” said the taller one. They were close to my age.
So we started talking, and even without having to explain who we were, the three of us sensed kindred spirits. They’d been as shocked to see my vehicle here as I’d been to see theirs! After a while we settled side-by-side in the shade on the bank above the road.
They live in the valley near where this road meets the highway. Both hikers, like me, they’d always wondered about this canyon, but had figured the road would be impassable since the fire. We all agreed it was a hell of a coincidence that the three of us had ended up here at the same time, soon after the rancher had re-opened the road with a friend’s bulldozer. We figured we truly were the first people apart from the rancher to reach this spot since 2012.
One of the guys was a retired trailbuilder – he said, like me, he prefers bushwhacking to following trails. “I never want to see another trail in my life,” he said, chuckling.
We entertained ourselves by identifying trees in the riparian canopy in front of us, and sharing stories of local people from our mutual acquaintance.
They had walked up the road to the corral, and when it was time to leave, suggested I drive on up there to check it out. So they backed up, and I continued up the road so they could use my parking spot to turn their truck around.
The corral, a rustic construction of juniper trunks bound together by 2″ steel pipe, lay at the center of a big level clearing. More plastic water pipe led across it, but was dry. The road continued steep and rocky from there, so I decided to walk it, hoping to reach a view into the next big canyon to the north. Instead, I discovered that the long traverse across the spectacular slope of the mountain wall is simply more rollercoaster, in and out of ravines. I felt like my day was a big success already, without the risk of driving another mile of steep, rocky road that might get me in trouble.
Returning up the steep grade out of the main canyon, I was surprised to see the pickup just ahead of me. Despite having 4-wheel-drive, it looked like they were having more trouble than me, moving in short lurches, with their much bigger vehicle bouncing and rocking back and forth over the rocks. That seems to confirm my theory that smaller is better in off-highway travel.
I stopped and waited to give them some space. And after they were out of sight, I continued, and found them parked in the saddle, where they waved me past.
It was on the drive down that I pieced a story together about what I’d seen. The rancher clearly decided to finally invest some effort in water features high on the mountain. He hadn’t yet dug out the big stock tank behind the dam, but he’d succeeded in piping water down to that metal tank at the halfway point. I figured the structure at the far end of the road, way past the corral, is an old tank, and his plans from here probably include getting it and the dam working again, so he can run cattle on the upper mountain.
Growing up in the Midwest, where cattle ranching involves nothing but level ground and plenty of seasonal rain, the extremes of Western ranching never cease to amaze me. But like so many backcountry roads, this one is clearly unsustainable! Ambitious plans like this are totally contingent on continued dry monsoons, poor winter storms, access to a big crawler, and deep pockets for diesel fuel.
In any event, I hope that amazing road stays drivable long enough for my foot to recover, so I can explore that spectacular, long-abandoned canyon.
Thursday, August 27th, 2026: Arts, Music & Dance.
Cattle and Cane
In 1983, a young Australian band called The Go-Betweens released a strange song about a familiar experience – the relentlessness of aging, the loss of childhood’s wonder and potential, the melancholy of memory. Despite record company backing and a professional-quality music video, The Go-Betweens’ new song was largely ignored. Hence, it didn’t reach the U.S., where at the time, I was in between versions of my own decade-long musical project, Terra Incognita. But “Cattle and Cane” would’ve aligned perfectly with what I was working on – translating the rhythmic discoveries of the original Terra Incognita into songs.
I met Katie, my songwriting partner, the following year. And we began setting the lyrics we’d both written – also evoking our rural childhoods – to music, using what I’d discovered about rhythm in Terra Incognita. We would’ve loved what The Go-Betweens achieved – lyrics evoking childhood and loss, propelled and elevated by their music to an ecstatic state, akin to the spiritual trance achieved in Sufi music and dance. But I didn’t hear the song until 2021, long after I’d lost touch with Katie. Two years later, she died.
Lyrics evoking childhood and loss are common in popular music. Cattle and cane are both exotic species introduced to Australia by British colonists, and the landscape they’ve created is part of the global devastation caused by imperialism and capitalism. What makes “Cattle and Cane” miraculous is its exceptionally rare rhythmic structure, with verse phrases of eleven eighth-note beats alternating with chorus phrases using the more conventional eight beats per phrase. Like Terra Incognita, The Go-Betweens never set out to compose a song in exotic rhythms – it just happened that way – a musical miracle.
And eighteen years after it was released and ignored, “Cattle and Cane” was voted one of the top 30 Australian songs of all time.
All colonial time, that is.
Notes, Beats, Bars, and Time Signatures
In the reductive, mechanistic European tradition, the building blocks of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. Rhythm is repetition, allowing our bodies to move in time with the music, in intervals that the European tradition calls “bars”, each containing a number of beats. The frequency or speed of those beats determines whether they’re called full notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. What we think of as a musical phrase can consist of one or more bars. And the number of beats per bar, combined with the kind of beats they are, is referred to as the “time signature”.
Over the centuries, European music came to prioritize melody over rhythm, simplifying the time signatures used in most compositions to two: the standard 4/4 time signature, with four quarter notes per bar, and the less common 3/4 waltz, with three quarter notes per bar.
Listen to your favorite songs, and count the repeating beats by tapping the fingers of one hand on your leg, or a table top. A slow, steady beat is in quarter notes – with four beats per bar written as 4/4. A faster beat is in eighth notes – typically 4/8 or 8/8. Try it while listening to the songs and compositions below – if your fingers find the rhythm, does it bring a smile to your face?
With its focus on melody and harmony, European music neglected the fundamental importance of rhythm, resulting in the now-common spectacle of a concert hall full of seated, immobile listeners. The more ancient traditions of African music make up for that, with their celebration of polyrhythm, the layering of what Europeans would call multiple time signatures, culminating in the incredibly complex and sophisticated music of the rain forest pygmies.
Exotic Time Signatures
Most of our favorite songs are in 4/4 time. Songs in exotic time signatures are extremely rare – I notice and gravitate toward them, but after a lifetime of collecting and creating, they still represent only 0.6 percent of my digital music library – less than 6 out of every 1,000 tracks.
Exotic time signatures are completely absent from some genres, like country music or disco. But they show up regularly in jazz, which became more competitive and cerebral in the postwar era. Listeners born in the 1940s or 1950s will likely remember what must be the world’s most popular tune featuring an exotic time signature – Dave Brubeck’s 1959 classic “Take Five”, a joyous rarity in 5/8 time, with five eighth notes per bar:
Creating Exotic Rhythms
Jazz splintered throughout the 1960s, resulting in new sub-genres in the 1970s, like jazz-rock fusion and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics. The jazz world demands formal training, chart reading, and instrumental proficiency, and in the late 1970s I briefly worked with a guitarist whose jazz-rock fusion band ran exotic rhythms into the ground. All their songs were written in odd time signatures, and they never performed for an audience – they just sat in the garage hunched over, concentrating on reading the dense charts, determined to meet the challenge.
They were apparently ahead of their time – a new genre called “math rock” emerged in the 1990s and has continued to grow, flaunting exotic time signatures, sometimes in sequence to build evolving compositions. As I noted above, the reductive European interpretation of music is fundamentally mathematical, so it can easily yield mathematical complexity.
But you don’t need training or virtuosity to make or enjoy exotic rhythms. Even amateurs love exotic time signatures because they’re a challenge to learn and intoxicating to sustain. My 1980s San Francisco band, Terra Incognita, began as a random collection of passionate amateurs. And without knowing or planning it, we became a proto-math rock project. During our first month jamming together, we spontaneously improvised a “Take Five” alternative, a country-funk tune in 3/4 time, and one in the really challenging 7/8 time signature, which evolved into my epic, tectonic love song “Seven Continents”:
There are so many ways to write a song! “Seven Continents” began in 1981 as a guitar riff in a jam session. We experimented with it throughout the next year, layering percussion, bass, and fiddle, sometimes in polyrhythm. When I met Katie in 1984, I began commuting between San Francisco and her home in Los Angeles. At night, in my sleeping loft under the massive rafters of our San Francisco loft, using a tiny battery-powered Casio keyboard, I started with the old guitar riff, and wrote lyrics about our long-distance affair, laboriously crafting melodies to fit the rhythm.
But the new love song included below, “A Night To Remember” (shared a few months ago on the six-song EP Miles We’ll Never See Again) emerged quickly and spontaneously. Writing lines on note paper, I strummed my guitar in a rhythm that matched the lyrical phrases, and discovered after the fact that it was in 5/8 time. Like “Cattle and Cane”, it was an organic miracle, and had nothing to do with math.
Give Them a Chance
Music enhances our lives in so many different ways, and exotic rhythms can help with most of them. The math of “time signatures” may sound daunting to our minds, but rhythms appeal directly to our bodies, and some unusual time signatures can actually be good for relaxing, meditating, or daydreaming. Speed them up a little, and as “Cattle and Cane” proved, they can energize and motivate us, for working or dancing. Both our minds and our bodies thrive when facing a challenge – that’s inspired musicians from Dave Brubeck in 1959 to Leep in 2024. And finally, changes in rhythm can take us on a musical journey, distracting us from our worries, surprising us and making us wonder what’s next, as shown at the end of this Dispatch.
You never really know whether you like something until you’ve had a chance to live with it and learn from it. I add music to my library if something about it interests or challenges me at first listen. I download it, add it to playlists, and only after weeks of listening do I begin to fully appreciate it. As The Go-Betweens learned with “Cattle and Cane”, it can take years – or even decades – for listeners to recognize your achievement.
Chilling Out
Brazilian popular music is notorious for complex arrangements in odd time signatures – I can only take it in small doses. But Marinero’s Brazilian-inspired “love song to San Francisco” in 7/8 time, from 2021, was catchy enough on first listen that I downloaded it, and it stood the test of time:
In high school during the late 1960s, I stumbled upon two psychedelic albums by quirky British bluesman John Mayall. I became obsessed with them, and unlike most music of the 1960s they endured on my playlists to this day. But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered this trippy but technically proficient jazz composition in 6/8, which was apparently only recorded live, in 1969:
British band The Stranglers approached punk rock as a pub band from the 1970s. But in 1981, frustrated by their plebeian image, they released this elegant novelty, and it became a minor pop hit. It begins with an intro phrase of two bars in 3/8 and one bar in 7/8, before settling into 6/8 time:
When I began working with Katie Rauh in 1984, I brought my experience with odd time signatures from the early Terra Incognita, but she was a musical novice. Somehow, together, we spontaneously translated her lyrics for “Plastic Snow” into the extremely unusual sequence of verses in 4/4 time and choruses in 3/4 time, and it clicked perfectly:
Motivating
In the late 1990s, Brazilian electronic composer Amon Tobin offered his own energizing, mesmerizing 5/8 alternative to Brubeck’s “Take Five”:
Holy Wire could only be from Brooklyn – a bearded white hipster with a tremulous voice and academic diction. But my attention was caught by how he establishes the beat with a 5/8 synth riff in this track from 2024, then overlays his vocal phrasing polyrhythmically in 8/8 time. And then he changes it up and cries out in pain, and I can overlook the cliches:
Like Stan Getz, Cal Tjader was a pioneer in the fusion of jazz with international music. This hypnotic Middle-Eastern-influenced composition from 1963 uses the 6/8 time signature:
And finally, here’s my recent, upbeat ode to fleeting love, my answer to Brubeck’s “Take Five”, in 5/8 time:
Embracing the Challenge
Another in the 6/8 time signature, released in 1998 by the British indie band Snowpony. I heard and downloaded this just before COVID and my house fire:
Jah Wobble was bassist for John Lydon’s groundbreaking post-punk act Public Image Limited in the late 1970s. Wobble followed that up with various international music collaborations, the most recent with his son, yielding this seductive groove in 7/8 time released just last year:
Stereolab was one of those emerging 1990s electronic bands that I was too stressed out to pay attention to at the time. And now, they’re mostly too cerebral for me. But they did produce some catchy grooves and hooks – the intro for this alternates between 10/8 time and 6/8 time, with the main theme settling into 10/8:
This American indie band formed in Philadelphia in 2014 – my list is trending contemporary. This piece from 2018, somehow both mathematical and dreamy, uses perhaps the weirdest time signature yet, 11/4:
Turns out math rock has cross-fertilized Emo – here’s an Emo song in 12/8 time, featuring a singing drummer, released in 2024 by this young trio from Berlin:
Making a Journey
During the first year in our San Francisco loft, my roommate and “adopted sister” Tiare started dating Mark Isham, trumpet player in pianist Art Lande’s jazz fusion band Rubisa Patrol. I met the band, and Isham dropped in on one of our big loft parties, but within the year he was off touring with Van Morrison, and eventually became one of the most successful soundtrack composers in Hollywood. This track from Rubisa Patrol’s 1977 album features the rare 9/8 time signature:
My last offering is the climax of a 2010 album by the math rock band Rooftops, from Bellingham, Washington. It’s truly an epic composition, evolving dramatically between time signatures, from 10/8 to 6/8, to 4/4, to 18/8, to 8/8, and finally to 6/8:
Monday, August 24th, 2026: 2026 Trips, Animals, Mogollon Rim, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips.
Stress and trauma may have made me more heat-sensitive, but this feels like the hottest summer yet. I can only work mornings – by afternoon my workspace is too hot, it’s too humid for the swamp cooler, and I can’t work on music with a fan blowing. The only practical solution requires a major investment, and for various reasons, the timing is bad and I can’t commit. So throughout each week, I get more and more uncomfortable and frustrated, until by Sunday I’m desperate for another getaway to higher elevations.
After last Sunday’s takeover by birders, I was hoping my next attempt at solitude would succeed. Today’s destination is called a mesa because much of it is fairly level, but it’s really more like a gently sloping plateau sprawling down from the crest of a small mountain range.
The range, topping out at 9,000 feet, is densely forested, and has mostly escaped recent wildfires. It’s become one of my favorites because it’s so remote, little-known, and seldom-visited. You can’t see the central part of the range from any highway, the forest blocks views outward, and there are no campgrounds or any other features that would attract recreationists.
The highway crosses the range in an 8,000-foot pass, but the turnoff onto the crest road is easy to miss and appears just to lead to a fire lookout. I could hardly have designed it better myself, to keep out the crowds.
The crest road is steep, rocky, and often deeply eroded, but another barrier is weather. I’ve learned never to go there in the windy season or when storms are forecast, because there will always be blowdown blocking the road in multiple places.
The road skirts the mesa at 8,600 feet, and from there, the mesa spreads out and gently steps down to its farthest edge at 7,800 feet. Turning off onto the mesa road, a rough dirt track which was flooded near the junction, I immediately spotted a pickup truck with popup campershell and a freestanding tent, back in the big clearing where I’ve seen lone campers once or twice before. Thankfully, you need a pickup or off-road vehicle to get up the crest road – RVs and camping trailers can’t handle it. Their camp seemed vacant, and they clearly hadn’t brought a UTV, so I assumed they were off walking somewhere, either down the network of meandering 2-tracks or bushwhacking through the parklike forest.
I drove a few hundred yards farther, to a side trail that bumps down over embedded boulders into the basin below the big dammed meadow. There are a couple of fire rings here, but I found no sign of recent visitors as I backed into shade between a couple of spreading oaks. With a high of 91 degrees at home, I expected temps here in the 70s. It was blissfully mild, but what struck me most powerfully was a smell in the air – sweet and slightly tangy, like vanilla. Here in the forest there were only a few tiny, widely scattered annuals blooming, so I sniffed the bark of a nearby ponderosa, and found that they were giving off the perfume which pervaded the entire area. I’d never noticed that before – it was barely believable!
I’d been wondering if the big meadow would hold any water, and I could already hear croaking from far away. A chorus somewhere out in the middle of the meadow, then an answering chorus closer, behind the low earthen dam. Walking over through the big trees, I spotted a shallow pool no more than 20 feet wide, and next to the dam, a deeper one. I ate a snack for lunch, then carried my chair and a book to a spot in the shade where I could watch the entire meadow, while breathing in the seductive fragrance of ponderosa bark. I couldn’t see or hear anything from the distant party of campers, and the only sounds were from birds, and occasional waves of wind through the canopy, 80 t0 100 feet above.
The frogs in the ponds were quiet for long intervals, then suddenly started up again. I learned later that they’re Arizona treefrogs, the state’s official amphibian. Scientists only recently changed their genus, and many online publications haven’t caught up yet, resulting in a bit of confusion.
I wondered where they came from, to end up in these ephemeral pools high on the mountain, miles from any perennial stream. And where they go when the pools dry up. All I could find online is that they’re “dormant” during dry seasons.
I had planned to drive farther up the highway for a midafternoon burger before heading home, but I was really reluctant to leave this spot. Going easy on my foot, I followed a barely visible 2-track trail south into the forest. I didn’t have a detailed map and wondered where it went. All throughout the forest were pines and firs wearing rings of orange paint about six feet off the ground.
After a little over a quarter of a mile, I reached the end of the trail in a small clearing anchored by three big, old stumps. I finally realized that the 2-tracks forming a maze across this mesa are logging roads. A website associated with a nearby national forest says the orange paint designates trees that are not to be logged, which was a relief, because they must’ve painted tens of thousands of trees along this crest alone.
Of course, that makes me wonder what blue paint means – I see that much more often in our regional forests.
Two hours of peace beside that meadow had made me sluggish, and I had to force myself to drive farther up the highway, only to be served a mediocre burger – one more reason to avoid that alpine village of Mormon Trump-supporters. From there, it was a long drive home, especially on the twisty stretches where I ended up trapped between pickups towing UTV trailers and city drivers pretending to be racers. I may have to rethink this weekend getaway thing.
