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Wildfire

Closer to the Crest

Monday, March 23rd, 2020: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Nature, Snowshed, Southeast Arizona, Wildfire.

After a bad cold limited my hiking for almost a month, I was anxious to rebuild my capacity and do more exploring. And in a time of global pandemic caused by urbanization, overpopulation, and globalization – among other failures of our imperialistic industrial society – I was super grateful that two decades ago, long before this man-made disaster, I’d made the decision to move to a region which consists of tiny enclaves of humanity in the midst of vast open spaces with mostly intact natural habitat. At a time like this, my situation couldn’t be in stronger contrast with the situation of most of my friends, who’ve chosen to live in the midst of vast concentrations of humanity surrounding tiny pockets of severely degraded nature.

So until our failing government declares martial law, I can still spend an entire day in wilderness without seeing another human. “Social distancing” – what a cruel joke on those who prize the benefits of big cities. The skyscrapers, the lights, the bustle, the restaurants, bookstores, bars, cafes, and nightclubs. Same as it ever was – the dangerous delusions of industrial civilization.

Today’s hike took me back to the range of canyons, a two-hour drive from home, to an unfamiliar trail that ultimately converged with the first trail I’d hiked there, back in January. This time, I was hoping to reach the crest, in a 12-mile round trip. But three things prevented that: the extreme steepness of the unfamiliar trail, my poor condition after prolonged sickness, and the need for multiple difficult stream crossings at the beginning of the hike.

Despite these challenges, I was able to get closer than before, within about a mile of the crest. And with many, many stops to catch my breath, I managed to climb a little higher than on any previous hike in the past 20 years or more.

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Hiking in Place

Monday, April 27th, 2020: Hikes, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Various, Wildfire.

Like every crisis in our alienated society, COVID-19 has revealed more of the social and ecological failures we live in everyday denial of. It was clear from the beginning that the virus became a pandemic due to our technologically-enhanced national and global mobility. The more people venture outside their local communities, the farther the virus spreads. But raised as individualists in our European-derived culture, we take our mobility for granted and resist any constraints on our ability to travel.

My weekend hikes have evolved to encompass a radius of a hundred miles from my home, but as the virus spread and voluntary travel restrictions were imposed, it became clear that the farthest of those hikes would take me out of my local service area and expose me to risk of interacting with people in other communities. So I dropped those destinations and stuck to hikes which, if anything went wrong, would limit my exposure to services and people in my local community.

I’m lucky to live in a small town which supports a vast rural region. For city people, the restrictions are much more limiting. Your local “community” is typically a tiny, densely populated enclave of strangers, completely surrounded by similar enclaves. If you want to get out into “nature” – a nearby park landscaped with non-native plants and infested with invasive species – you enter into competition with thousands of people from neighboring communities. Hence many city parks have been closed. And if you travel outside your enclave, you’re immediately at risk of spreading the virus. But that’s the price you pay for living in a city – an unhealthy environment at the best of times.

Thus one of the most profound failings of our alienated way of life is exposed – the meaninglessness of “communities” to modern, urbanized people. City people are lucky if they even know their next-door neighbors. The idea of living in a neighborhood has only intangible value to them. In a crisis, it’s every man for himself. He can’t be bothered to care about the health of the thousands of strangers surrounding him. He just desperately needs to “get out.”

Early spring is a transitional season for us. Our habitat can’t accurately be described using the four-season cliche; March and April are the dry and windy season. Vegetation doesn’t really start greening up and flowering broadly until May.

Despite the dry air, the winter’s heavy snows still cling to north slopes over 9,000′, blocking some of the trails I’d normally use this time of year. And snowmelt floods streams and rivers, blocking other trails.

Excluded from many of my favorite trails, I experiment with trails I’ve avoided in the past. But the drabness of vegetation this time of year offers only limited photo opportunities.

With all that in mind, here’s a gallery of highlights from “hiking in place.”

March

April

May

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Hiking Through Trauma, Part 1

Monday, August 17th, 2020: Hikes, Holt, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Stories, Trouble, Wildfire.

First Sunday

My house fire occurred on a Monday morning. My neighbors were wonderful as usual, but the aftermath was an ongoing series of crises that fell on my shoulders alone. By Sunday I was a wreck.

I headed for the trail in the high mountains to the northwest, the trail where I can get 4,000′ of elevation gain and an expansive view of the tallest peaks. We were still in a drought and heat wave at home, but I was hoping for rain or at least cloud cover up in the mountains.

It’s an hour’s drive from my temporary accommodations to the trailhead. Suffering from PTSD, my heart fell when I rounded a bend, got a view of the canyons and peaks I’d be climbing, and saw smoke from a wildfire back in the wilderness near where I was headed. My first thought was that the trail would be closed by firefighting equipment.

I turned off and drove up the dirt road into the foothills. I passed a truck and encountered an older couple walking beside the road. They said they lived down in the valley and I asked them about the fire. They said the Forest Service was aware of it but wasn’t doing anything. That was both good and bad news. I could get to the trail but didn’t know if I could hike it safely.

The couple dismissed my concerns. “If you see smoke ahead, just turn around and hike out!” said the woman. This was the only trail this side of town that would kick my ass, which in my damaged state I mistakenly thought I needed, so I didn’t want to give it up. What pathetic animals we humans are!

The sun blazed down in the canyon, and the humidity turned out to be as bad as I’d ever experienced. My clothes were all drenched with sweat at the halfway point, so I stopped for lunch and hung my shirt and bandanna headband over branches, hoping they’d dry a little.

On the climb, a thunderhead finally began to develop in the east, moving over the crest. It chilled the alpine air but failed to drop any rain. From the little knob on the shoulder of the peak, I could finally see the fire, a few miles due east. It was one drainage away near the head of the biggest canyon in this part of the mountains, and its smoke was beginning to pour north over the ridge into a smaller side canyon.

I took a picture of myself up there, as usual, but I look too miserable to include it in this Dispatch.

On the way back to town I saw a serious storm in the east, and it turned out we’d finally gotten a little rain back home.

Next: Part 2

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Burned Ridge

Monday, September 21st, 2020: Hikes, Nature, Pinos Altos Range, Plants, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.

I first started hiking the six-mile-long ridge north of town ten or twelve years ago, but only the first couple of miles – I wasn’t doing longer hikes back then. It was never one of my favorite hikes; there were higher peaks closer to town, there wasn’t much exposed rock, and the rare views through the forest up there merely showed more forested hills.

But during the past two years, as I started challenging myself, measuring and logging distance and elevation, I wondered what it would be like to hike the entire ridge. Maps showed something called a “lake” at the west end of the ridge, near the top, more than six miles from the trailhead on the highway. That made no sense – lakes don’t form near the tops of ridges, in this latitude, at that elevation, in the arid Southwest.

But the “lake” gave me a mystery to explore, and on contour maps I could see that the trail had enough ups and downs to give me a significant overall elevation gain, so in December 2018, I tried to hike the distance. I was just starting to build capacity and only made a little over five miles, frustratingly close, before I ran out of time, only five days from the shortest day of the year, and had to turn back.

Five months later I finally made it. The “lake” turned out to be a turbid stock pond excavated out of a small forested plateau and filled naturally by annual precipitation, permanently muddy due to electrically charged particles of clay in suspension. It didn’t invite you to take a dip, but it was sufficiently incongruous, up there in the Southwestern sky, that it made the fairly grueling, twelve-plus-mile roundtrip ridge hike worthwhile.

Like with all my repeated hikes, I came to know it in sections. The initial ascent up and across the eastern shoulders, past a broad exposure of unusual white rock to an old burn scar, colonized by dense ferns, that offered a view east toward the “moonscape” of a more recent wildfire around the peak of the range. The meandering traverse of the steep north slope, shaded and densely forested with fir, which always seemed damp no matter how dry the season was. The punishing climb to the high point of the ridge, actually a narrow, rocky, mile-long “plateau” of parklike pine forest. Then began a rollercoaster of steep ups and downs, in which pine forest alternated with rocky sections of agave and mountain mahogany, that lasted another couple of miles and ended at the pond.

I hiked it again in April of this year. Then in June, I was rushed to the hospital with severe back pain, and a few days later, lightning started a wildfire in one of the little canyons below the ridge. I first saw the smoke from a hill in town, a few blocks up my street. The fire quickly climbed to the ridge, and strangely, as far as I could tell from the wildfire website, spread east along the opposite slope, probably a trick of the wind. I was pretty dismayed, on top of the pain I was feeling. What would happen to this familiar habitat near home?

The fire jumped to the east end of the ridge, where the trail begins, and they closed the highway. It turned out to be closed for the next month, as firefighters surrounded the fire and barely kept it from crossing the road, where it would’ve had miles of unbroken forest fuel dotted with occupied cabins. The perimeter was still pretty big, and the fire kept running out onto secondary ridges. When I was able to hike again, I targeted peaks that would give me a closer view.

Finally they reopened the highway and I drove around the eastern edge of the fire. All access to the ridge was off limits, and helicopters were still filling up at roadside “pumpkins” and sailing off to make drops in remote drainages. Several miles past the ridge, I found a barely passable back road and eventually got a limited view. The entire north slope of the ridge, which was where the trail mostly traversed, seemed devastated. Based on recent experience, I doubted the trail would be usable any time soon. And that dense, humid forest, with its ferns, mosses, and wildflowers. Gone for decades, maybe forever.

Since my house fire, I’ve been driving at least an hour away for my Sunday hikes, but this weekend I just didn’t feel like driving. In addition to the burned ridge hike, there was another nearby possibility that I decided on. But since it was only about ten minutes farther to the ridge trailhead, I figured I would check on the slim chance that the burned trail might be open. I didn’t expect it to be clear of fallen trees or erosion from monsoon rains, but I’d take a quick look before returning to hike the other trail.

At the trailhead, I was surprised to see nothing but the usual post-fire warnings. I was so curious to see conditions in the forest, I hoisted my pack and set out.

At mid-morning it was cool, in the low 60s, with a forecast high in the low 70s – a perfect fall day for hiking. I knew from my earlier drive that the forest on this first section had burned patchily, with roughly half the trees killed. But they were still standing, and the trail was as clear as ever. The gentle slope at the beginning was gold with pine needles, but they were all needles that had been killed by the fire and were continuing to drop from limbs above.

As I climbed toward the shoulders of the ridge, I found logs that had been recently cut, and clear tread on the trail. I realized that during “mopup,” firefighters had used this trail to monitor the fire, hence they’d had to keep the trail open. I hadn’t thought of that, and it made me hopeful about the rest of the hike.

As usual, I was hoping to be the first, or one of the first, to hike this trail since the big event. There were only two human footprints preceding me since the last rain, a couple weeks ago: a big man and a small woman. In the first couple of miles, destruction was patchy. I was impressed to see trees whose vegetation had been killed almost to the top, but still retained a small crown of green. The slope of ferns had been completely burned off, but smaller ferns had sprouted over much of it.

There was a lot of green, but it was mostly new growth since the fire – annual wildflowers and thickets of fast-growing thorny locust. It wasn’t until two miles in that I hit a badly burned section of north slope. Whereas before, the trees still bore their dead needles or leaves, here they were only black skeletons. Every now and then I came upon a tree that had burned down to nearly nothing, or the empty tunnels left in the ground when even the roots of the tree are consumed. The soil had been burned off the steep slopes and loose sediment was washing downhill, cutting away sections of trail. I stubbed my toes, slipped, and stumbled over and over again, and fell a couple of times.

My favorite tree on this hike was the one on the high plateau that had lost its trunk and grown a new trunk from a lateral branch. I was afraid it’d burned, but on reaching the top I found it safe, only sixty feet from the edge of destruction. The ridgetop was like that in many places – a sharp line between total destruction and intact habitat.

Looking at slopes from a distance, I could see that the fire had made linear “runs” like long fingers of black up and down steep slopes. Thinking of the chemical and physical phenomena of fire it always seems strange to think of it as an active “thing” – something seemingly alive that can move across the landscape with a will of its own – whereas a physicist or chemist would view it as a series of discrete microscopic and macroscopic events and interactions between forces, particles, living and dead organic tissue, cells and structures. The fire is just the visible, tactile sensation of what’s going on invisibly. How can it be something big and continuous that moves across a landscape? But it does.

I found myself focusing in on the details – the varying effects of fire on different plants. Many gambel oaks looked like they were wearing their “fall foliage” – brown leaves – while actually their foliage had all been killed by fire that wasn’t intense enough to incinerate the leaves. These trees were re-sprouting from root stock around the base. The core blades of agaves mostly survived while the outer ring burned. Many trees seemed completely dead until you noticed a few surviving branchlets at the very top. I realized this had uniformly been a ground fire rather than a crown fire. In many places, the duff and organic matter in the soil had burned but the bark of the pines had barely been singed. In other places, slopes where the dominant vegetation had been mountain mahogany, everything was charred and skeletal and even the rocks were blackened.

There was much less shade after the fire, and I was surprised that it felt like the 80s up on the ridge top – far from the cool fall day I’d expected.

The footprints of the big man and the small woman ended on the high part of the ridge, less than four miles in. The well-maintained trail ended there, too – apparently even firefighters hadn’t gone any farther. But I knew the trail well even if it was invisible to others.

Eventually, moving in and out of burn scars and intact habitat, but always with evidence of spot fires that consumed isolated trees in the midst of green, I reached the plateau and the pond. The parklike forest around it was mostly intact. The water level was down, and individual small trees had burned right up to the edge.

I found a pistol, apparently left by a hunter, and a motion-sensor camera someone had set up on a tree trunk. The other access to this place is via a short hike up from a remote forest road – a lot more driving, a lot less walking.

I was sore all over, and the hike back was a real slog. But considering that I’d been hiking and working out much less during the past month, I felt in pretty good condition. Apparently I can take it easier in the future and still stay in shape.

I took the pistol back with me. I’ve used a fair variety of guns, ever since childhood, but this was a new model with a plastic stock. I couldn’t figure it out and even thought it might be an air gun at first. It was holstered, and I stashed it in my pack. At home I looked it up and found that it’s an expensive sidearm, highly rated for both target shooting and personal defense. I took it to the sheriff’s office the next morning. They seemed pretty freaked out, detaining me and checking my ID in the system while a senior deputy took the gun outside to check it for ammo. Then they let me go without any further fuss, after taking my cell number in case the owner was offering a reward.

I also found online that one other person had logged a hike on the ridge trail after the fire – ironically, the day before me – but he’d only gone four miles. The big male footprints were explained, and I kept my distinction of first to complete the trail since the fire.

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Whole Body Workout

Monday, December 7th, 2020: Hikes, Mogollon Crest, Mogollon Mountains, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.

When I first moved here, I discovered right away that the Mogollon Mountains were the tallest nearby range, and there was a five-mile crest trail to the highest peak that looked like a walk in the park, with less than 2,000′ of cumulative elevation gain.

But I lost interest when I read the trip reports of other hikers. The entire distance, including the top of the peak, was densely forested, so there were no views anywhere.

That changed after the 2012 wildfire, because the trail now traversed the heart of the burn area, a “moonscape” in which all vegetation had been destroyed. I figured there might be some decent views up there now. The crest trail starts at a forest road in the far north and runs more than 24 miles one-way to the southernmost high peak, so it has a history of use by backpackers aiming to complete the entire route.

However, the crest trail wasn’t included on the most recent Forest Service maintenance log. And in May of this year, a hiker reported that he was only able to do 3 miles, after dealing with more than 100 deadfall logs across the trail.

So I forgot about it until Sunday morning, when I did another search and found 3 trip reports from August, September, and October. They all claimed the trail had been cleared over the summer. The report in mid-October said the trail was completely clear up to a half-mile north of the peak, where some moderate deadfall began.

Yeah, the drive to the trailhead would take at least two hours, to a place that’s only 30 miles from my house as the crow flies. But I’d done a couple of hikes in Arizona recently that required a two hour drive. It would limit my hiking time, but I’d get an early start and I’m a fast walker.

The final road to the trailhead is legendary – I’d driven the first few miles of it last winter, but the rest of it had been gated – it’s usually closed all winter. It climbs from the old mining ghost town – itself reached by a scary one-lane paved road – over a 9,000′ pass to the high plateau north of our huge wilderness area. I was all stoked to put in another 15-mile day at 10,000′ elevation, with forays onto branch trails, and it didn’t even occur to me until I reached the ghost town that the forest road was almost certainly closed. I wouldn’t even reach the damn trailhead!

My heart sank, but I decided to keep going, knowing there were a couple of earlier trailheads I could take instead, for an alternate hike into lower elevations.

I was a little surprised to find patches of snow on the road through the ghost town – it’s in a deep canyon that remains in shadow through the winter. The storm had hit last Tuesday night, and was limited to the highest mountains – we didn’t even get any clouds in town.

I drove through onto the rough, rocky forest road, and after the first few miles, was surprised to find the gate open. That’s where it gets steep, and I was not even sure my 2wd truck would make it, especially if I hit snow higher up.

But the truck did okay. The road lived up to its legend, climbing up above the world for some truly spectacular views, but the snow was limited to inch-deep, fairly level stretches near the high pass. I passed only one other vehicle, a new-model Subaru with Texas plates parked in a forested, primitive camping area at 9,000′.

A mile or so beyond that was a large, cleared ledge with a Forest Service restroom and an incredible view to the northwest. My trailhead was across the road at the foot of a densely forested slope blanketed with 2″ of snow. It really felt like the top of the world, and the temperature was close to freezing, but the sky was perfectly clear, and since I expected most of the hike to be exposed, I packed my long johns rather than pulling them on.

As soon as I started up the trail, I encountered recent deadfall. Another hiker had recently told me that our local volunteer trail group had tried to clear this end of the trail but had given up because more trees were falling every day, so that was another piece of second-hand info floating around in my mind. I climbed around the first deadfall, but obstacles continued throughout the intact forest that lined the early part of the trail.

After a quarter mile or so, I left the intact forest and entered the burn scar, and the deadfall got really bad. Had all these trees really fallen since mid-October, when the last trip report claimed it fully cleared? It was hard to believe.

I’d recently decided to just accept the obstacles as the new normal, so I persevered. I might not get any decent mileage or elevation, but I’d get a whole-body workout instead. Many logs leaned over the trail at chest-height or higher, and those I could sometimes grab and swing under, with care for the rotator cuff tears in both shoulders. Some could be straddled and rolled over, and some huge logs had a gap underneath that could be crawled through. Others were so broad they had to be climbed over or around, and many involved multiple criss-crossing trunks that required precarious rock-climbing moves with outstretched legs, over a distance of several yards. Of course, a few were simply insurmountable, and I had to find a detour around them.

In a few places I found sections of clear trail that lasted for up to a hundred feet, where I would practically run to make up time. Climbing steadily, the trail traversed from a north slope around to an east-facing slope, and the view east, over country I’d never seen, was welcome. Still, I was hoping to reach a saddle with views to both east and west, and that was slow coming.

As I worked my way hopefully up the long east-slope traverse toward the crest, I encountered more animal tracks in the snow, finally coming upon really fresh mountain lion tracks, maybe from last night or this morning. The lion had been coming down the trail from the opposite direction, and its tracks continued for more than a mile. I envied it the ability to walk under many of the fallen logs that I had to climb over or around.

The obstacles never ended, and although I can hike for hours up much steeper trails without getting fatigued, my whole body was getting worked a lot harder than usual. I wondered how much more of this I could endure.

Finally I reached the crest, a point where the trail crossed over from the east to the west slope. I could now see the interior of the wilderness to the west, the headwaters of the biggest canyon, and the western peak and ridge that I hike regularly, where I’d recently cleared thorny locust with my Dad’s machete. But there was still a maze of charred snags masking my trailside view.

This trail gradually climbed and traversed through more deadfall until I eventually came in view of the highest peak. There was a rocky outcrop where I could climb out above the snags and get an unobstructed panorama of the entire west of the range. What a relief to rise clear of all those dead tree trunks! The peak was close, but it was also clearly covered with snags. There would be no unobstructed view up there! And apparently there was no trail either – it would just be a scramble over fallen logs the whole way up.

I continued to a saddle about a mile short of the peak, and there, at an elevation of almost 10,400′, I met my nemesis. On most of this winding trail, visibility had been limited to a few dozen feet, but facing me ahead was a long, straight uphill section that was a continuous maze of dense deadfall. I’d finally had enough of this, especially since the big peak wasn’t offering the payoff of a decent view.

Reflecting on the multiple recent trip reports that claimed this trail cleared, what amazed me most was that all those snags could’ve fallen on this 4 miles of trail in only a month and a half. The number of fallen trees I’d encountered in that distance may have been as high as 2,000. Yes, we’d had high west winds in November – that’s apparently what had brought them down – but the deadfall was nearly continuous along the whole trail, including forested sections, north, east, south, and west slopes.

After my leg cramp scare last week, I’d been drinking water more regularly, and I’d brought an electrolyte supplement I could add halfway through. I didn’t linger in that saddle because for once, with a two-hour return drive facing me, half of it on that difficult one-lane forest road, I was actually anxious to just get this damn hike over with. And I knew the hike back, battling all that deadfall over again, would really wear me out.

So I took it a little easier on the way down, stopping regularly to try and identify landmarks on the unfamiliar horizon. During the final traverse, a mile or so from the end, I noticed an out-of-place color on the trail ahead. Other hikers, here at the end of the day!

A man stood up and waved, a woman rising behind him. They were carrying medium-sized overnight packs, and appeared to be in their mid-to-late 30s. The woman was beautiful, but the man took over the conversation so I had to keep my attention on him.

They were clearly urban professionals, from San Antonio. I’ve gotten used to most of our visitors being from Texas – they’re always anxious to escape their state, and to them, New Mexico seems like paradise. They’d apparently just driven straight here, and were hoping to spend at least a couple nights out, maybe reaching the end of the 24-mile trail. I knew they wouldn’t make it, and I hadn’t seen any promising campsites in my 4-mile jaunt. They wouldn’t even make it as far as I had, in the time remaining tonight.

I told them the deadfall was bad but didn’t try to discourage them. I was just amazed that anyone would even try backpacking on this trail, in this condition. They’d find out for themselves.

Despite the late hour, it seemed the man could’ve stood there chatting with me forever, but his less enthusiastic companion was getting cold and wanted to keep moving, so he reluctantly bid me farewell and hurried to catch up with her.

I felt sorry for that young couple, forced to clear out a tiny campsite in the maze of charred deadfall somewhere short of the crest, on a night with temps well below freezing. I’ve been there many times myself, you just add to your store of experience. You can imagine my relief when I reached the truck, in plenty of time to enjoy the last light on the peaks and canyon walls, in plenty of time to reach the highway before full dark.

Subtracting stops, it’d taken me 5-1/2 hours to hike that 8 mile round-trip. Compare that with two months ago, when twice as far on clear trail took only a half hour longer. I wouldn’t be exploring this trail again without confirming it was clear!

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