Rewilding
Tuesday, November 4th, 2025: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Rattlesnake, Southeast Arizona.
My itinerary, returning home from Tucson with stops along the way to explore new hiking areas, was resulting in mid-day hikes and missed mid-day meals, which I can ill afford with ongoing muscle atrophy and weight loss. After the Indian Trail hike on Saturday, I’d spent the night in Willcox and was hoping to hike the wild, less-visited west side of the range of canyons on Sunday. And sure enough, I was destined to miss another mid-day meal while doing some hard exercise. A great weight-loss plan if that’s what I needed. Yeah, I always carry snacks, but not enough on this unplanned trip. I didn’t even have enough clean clothes, and would unsuccessfully try to wash and dry a set overnight…
The west side of the range consists of four major west-trending ridges, all designated wilderness, with three primitive forest roads leading up between them to remote, primitive campgrounds and trailheads. Until the massive 2011 wildfire, an intricate network of 4wd roads and backpacking trails penetrated the entire area from exterior basin to crest, but after the fire, flash floods, washouts, and debris flows resulted in all those trails and most of the roads being abandoned.
This is just the kind of hiking scenario I crave! But before now, this area had been just too far from home to explore. The far northern ridge lies within the national monument where I’d done a couple of hikes, and the northernmost forest road leads over the crest of the range to the popular eastern basin – I’d driven that once from west to east.
My map showed a secondary forest road turning south off that crest road, well below the crest, toward a pass and a remote canyon marked with something called “Pine Canyon Camp”. A little more research revealed an elaborate Methodist Church Camp tucked away in this remote canyon, which had been damaged by catastrophic floods after the 2011 fire, and “completely removed” by the Forest Service as recently as 2018. Apparently they even broke up and buried the foundations…
My topo map showed that branch road into Pine Canyon climbing over a pass and ending at the canyon bottom, where trails led up and down canyon. With all that flood damage, I had no idea whether the road over the pass would be usable – let alone the trails in the canyon. If not, I would just continue to the crest, do a hike there, then make the three-hour drive home, stopping at the cafe in late afternoon for my only decent meal of the day.
The main road to the crest is pretty scary, but the minute I turned off onto the side road to the pass I felt like a real pioneer. Not only was it rougher, it was far more spectacular! In tight, narrow turns, it cut between a cliff and a towering rock outcrop, then did a hairpin and climbed precipitously over the pass, between dramatic rock outcrops – one of the most spectacular backcountry roads I’ve driven!
And beyond the pass lay a big, very remote canyon with more spectacular rimrock, and a short, steep descent to the bottom. I’d studied this canyon on the map, and assumed the main access was via a maze of ranch roads in the western basin. But the sign at the bottom said this road dead ends at a locked gate – private ranchland. So this gnarly road over the pass is the only way into and out of this big, spectacular canyon.
I wanted to explore it all, but only had time for a hike. Beyond the sign, the old road north up the canyon was washed out and officially closed, so I parked, loaded up, and set out on foot.
Across the shallow washout was a broad floodplain, where remnants of the old road alternated with debris fields from the floods. Despite our continuing unseasonable warm weather, fall color was spreading through the sycamores, oaks, walnuts, and willows.
Some types of off-road vehicles had recently disobeyed the road closure and rock-crawled over the debris fields, up to a point where a side road – unmarked on any maps – climbed up a small side canyon, and the way up the main canyon was decisively blocked by logs. That side road may just be former access to one of the removed camp buildings, since nothing shows there on satellite view. But I was only interested in the main canyon, where I spotted the tail end of a whitetail buck disappearing into the forest across the floodplain.
Walking up the broad debris field, over and around logs, was easy and pleasant enough, until I reached a small cabin, still standing but partly collapsed by flood debris. On a camp history web page this is called the “Forest Service Storage Building” – hopefully they’re planning to remove it before it washes downstream.
Past the storage building, the canyon narrowed and the debris got gnarlier. Eventually I reached the camp’s water tank and associated equipment, which the Forest Service apparently considered not worth the effort of removing. This is the ultimate legacy of Western Civilization – toxic ruins.
I could still follow traces of the old road up the canyon, but frequent washouts and debris had mostly obliterated it and created an unfolding obstacle course. Initially I embraced the challenge because my knee pain had confined me to easy trails for so long. Eventually I found a trickle of running water.
The map showed that after a mile and a half the canyon split into two upper branches, one coming down from the crest of the range, the other from a saddle in the next major east-west ridge. The latest Forest Service map, from 2016, shows an actual, driveable road not only going up the main canyon, but continuing up the left-hand branch all the way to the crest. So most of this flood damage must’ve occurred since 2016.
I was hiking in the creekbed and could easily tell when I reached the branch point, but there was no sign of a road there. So first, I took the left branch, and there was enough floodplain left that I was able to climb out of the gully and hike through forest for a hundred yards, until I came upon an apocalyptic pile of debris that I had no interest in climbing over.
I sat on a rock and ate a snack, then climbed over a logjam toward the “crotch” between branch canyons. Reaching a gentle slope with parklike forest, I looked back and noticed a shallow gully that was likely the old road to the crest. Amazing, in less than a decade here a road can revert to a natural feature!
A little farther, I came to a broad corridor in the forest, leading toward the next branch canyon, that could only be an old road – an even older road that had been “retired” and left off the 2016 map. I love the habitat in this range, but there was something about the experience of societal abandonment that enhanced my hike, made my spine tingle, and encouraged me to continue past the obstacles in this rewilding canyon.
It helped that the old roadway left intermittent terraces where I could walk faster, making up for the occasional logs, washouts, and debris piles. I spotted another whitetail buck fleeing across the canyon. But I soon came to a sharp dogleg in the canyon that had cut deep banks and left taller piles of debris. That’s where I began encountering minimal cairns – often just a single rock sitting on a boulder – that helped me find a path through the chaos.
Beyond the dogleg, the canyon got narrower and more spectacular, and the debris got bigger and more challenging, but I still found traces of the old road and its terraces. I’d been hoping to reach the saddle, but the sun was going down and I was starting to think about getting home before dark – especially since the time had changed and night was falling an hour earlier.
My route passed back and forth across the creekbed, and eventually I crossed a stretch of slickrock. Not far upstream I reached another daunting debris pile, and decided to turn back. I figured I hadn’t been able to cover much more than two miles in over two hours of hiking, and probably had another mile to go to the saddle.
When I checked the GPS waypoint that night, I discovered that my turnaround point was just inside the federal wilderness boundary. It’s likely been years since anyone had the masochism to hike up there – again, just what I like. HikeArizona has a trip report from a guy who hiked the eastern canyon in October 2019, so that may be the most recent. The official trail guide says some group cleared this trail in 2022, but admits it hasn’t been verified, and the report was clearly mistaken. Maybe some of the cairns dated from that year…
Knowing the way, I was able to move a little faster on the way down – but not by much. Long before I reached the vehicle, I knew I would need to stay overnight at the lodge on the east side, to avoid driving home in the dark through deer-infested mountains.
A long, steep, rough drive – an hour and fifteen – to the crest road and over into the eastern basin, with the sun dropping behind the crest. To a big burrito, only real meal of the day, and a quiet room for the night, where shoulder pain – until now a lower priority than the knee – would keep waking me up.
I found only locals in the cafe when I arrived, but scientists and cyclists poured in shortly after. A scrawny but powerfully muscled cyclist in his 70s was wearing a “We the People” U.S. Constitution jersey, his whole body red white and blue. No way of telling whether he was a right- or left-wing patriot, although populists do lean right.
And after four nights away, the final drive home, to the ongoing trauma of helplessly trying to comfort my beloved, suffering, fading mother.
