Hikers That Pass in the Day
Monday, November 10th, 2025: Hikes, Mogollon Mountains, Rain, Southwest New Mexico.
The new knee doc, three hours away in Tucson, says my local doc was mistaken/misguided, and the brace that made my life hell for the past five months has actually delayed my recovery.
I’m scheduled to get PT – starting in Tucson – but meanwhile I can hike, wearing something hilariously simple called a Cho-Pat strap. I can make this myself using a cheap athletic tape called “pre-wrap”, only available at Walmart. What a wonderful world, what a wonderful healthcare system that makes simple solutions so incredibly hard to find.
So on Sunday I returned to my old favorite trail on the west side of our high mountains, for the first time in almost two years. This is the trail that descends 400 vertical feet into a canyon, climbs a thousand vertical feet to the southwest end of a rolling plateau, crosses the plateau northeastward, descends 1,200 vertical feet into a second canyon, and from there branches either upstream or over another ridge into a third canyon. The hike into and out of the second canyon is brutal but rewarding, and for some reason this trail has featured more crazy weather than any other – blizzards, hailstorms up to 3/4 inch.
Today I only hoped to make it to the edge of the plateau, where I would face a dauntingly steep climb on loose rock up 350 vertical feet. Unseasonable warm weather was finally over. Here in the second week of November, this was our first true fall day, with a forecast high of 61 in town.
On my last visit I’d found a new restroom at the trailhead, constructed on public land by a private club of recreational aviators to service a nearby dirt airstrip. Their thing is to fly in and out, adding this landing to their competitive life list – just like birders, peakbaggers, and through hikers. Today, at the end of the 15-mile, mostly unmaintained dirt ranch road that accesses the typically lonely trailhead, I found three vehicles, a tent, a big pickup with a huge fifth-wheel trailer, and a newly graveled camping and picnic site with permanent concrete picnic tables – all installed by the private club on public land.
A young woman was sitting outside the trailer, reading, surrounded by expensive gear. First time I’d seen anyone under 60 with a setup like that, so I spent the next hour or so struggling to imagine what she was doing there alone with that huge, expensive rig. As I shouldered my pack, she gave me a half-hearted wave and turned back to her book.
Traversing down into the first canyon, the first thing I noticed was that virtually all the pinyon pines had died in the past year. I’ve been seeing and remarking on tree mortality recently, but this was beyond anything I’d seen yet. I estimated it was over 90 percent, and I’m sure it will get worse.
The next thing I noticed was the gnats, swarming my face. Why now, on our first cool day, weeks after the last rain? I could see the creek flowing over bedrock in the bend below the trailhead, where it leaves the mountains, but at the crossing in the canyon bottom, which usually requires waterproof boots, it was barely a trickle.
Climbing the opposite wall, on a series of long switchbacks, was a great workout to recover my cardio capacity. I had to stop repeatedly to catch my breath, but I still did better than expected.
At the top of the switchbacks the trail cuts back into a shallow valley, past looming rock formations, finally climbing to a saddle below the low peak at the southwest edge of the plateau. But today was my mother’s 99th birthday and I’d planned to visit her after the hike. The gnats became so bad that I finally had to stop and pull on my head net. By the time I reached the saddle I was out of time, so I immediately turned back.
The knee strap is designed to reduce tension on the inflamed tendon, and on the steep descent it seemed to be doing its job. More than halfway down I was approached from behind by a young man wearing a medium-sized pack and carrying what looked like a tripod. When I asked him if he was scouting for deer, he replied, “Hunting!”
“Get anything?”
“A buck! My partner’s behind me with the meat.” The young man was taller than me and as I stood aside to let him pass I saw the head and a modest rack of antlers sticking out of his pack.
“Whitetail?”
“Yep. No mule deer left around here.”
“Plenty in town,” I replied.
At the creek crossing, I met him again, sitting at the foot of the little cliff on the west side. He asked me if I was a hunter and we fell into a conversation. I asked him where he was from – he named a tiny village two hours north – and that led to him asking me if I’d hiked up around Willow Creek, on the other side of the mountains.
I said yes, two or three times. Then I remembered that more than four years ago, hiking the next canyon north of here, I’d met a tall young man who’d hiked 40 miles over the mountains from Willow Creek. Here’s the passage from Dispatches describing that encounter:
About midway up the canyon I surprised a young man with a dog. He was in his early-to-mid 20s and was carrying a pack smaller than mine, but he said he’d backpacked over from the opposite side of the mountains – a journey of close to 40 miles. I wanted to ask him how he’d made it so far, carrying supplies for himself and the dog in such a small pack. But he was anxious to discourage me from going farther – he’d had to climb over the deadfall I’ve encountered in the past up on the crest. I think he assumed I was backpacking and I didn’t get a chance to correct him. We wished each other well and parted ways.
I described that encounter to the hunter, and he admitted it was likely him. What are the chances?
I continued up the steep trail, and at the trailhead, as I was unloading my pack, the young hunter appeared and walked to the lone pickup truck that wasn’t surrounded by camping gear. That answered part of my curiosity – he wasn’t the partner of the girl in the fifth wheel trailer, who was now nowhere to be seen.
