Jagged Canyon
Monday, December 15th, 2025: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
I didn’t feel like hiking this Sunday, but the night before, I reviewed my options and made a short list.
In the morning, I reviewed my list, and didn’t like the areas I’d chosen. I reviewed the options again, and found a partial hike I could do in an area that appealed to me more.
Finally, on the drive north toward our high mountains, I realized there was another hike on my way that felt more interesting. It goes up a super-rugged, rocky canyon to an 8,200 foot saddle overlooking the next canyon. The rockiest stretch is really slow going, but I figured I would have just barely enough time.
On the long gravel drive to the trailhead – made longer by dozens of washouts last summer that still hadn’t been graded – I was surprised to notice a snowfield just below the 10,700 foot peak. Pretty impressive – our last storm was, what, more than a month ago?
Trailhead parking was empty, a relief after my last hike, in Tucson. Clear skies, temps in the high fifties, but hiking in the sun kept me almost warm enough in my sweater.
The trail begins with a mile of difficult and slow climbing up and down a couple hundred vertical feet over loose rock, finally reaching the creek.
In a bare patch I found fairly recent boot tracks.
The trail in the lower canyon was catastrophically washed out a few years ago, and eventually rebuilt. For some reason, the cliffs above are easier to see now – the canyon bottom used to be a jungle with low visibility.
Blowdown, washouts, and debris flows since our 2012 wildfire have repeatedly invalidated the Forest Service map for this trail, and early GPS routes were low resolution, yielding a mileage to the saddle that I always knew was too low. But the most recent GPS is more accurate. The trail proceeds in five sections: the rocky hike from trailhead to creek, the rebuilt section that mostly uses creekbed and banks, the mid-section detouring around boulders the size of apartment buildings, the gentler final canyon bottom stretch, ending in the long, steep traverse to the saddle.
The trail up the canyon bottom was a slog as usual, but with mostly good tread, and as mentioned above, I enjoyed the exposed boulders, cliffs, and rock formations more than before, with the creek frequently pouring over little waterfalls for a soundtrack.
I’d started late, and by the time I reached the traverse to the saddle I knew I was going to run out of daylight. To make it worse, I had to stop often to catch my breath. But because the fire burned at high-intensity on this slope, regrowth was brushy, providing great views over the spectacular head of the main canyon, and after each stop I kept going.
And when the trail rounded a shoulder into the side canyon where you can first glimpse the surviving mixed-conifer forest below the saddle, I knew I would go all the way, despite having to drive home in the dark.
In the past, this saddle would’ve been only the first milestone as I continued to the crest, or all the way down into the next canyon. But in my current condition, having lost so much strength and cardio capacity, it felt like a real achievement.
The next canyon is one of the biggest and most rugged in the range – and with no trails up it, can only be accessed from the adjoining canyons, with this being the nearest. Aspen seedlings in the saddle blocked my view, so I continued down the trail for a few hundred yards to a rocky shoulder, making my full out-and-back distance exactly 8 miles.
My new physical therapist had recommended using trekking poles when going downhill, so I’d carried them in my pack all day. I’d bought these expensive poles last winter, tried them and hated them. And now, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to assemble them. They’re totally non-intuitive, and the instructions that came with them were pictorial and made no sense.
I ended up using them as much as possible anyway on the traverse, but they kept coming loose, and I couldn’t use them at all in places where shrubs or dense annuals crowded the trail, because the poles would get hung up in the vegetation.
I had a headache, my neck was so stiff I could barely turn my head, there was a sharp pain in my right hip, and both my legs were burning. I knew it would last all night, so I kept putting off taking my pain meds.
The canyon was in deep shadow by the time I reached the bottom of the traverse, and I still had three miles to go, including the hard middle part. But it was beautiful with the rim, high above, lit golden by the setting sun. And for some reason, I noticed the many abandoned mine tunnels, in cliffs on the east side, for the first time.
I finally took a couple of pain pills at the halfway point. The sun had completely set by the time I started the final section, out of the canyon bottom on all that loose rock, but the pills had done their job, freeing me to enjoy my surroundings.
The washed out access road resulted in an hour-and-a-half drive home, but the clear sky revealed a splendor of stars and constellations as I made the final descent into town.
