Spoiling Cool Secret Places
Monday, August 17th, 2026: 2026 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
On one of the terrestrial radio stations I listen to throughout the week, there’s a program of movie and TV soundtrack music, hosted by a guy who sounds like an elementary school teacher. A regular feature of his program is called “Cool Secret Places”, in which he introduces thousands of listeners to the kinds of places a few of us have discovered, and hope no one else will, because their value lies in being uncrowded. I groan every time I hear it, with my only relief being that all these places are in my old stomping grounds, hundreds of miles from my current home.
This is one of the countless ways in which technology degrades our lives and habitats. Those of us who explore the world, gain cool secret places because we stumble upon them accidentally, not because we’ve heard about them on the radio – or on social media. The effort we make to discover them is part of what makes them cool and keeps them secret.
A couple of months ago I told a friend that my life has become like fighting the Hydra – the many-headed serpent from Ancient Greek mythology. Whenever the hero cut off a head, two grew back to replace it. My problems had become so overwhelming that I could no longer step back and get perspective, I could no longer identify priorities, and I kept making obvious mistakes and overlooking obvious solutions.
One of those was an obvious treatment for my foot inflammation – rest. I couldn’t imagine my life without hiking, so I had kept telling myself rest meant shorter hikes. No, Max – rest means NO HIKES.
So, for the umpteenth time in the past two years, here I am doing road trips to nature, in place of hikes.
Today I would take a slightly different route to the abandoned campground in the sky, where I planned to have a snack and enjoy a few hours of solitude, before driving down to the cafe for a midafternoon main meal, then returning home in late afternoon/early evening.
Today’s slightly different route involved a stretch of backcountry road through a remote rural settlement I’d been curious about and gotten close to a couple of times, but never actually seen.
This may be considered one of those “cool secret places”, but with caveats. First, like many areas in my region where people have chosen to build and live, the access roads involve creek crossings that flood seasonally and wash out catastrophically once or more per decade, leaving you isolated for days at a time and dependent on the county’s heavy equipment crews.
Second, it’s in habitat that has evolved with wildfire and will burn at least once per generation. This settlement was evacuated during the last big wildfire, and only saved via labor-intensive “structure protection” by fire crews. So if you build and live there, you’re totally dependent on the tax dollars of the rest of us and the life-risking labor of dozens of young strangers. Which in my opinion is egregiously irresponsible.
Despite all that, when I finally saw this place, I understood the name they’ve given it, and I was encouraged to see that the homes along the road were typical working-class retreats – not the kind of architect-designed monstrosities you find in places with more reliable access.
The settlement lies in a long, narrow canyon, and the canyon road was a little gnarlier than I expected, which was fun. Eventually, it joins the road to the crest of the range, where I deflated my tires to handle the rocks. I passed two or three other vehicles on the way up, all city SUVs, which is about normal for midday on Sunday.
I reached the spectacular crest, climbed to the side road to the abandoned campground, crossed over to the west side, and began descending into the lush old growth forest of the little bowl, where it lies nestled below cliffs and talus slopes. I soon came to a broken-up tree trunk mostly blocking the road. It was only about five inches thick, and I stopped and easily cleared everything off. I assumed this was a sign that no one had driven here today, and I would be alone in the rolling, parklike forest below.
But lower down, I got my first glimpse of the clearing at the foot of the meadow, and saw a couple of vehicles parked. Driving between them, I saw another farther in. I began to drive a spur trail across the drainage point of the meadow and found it was flooded for 60 feet or so, so I stopped and got out. Just then, an older woman appeared from the uphill side. I could see yet another city SUV, parked at one of the abandoned campsites in the forest beyond. What the hell was going on?
I was hesitant to drive that far through saturated mud, so I backed up to the first clearing, passed the parked SUVs, and started down toward the old campground. This forest track descends over rock ledges that will stop most low-clearance vehicles. But around a bend, I encountered a small Japanese sedan that had somehow made it that far, and saw yet more people on foot ahead. Jesus Christ!
I continued down a stretch where the road definitely needs high clearance, glimpsing a crowd milling below around campsites that were destroyed by deadfall after the 2011 wildfire. At the bottom, two women about my age approached, and I stopped to ask them what was going on.
“It’s all birders!” they said. “The word got out that a tufted flycatcher was seen here for the first time, up from Mexico.”
“I’ve been here many times, and this is the first time I’ve seen anyone else,” I said, sighing and shaking my head. “I guess I’ll just try to find a place away from the crowd.”
None of the birders had brought a vehicle capable of reaching the lower campsites, so I easily found a spot to park just opposite the only surviving trailhead – which I had hiked only a few months ago. The two women caught up with me, and I had a long, friendly conversation with one while the other started down the trail toward the GPS location where the rare bird had been spotted. They were from a retirement community west of here, on the Mexican border next to an Army base. As we talked, small parties of birders kept walking past, to and from the low rise where the forest track ends, with a partial view west.
The friendly lady sympathized with my shock at seeing a crowd here. “I’m not a serious birder like my friend,” she said. “I’m interested in everything in nature. But at least these folks are here for a benign purpose.” I was not so sure – the compulsion to see a bird that’s already been recorded seems to have little conservation value.
She mentioned encountering a guy who maintains motion-sensor cameras in the mountains along the border, and has recorded two male jaguars that are now isolated due to Trump’s wall, and will never mate with females in Mexico. She said the Border Patrol hates the wall and considers it an insult to their work.
I ate my snacks, read my book, and between regular influxes of birders, took short walks around the edge of the old campground. Thunder boomed sporadically from a dark cloud mass over the crest, a mile or two south. A pair of undersize whitetail does foraged back and forth around me, at one point approaching within a couple dozen feet, their prominent ribs and disregard of humans making me wonder if they were diseased. There were definitely a lot of birds out. A woodpecker worked high in a tall, dying pine just west of me for so long I lost awareness of it.
A convoy of three side-by-sides passed, driven by old geezers. They’d obviously parked their giant RVs in a campground at the base of the mountains and were on a grand tour. They drove out to the viewpoint on the western rise, returning a half hour later.
A late-model Jeep Gladiator – the 4-door pickup – was parked at one of the old campsites on a slope opposite me, and after a while I realized they were speaking Spanish. Paying more attention, I discovered it was two young women, so they had to be on vacation from Mexico. With all the uproar about ICE, deportation, and the Wall, few Americans are aware that the Southwestern U.S. remains a popular vacation destination for Mexicans – after all, many of them have family and friends here. And in my experience, Latinos are avid campers, hunters, and fishermen – at least as outdoorsy as Anglos.
I spent over three hours in the beautiful old-growth forest of that lush basin below the cliffs, and those young women were industriously packing up their campsite for most of that time. I noticed one of them had a black ponytail swinging past her butt, reminding me of the great love of my life, whose dark hair reached her waist – my only girlfriend with hair that long. Mamaw, my dad’s mother, talked nostalgically of hair that reached her waist, worn mostly in elaborate braids, when she met Papaw in the 1920s. It’s definitely a turn-on, and an asset.
When the girls drove out, I saw they’d had to drive over the concrete foundation of one of the original Boy Scout cabins – since the campground is abandoned and interspersed with deadfall, there’s no longer direct vehicle access to many campsites.
The last birder I saw before I left was a little old guy who spent a half hour circling my vehicle, at a discreet distance off in the woods, looking up and occasionally giving me a furtive glance, creeping me out. He obviously saw me as an inconvenient obstacle, a vibe I’ve had from birders before.
That got me thinking about this whole flycatcher thing. It had started when someone with bird knowledge was hiking on that little-used trail, noticed and identified the rare bird, and captured its location on his phone. Like my thoughtless radio host, the hiker then shared the GPS coordinates with thousands on email lists and other forms of social media, and that addictive technology had brought dozens of people with selfish motives, from distant cities, to flood this remote, mostly secret and abandoned place.
It’s significant that on the way in, I had stopped to move those logs off the road for the convenience and safety of those who came after me – but none of the birders thought to do that – they’d just swerved into the ditch to get around them. And there were more arriving as I left. Who knows how many more people, with less honorable motives, will now learn about this special place?
That raises the question of how the Mexican girls in the Jeep found it – especially considering that I’ve never seen anyone camping here before. I can’t answer that, but I’d love to hear the story…
After more than three hours, I drove out, and on the way up the slope of the bowl, I glimpsed something strange through the forest, a hundred yards off the road. It sparked a vague memory from my superficial reading about this place, so I pulled over at a clearing halfway up, and began walking through the forest, over and around numerous deadfall logs.
What I came to was this bizarre structure – isolated in the forest, with no road or trail leading to it. Obviously designed with some purpose in mind – but what? Some long-obscure ceremony or ritual? Hard to imagine it ever being used, but if not, why did they haul all that lumber, those asphalt shingles, those bags of cement and sand, the water, and the tools? Roofing that doesn’t biodegrade, all abandoned as a monument to some dude who died elsewhere, far away. The whole bizarre little structure, intended in service of “God and Truth”, seems like the product of beings who were mentally deranged and/or deficient – and we have the Kiwanis Club to thank.
So I drove down the mountain and feasted in the cafe. I was surprised to eat alone – apparently the birders came from the west and returned down the opposite side of the range.
Most of my hikes involve long drives on mostly-empty roads past intriguing mountain ranges. And because of the low traffic, my eyes and mind can wander, speculating about future hikes.
