circumnavigating the four corners
May. 1st, 2021 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ilanaramaUh, oops, have I really not posted here in almost a year? (I guess the pandemic is a decent excuse.) Anyway, I wanted to share some photos and blahblahwords from a couple of weeks of vacationing we did in the second half of March, and yes, it was a pandemic-proof vacation, mostly spent in our camper van, but with five days in a VRBO in Scottsdale that we shared with some friends of ours who drove down just for that bit. (They, and we, are fully vaccinated, so we had no qualms at all!) We hiked and biked in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and back to Colorado - around the Four Corners!
Here is a teaser (from the Navajo Rocks trails north of Moab, looking east toward the La Sals):
We started out by driving about five hours south and east into New Mexico, past Albuquerque, to the Valley of Fires Recreation Area (BLM) near the town of Carizozo. This is the site of what's called Malpais Lava Flow; approximately 5,000 years ago, an eruption from vents in the surface of the ground created a lava flow 44 miles long, 4-6 miles wide and 160 feet thick. It's one of the youngest lava flows in the continental United States, and there's a small campground on an "island" in the middle - and we snagged a spot! The lava flow area is surprisingly lush with desert bushes and cactus (mostly sotol), since the bubbles in the lava created air pockets which then eroded into small water catchments. There's a nice nature-trail loop hike from the campground, and we took a stroll that evening.
The next day we drove a short distance south to White Sands National Park. We'd been hoping to hike in to their backcountry campsite, but it was closed due to covid-19; fortunately, most of the rest of the park was open. It was relatively crowded with families pretending they were at an oceanless beach, and the sand dunes nearest the parking areas were covered with kids sliding down them, on plastic saucers or on their butts, but we headed for the 5-mile Alkali Flats Trail, and soon the crowds had vanished.
It was like being on the moon. White Sands lives up to its name, very soft and fine, and blinding in the bright sunshine. The trail was marked by stakes, but even so, we got off-track a few times, because there is literally nothing but white sand all around. The dunes were hard-packed on their windward sides, but the soft sand on their leeward sides made it tough going. Between the dunes, hard-packed ridged sand made patterns where water had flowed during rare rainfalls.
From there we drove west through Las Cruces, where we picked up I10 through southern New Mexico. We camped on National Forest land north of Lordsburg; all the signs made it look like PRIVATE PROPERTY but we knew there was public land just past it, and just past the boundary marked by a fence and a cattle guard we pulled over and stopped for the night. In the morning we drove back to the freeway and then south just before the Arizona line, on a road that eventually crossed that line and went to a tiny place near Portal, AZ (itself a tiny town) called Cave Creek Canyon, which is known for birding and not much else. We snagged the only open spot at a 6-site campground (one of our neighbors told us the previous occupant had just left) at just past 10am, and watched gleefully as people drove in, looking for a campsite, and drove back out again.
It was a very pretty canyon, and we biked to a trailhead and then took a pleasant hike. After that we took out our bikes again and rode to the other campgrounds. We are only casual birders, but we did hear a screech owl, and saw a small flock of wild turkeys. The next morning we drove over the very rough dirt road that is the back way into Chiricahua National Monument. Britt had figured out a hike to do that would be, he thought, about 8.5 miles long - turns out he must have done the math wrong because it ended up being nearly eleven! Still, it was really beautiful, through the forest on the Rhyolite Canyon trail, to the Heart of Rocks loop where huge rock pillars, many with balanced caprocks on top, loomed above us.
Beyond the rock pillars we could see the formation known as Cochise Head - tilt your head to the right if you don't see his profile! Britt had been rock climbing there when he went to school in Tucson, and told me a story about taking shelter in Cochise's nostril during a storm. We returned along the other side of the valley, a long day but a beautiful one.
The next day we drove to the other side of the valley and hiked the Echo Canyon loop - it was only a bit more than five miles, but it had been routed so as to go through some exceptionally nifty slots between high rock walls.
After our second hike, we got back on the freeway and drove through the big cities of Tucson and Phoenix to get to Scottsdale, where we had a VRBO reserved for five nights. Our friends Chuck and Anita came down for a couple of days to join us in hiking and biking - we'd all been vaccinated (in fact, they had volunteered at the clinic where I got my shot, and Anita had kept me company while I waited in case of allergic reaction) so it was a nice, relaxing vacationlet for all of us. We hiked the Tom Thumb trail, which was astonishingly crowded, and also rode our bikes to the Needle Rock Recreation Site, which had a bunch of idiots in dune buggies driving around the parking lot but still made for a pleasant hike above the Verde River.
We also hiked on the Verde Trail, which we biked a few days later to get to the McDowell Mountain Regional Park (it was the trail we used, in the other direction, to get to the Tonto Verde Grill when we were in this area in November 2018) and admired the beautiful saguaro cactus. The first photo's of a cactus with a remarkable corkscrew arm; the second is what is called a "crested" or "cristate" saguaro, a rare mutation in which the cells in the growing stem begin to divide outward, rather than in the circular pattern of a normal cactus.
Our friends were more into hiking than biking, so after they headed back to Durango, we doubled down on the mountain biking. We revisited some of the trails we'd ridden on our previous visit, like Granite Mountain and the Pemberton Trail, and explored some new ones, of which the Escondido Trail really stands out; I still feel that the Scottsdale area has some of the most fun and scenic relatively easy riding, and I still haven't ridden all of the trails there. (But we're thinking of going back with some friends this coming Thanksgiving - always more to discover!)
From there our plan was to spend a few days camping and biking in Sedona. But when we got there we were appalled at just how crazy crowded it was. There was a constant stream of traffic, and cars were parked along the road for at least a half-mile either side of the full trailhead parking areas. We saw a lot of hikers and walkers near the trailheads, which suggested that biking on the trails would be slow with a lot of stopping to cede the trail to others. (Possibly part of this was because it was Saturday afternoon, though that meant that Sunday would likely be just as bad.) And then when we got to the National Forest land where Britt had planned to camp, there was a NO CAMPING sign - and when we looked things up online we discovered that all the public land around Sedona had been closed to camping. We drove down the forest service road to where camping was allowed, and unsurprisingly it was packed with campers, even ten miles away from town. We decided we didn't want to go to Sedona, anyway!
Our first idea was Flagstaff, which wasn't really that far and had a lot of trails listed on our resource app (MTB Project). We stopped at one area to check it out and did a little loop for fun, then went to a place we'd camped before on our way through, near Sunset Crater. But Flagstaff is high elevation, and in late March it was still darn cold, and in the morning, sitting in the van with the heater running, drinking hot coffee and eating oatmeal, we realized that it wouldn't be warm enough for riding for hours yet...
...so we decided to drive to Moab. Now, I know some of you are thinking incredulously, "Moab? You just said Sedona was too crowded for you! Moab's a zoo!" And depending on where you go in Moab, it definitely is a zoo. But we know Moab pretty well, and we know where to go to get away from the crowds. (And if you buy me a beer, I'll let you in on the secret, too! :-) Okay, the secret is actually to just get out of town and onto the trails that aren't in a national park.)
We arrived in mid-late afternoon and decided to try one of the areas we'd seen from the road and on the maps but hadn't ridden before, the "Brand" or "Bar M" trails which are north of town on the east side of the highway, across from the access road to the Island in the Sky area of Canyonlands National Park. We rode the EZ/Lazy loop, which was neither EZ nor lazy but a good beginner/intermediate singletrack route with a few tricky spots but nothing out of my comfort zone. After that we rode the first part of North 40 and then came back on Maverick, a little harder but still a lot of fun.
Then we drove to our seekrit camp spot (which I'm not telling you about!) off Mineral Bottom Road and spent the night. The next morning we set off an epic 6-hour ride through the Navajo Rocks and Horsethief MTB areas, a little under 20 miles total but a lot of varied and sometimes challenging terrain. I took a bit of a painful fall here, landing with my chest on my hand such that it knocked the wind out of me and maybe bruised a rib; I didn't notice it hurting until the next day.
The next morning we drove north out of Moab and took I-70 east back into Colorado. Just over the state line was McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area, which neither of us had visited before; we pulled into the parking lot of the Trail Through Time, a short loop hike that featured dinosaur fossils! They were a little hard to pick out of the surrounding rock, but fortunately there were info panels:
We then drove down a jeep road which got progressively worse as we proceeded. It was part of the Kokopelli Trail mtb route, and it would certainly have been a lot more fun on the bikes than in the Sportsmobile, but camping was restricted to designated campgrounds in the NCA, and we wouldn't be able to camp where we liked until we crossed back into Utah. Which, as soon as we did, we parked in the nearest flat spot and got on our bikes instead! We rode the Western Rim trail, which is about 6 miles but makes a 10 loop with another portion of the Kokopelli Trail. It was gorgeous singletrack above the Colorado River, really spectacular and (mostly) not too hard.
Unfortunately, this is when I noticed that I must have bruised my ribs, because every time I went over a bump it hurt! I didn't want to do any more mountain biking, and Britt, who has knee issues, wasn't keen on doing any big hikes, so we decided to cut our vacation a little short and head home the next morning. But since we were in the neighborhood, we took the scenic route over the Colorado National Monument and did a few of the short hikes to viewpoints and interesting spots.
Anyway, it was a super fun minivacation, and it definitely got me stoked for both traveling around the area and hiking and biking!
These plus more photos at Flickr (album of 36 pictures from our trip), no blah blah
Here is a teaser (from the Navajo Rocks trails north of Moab, looking east toward the La Sals):
We started out by driving about five hours south and east into New Mexico, past Albuquerque, to the Valley of Fires Recreation Area (BLM) near the town of Carizozo. This is the site of what's called Malpais Lava Flow; approximately 5,000 years ago, an eruption from vents in the surface of the ground created a lava flow 44 miles long, 4-6 miles wide and 160 feet thick. It's one of the youngest lava flows in the continental United States, and there's a small campground on an "island" in the middle - and we snagged a spot! The lava flow area is surprisingly lush with desert bushes and cactus (mostly sotol), since the bubbles in the lava created air pockets which then eroded into small water catchments. There's a nice nature-trail loop hike from the campground, and we took a stroll that evening.
The next day we drove a short distance south to White Sands National Park. We'd been hoping to hike in to their backcountry campsite, but it was closed due to covid-19; fortunately, most of the rest of the park was open. It was relatively crowded with families pretending they were at an oceanless beach, and the sand dunes nearest the parking areas were covered with kids sliding down them, on plastic saucers or on their butts, but we headed for the 5-mile Alkali Flats Trail, and soon the crowds had vanished.
It was like being on the moon. White Sands lives up to its name, very soft and fine, and blinding in the bright sunshine. The trail was marked by stakes, but even so, we got off-track a few times, because there is literally nothing but white sand all around. The dunes were hard-packed on their windward sides, but the soft sand on their leeward sides made it tough going. Between the dunes, hard-packed ridged sand made patterns where water had flowed during rare rainfalls.
From there we drove west through Las Cruces, where we picked up I10 through southern New Mexico. We camped on National Forest land north of Lordsburg; all the signs made it look like PRIVATE PROPERTY but we knew there was public land just past it, and just past the boundary marked by a fence and a cattle guard we pulled over and stopped for the night. In the morning we drove back to the freeway and then south just before the Arizona line, on a road that eventually crossed that line and went to a tiny place near Portal, AZ (itself a tiny town) called Cave Creek Canyon, which is known for birding and not much else. We snagged the only open spot at a 6-site campground (one of our neighbors told us the previous occupant had just left) at just past 10am, and watched gleefully as people drove in, looking for a campsite, and drove back out again.
It was a very pretty canyon, and we biked to a trailhead and then took a pleasant hike. After that we took out our bikes again and rode to the other campgrounds. We are only casual birders, but we did hear a screech owl, and saw a small flock of wild turkeys. The next morning we drove over the very rough dirt road that is the back way into Chiricahua National Monument. Britt had figured out a hike to do that would be, he thought, about 8.5 miles long - turns out he must have done the math wrong because it ended up being nearly eleven! Still, it was really beautiful, through the forest on the Rhyolite Canyon trail, to the Heart of Rocks loop where huge rock pillars, many with balanced caprocks on top, loomed above us.
Beyond the rock pillars we could see the formation known as Cochise Head - tilt your head to the right if you don't see his profile! Britt had been rock climbing there when he went to school in Tucson, and told me a story about taking shelter in Cochise's nostril during a storm. We returned along the other side of the valley, a long day but a beautiful one.
The next day we drove to the other side of the valley and hiked the Echo Canyon loop - it was only a bit more than five miles, but it had been routed so as to go through some exceptionally nifty slots between high rock walls.
After our second hike, we got back on the freeway and drove through the big cities of Tucson and Phoenix to get to Scottsdale, where we had a VRBO reserved for five nights. Our friends Chuck and Anita came down for a couple of days to join us in hiking and biking - we'd all been vaccinated (in fact, they had volunteered at the clinic where I got my shot, and Anita had kept me company while I waited in case of allergic reaction) so it was a nice, relaxing vacationlet for all of us. We hiked the Tom Thumb trail, which was astonishingly crowded, and also rode our bikes to the Needle Rock Recreation Site, which had a bunch of idiots in dune buggies driving around the parking lot but still made for a pleasant hike above the Verde River.
We also hiked on the Verde Trail, which we biked a few days later to get to the McDowell Mountain Regional Park (it was the trail we used, in the other direction, to get to the Tonto Verde Grill when we were in this area in November 2018) and admired the beautiful saguaro cactus. The first photo's of a cactus with a remarkable corkscrew arm; the second is what is called a "crested" or "cristate" saguaro, a rare mutation in which the cells in the growing stem begin to divide outward, rather than in the circular pattern of a normal cactus.
Our friends were more into hiking than biking, so after they headed back to Durango, we doubled down on the mountain biking. We revisited some of the trails we'd ridden on our previous visit, like Granite Mountain and the Pemberton Trail, and explored some new ones, of which the Escondido Trail really stands out; I still feel that the Scottsdale area has some of the most fun and scenic relatively easy riding, and I still haven't ridden all of the trails there. (But we're thinking of going back with some friends this coming Thanksgiving - always more to discover!)
From there our plan was to spend a few days camping and biking in Sedona. But when we got there we were appalled at just how crazy crowded it was. There was a constant stream of traffic, and cars were parked along the road for at least a half-mile either side of the full trailhead parking areas. We saw a lot of hikers and walkers near the trailheads, which suggested that biking on the trails would be slow with a lot of stopping to cede the trail to others. (Possibly part of this was because it was Saturday afternoon, though that meant that Sunday would likely be just as bad.) And then when we got to the National Forest land where Britt had planned to camp, there was a NO CAMPING sign - and when we looked things up online we discovered that all the public land around Sedona had been closed to camping. We drove down the forest service road to where camping was allowed, and unsurprisingly it was packed with campers, even ten miles away from town. We decided we didn't want to go to Sedona, anyway!
Our first idea was Flagstaff, which wasn't really that far and had a lot of trails listed on our resource app (MTB Project). We stopped at one area to check it out and did a little loop for fun, then went to a place we'd camped before on our way through, near Sunset Crater. But Flagstaff is high elevation, and in late March it was still darn cold, and in the morning, sitting in the van with the heater running, drinking hot coffee and eating oatmeal, we realized that it wouldn't be warm enough for riding for hours yet...
...so we decided to drive to Moab. Now, I know some of you are thinking incredulously, "Moab? You just said Sedona was too crowded for you! Moab's a zoo!" And depending on where you go in Moab, it definitely is a zoo. But we know Moab pretty well, and we know where to go to get away from the crowds. (And if you buy me a beer, I'll let you in on the secret, too! :-) Okay, the secret is actually to just get out of town and onto the trails that aren't in a national park.)
We arrived in mid-late afternoon and decided to try one of the areas we'd seen from the road and on the maps but hadn't ridden before, the "Brand" or "Bar M" trails which are north of town on the east side of the highway, across from the access road to the Island in the Sky area of Canyonlands National Park. We rode the EZ/Lazy loop, which was neither EZ nor lazy but a good beginner/intermediate singletrack route with a few tricky spots but nothing out of my comfort zone. After that we rode the first part of North 40 and then came back on Maverick, a little harder but still a lot of fun.
Then we drove to our seekrit camp spot (which I'm not telling you about!) off Mineral Bottom Road and spent the night. The next morning we set off an epic 6-hour ride through the Navajo Rocks and Horsethief MTB areas, a little under 20 miles total but a lot of varied and sometimes challenging terrain. I took a bit of a painful fall here, landing with my chest on my hand such that it knocked the wind out of me and maybe bruised a rib; I didn't notice it hurting until the next day.
The next morning we drove north out of Moab and took I-70 east back into Colorado. Just over the state line was McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area, which neither of us had visited before; we pulled into the parking lot of the Trail Through Time, a short loop hike that featured dinosaur fossils! They were a little hard to pick out of the surrounding rock, but fortunately there were info panels:
We then drove down a jeep road which got progressively worse as we proceeded. It was part of the Kokopelli Trail mtb route, and it would certainly have been a lot more fun on the bikes than in the Sportsmobile, but camping was restricted to designated campgrounds in the NCA, and we wouldn't be able to camp where we liked until we crossed back into Utah. Which, as soon as we did, we parked in the nearest flat spot and got on our bikes instead! We rode the Western Rim trail, which is about 6 miles but makes a 10 loop with another portion of the Kokopelli Trail. It was gorgeous singletrack above the Colorado River, really spectacular and (mostly) not too hard.
Unfortunately, this is when I noticed that I must have bruised my ribs, because every time I went over a bump it hurt! I didn't want to do any more mountain biking, and Britt, who has knee issues, wasn't keen on doing any big hikes, so we decided to cut our vacation a little short and head home the next morning. But since we were in the neighborhood, we took the scenic route over the Colorado National Monument and did a few of the short hikes to viewpoints and interesting spots.
Anyway, it was a super fun minivacation, and it definitely got me stoked for both traveling around the area and hiking and biking!
These plus more photos at Flickr (album of 36 pictures from our trip), no blah blah
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 02:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 04:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-02 06:21 pm (UTC)Sometimes they eventually topple, but it's astonishing to me how many balanced rock formations are in the Southwest.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-04 01:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-11 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-12 10:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-10 10:23 pm (UTC)Congrats on a lovely expedition and thanks so much for sharing it.
Are the MTB trails maintained at all, or is there so little moisture that they stay fairly level?
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-11 03:07 pm (UTC)I think that most of these trails are maintained, and don't require much work against weathering (though they do against usage). Like, in Scottsdale, they've taxed themselves to fund trail creation and maintenance, which means that the trailheads are all super nice and the trails are well-signed and in excellent shape. Moab-area trails are dicier depending on where they are (the closer to the road the more they're taken care of), but I think there's some maintenance done as well. Of course a lot of this terrain is just rock surface! The start of the Western Rim trail was a bit of a mess, though; it was clear that it wasn't well-marked enough and riders chose their own lines so it was easy to get off-track and then have to find the original trail.