North Palomas Creek Upper Box- Gila National Forest

 

 Note: I'm calling this the"upper box"  to distinguish it  from a  second box canyon  further downstream right before its confluence with the South Fork Palomas.
On Sunday( Easter) morning we headed out to another box canyon cut through the same layers of Paleozoic sedimentary rock. The  North Fork of Palomas Creek is the next major drainage to the north, less than 2 miles of Circle Seven. It's even deeper, somewhere close to 900 feet from the hilltops to the creek bottom, but unfortunately it's more open to sun and more accessible to livestock, which meant there were only a couple of bends that had a few puddles of water.  Riparian trees were limited to scattered willow clumps and mostly older cottonwoods.

 We started out parking at a  camping spot sitting  30-40 feet above the creek. We headed down the  bank where the dogs began bounding through the flats covered in tall, dry grass and past some big stream side cottonwoods just beginning to bud. We began to walk in the dry, gray gravel where my Seamus began picking up sticker after sticker. We had to stay  to the most recent channel  to avoid those as we went on.
 Our first stop was a small shelter cave. Nearby, on the same side of the creek was another cave opening  hidden in the leafless vines. I investigated in on the way back but my weak little LED flashlight was useless in trying to see into its black depths. I wonder if anyone has ever investigated it.

 We came upon a few mossy puddles of water in the bedrock of the first bend and then began making our way through  turn after turn. Chipmunks and squirrels ran in and out of the  crevices in the limestone making my terriers more than little excited. The walking in the stream bed was mostly in flat gravel but occasionally through boulders and bedrock.  It was wide enough however that we were able to use cowpaths on the banks at times to bypass some rougher passages. Spring comes on late in these dry years,  so the scenery lower down, lacking any greenery, was not the best, but high above our heads it got better and better. Massive cliffs, sparsely covered with desert vegetation on the south facing slopes, and painted with piñon and juniper on the north facing ones, had us craning our necks.

At the deepest bend was an alcove formed where layer of shale is eroding more quickly than the layers above and below. Nothing remarkable was found when I investigated, except  the piles of flood debris about 15 feet above the floor of the canyon.


 Eventually, the netleaf hackberries, to my mind a tree of the lower desert, appeared and the heat seemed to rise. We sat in the  branch shade of a huge cottonwood( alive but leafless still) and then made  our much more slowly back.