Horse Mountain Wilderness Study Area - Nance, Log Canyons ( Loop Hike)

 

We started out Sunday morning (8/31/24) from the WSA access in Teepee Ranch heading west over the hill and then finding a very old road down into the next canyon. From there, we contoured around the next ridge down into Nance Canyon ( the only other named canyon on Horse Mountain). Nance was similar to many of the canyons we have hiked on the north side with large widely spaced ponderosas, on grassy benches along the sides of the stream course. There were deciduous oaks too. Nance was a little different than the others in that it had a fairly wide gravel streambed that looked geared to handle a decent amount of surface flow at certain times of the year. It was dry at the time of our visit.

 It was a delightful, cool, late summer morning with the shadows getting longer that tell of approaching fall. Western bluebirds and nuthatches were in the trees. Abert's squirrels scurried away  from our approach. 

A green hummingbird fed at bright red flowers, utterly unfazed by our presence less than three feet away It definitely felt like a slice of New Mexico paradise. As we ascended the canyon, we eventually hooked with the old road invisible perhaps to the untrained eye as it now was covered in wildflowers.

 We had been hoping to use it to get us to the saddle at the top of Log Canyon, but got a little sidetracked by a well traveled trail. It was all good anyway, though, as we came upon  a giant rock tower we had never seen before on the sparsely vegetated ridgetop where several branches of the major canyons of Horse Mountain come to meet. 

We ended up following another road remnant which got us to an eastern branch of Log Canyon, but not to the saddle with the drinker and the branch with the road that the descends to the main canyon. No worries though we just slowly made our way down this roadless branch ( passing one enormous Douglas-fir as we did)  where the sight of rusty old drinking trough let me know we would soon be back on the old road in Log Canyon.

It was warming up quite a bit on this last leg. We had been out almost 4 hours even though this loop was probably just a little over 5 miles.