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. 

Cibola National Forest - Goat Spring Pueblo

 

Rubble pile. Short arm of the L. Bear Mountains behind.

Isolated rubble block. Magdalena Mountains in the distance.

Looking towards the spring area. Borrow pit (?) depression

Pueblo rubble. Ladron Mountain (Sierra Ladrones) in the distance.

It had been a cloudy, rainy weekend, (the monsoon having arrived just a bit early in the last week of June) and I was hoping the clouds would hold out long enough for us visit the Goat Spring Pueblo site on our way back from the cabin at Horse Mountain.They did. Sort of. When we go to the site it was in the mid-seventies. It was a very short walk from where we parked, our footsteps crunchy on the extremely parched weeds, rocks and soil ( the rains had not made it to this locale on the east side of the Bear Mountains). 

The main body of the pueblo is an L shape. There is also a detached block on the south side. There appeared to be a kiva-like depression interior to the L, and a another depression (perhaps a borrow pit) exterior on the west  side.The rubble pile of un-shaped stones was several feet high but room blocks were not easily distinguishable on the ground (though they are there on Google Earth). It may have had a second story. 

We wondered around looking for examples of pottery, but this site was pretty stingy. The best spot to find any to look at was around a large rodent burrow.  I would have like to have walked the arroyo to the spring, upstream and to the west of the ruin (although I suspect it might be dry nowadays), but the sun came out, the temperatures rose rapidly and we made an early exit from our exploring.

Two large and one small ceramic sherds, plus and obsidian flake.

Gila National Forest - Apache Creek Interpretive Trail, FT 16

prickly poppy

 We went out to this site a couple of weeks ago (7/3/24). It's a lower elevation hike for the area so it was already getting to be a bit too warm. I'm sure it is too hot right now. The sign for the site, right at the intersection of the primitive road (4177 R) and the well maintained  FR 94, was completely obscured by a huge section of a huge ponderosa pine that had fallen across the road to the parking area.  At first I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to just start walking down the road because I didn't want lengthen the hike any with the morning warming up rapidly and me with two black scottie dogs. Another section of the tree had fallen the other way which seemed to block going around the rather considerable stump. Looking closer though, it seemed that we could just squeeze the 4Runner in between the standing snag and the fallen section, which it what we did. 

 After parking we started to the left where the trail quickly got rough and steep. Luckily, our older dogs seemed up for the adventure, although they didn't quite understand all the switchbacks.

Soon we were at the  cliff face where the trail leveled out and the scrub live oaks provided welcome shade. It was mostly easy walking that had a sweet cozy feel as we looked for petroglyphs and listened (but didn't hear any) for snakes.

The rock art here isn't the best, certainly not in league of the site along the Tularosa River that we visited last year.  There isn't a whole lot of it either so you have to keep your eyes peeled if you want to see what's there. Just as I was wondering why the all of the petroglyphs were on the cliff faces and not on any of the abundant broken-off boulders, we came upon two marvelously clear ancient spirals on a large gray angular rock. Unfortunately, immediately adjacent, were someone's painstakingly scratched initials of a much more recent vintage.

 There were lovely views of the pine clad mountains the grassy valleys from up top. The descent offered a little more shade than the ascent. All in all it was a nice, but very short, hike. If you go in the summer, get there as early as you can.

Gila National Forest - Berrenda Creek, Pierce Canyon area

 

Looking back toward Berrenda Creek

Volcanic rock with many nodules giving it the look of fossilized limestone.

Sotol forest

Dummy bomb like the ones I've found at Doña Ana County target sites

For some reason I completely spaced out and didn't put this trip on the blog. Well, maybe not for just some reason. Maybe I was subconsciously blocking it out because it wasn't the best of days in the outdoors. 

 I had been trying to figure out a way over into Macho Canyon from Berrenda Creek (while avoiding trespassing on any of the several private inholdings in the area), but let me say before I get too far into this  that the route we started out this day on is definitely not it. We parked  on the left very shortly after entering forest service land. At first we followed a livestock/wildlife trail back along the little side creek headed west. Easy stuff except for low branches and loose soil and gravel. Pretty quickly though the mostly dry creek became a steep-sided gully cut into the whitish-gray (volcanic ash?) bedrock. Then it branched, then it branched again. The side branches were much the same as the main one with only the narrowest of little ridges in between. We would go out of ravine to avoid a small drop-off only to realize the ravine was way safer than the loose gravel and steep slopes above. It  became more than chore, especially given we had to keep lifting our short legged dogs to get them up to the next level of the tight canyon. We weren't making much progress, or having much fun, and we couldn't see where we were going. 

Narrow passage below a waterfall

We got up out of the canyon to look up at a maze of formations in front of us with absolutely no clear cut way to proceed. This whole little boondoggle reminded me once again of folly (sometimes) of letting  satellite images be my guide to unknown places. Google Earth images compress the verticality of any terrain and can't let me see through trees. Elevation changes of less than 25 feet can't really be discerned either and can be mighty inconvenient on the ground when confronted with a 15 foot drop-off in a canyon that's only six feet wide.

 The formations of white and orange were pretty cool though and we took our pictures and began our treacherous descent. I had a back up plan though. We drove a little further down Pierce Canyon, past where we had parked on our last trip out here  to where I had seen an old road following a side canyon.

Cool rock formations.

The kinder, gentler terrain of my back-up plan.

 The walking was pretty easy for little while, but when it started to get steep we retreated. I explored up another road that was barely there that appeared to go to a mining prospect, while my wife and the dogs stayed put in the shade of juniper. High on hill that seemed to be extraordinarily  proficient at growing agave, I realized  the mine tailings were farther away than I expected. I gave up and descended.  In the end the day amounted to a weird outing that was teetering on the edge but luckily didn't fall completely into disaster.

Agave