Aug 03 2010

A very wet hike in Arizona

I’m in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, during summer. All around me is nothing but sand dunes and shimmering waves of heat, right?

Well, no. Actually we are blessed with beautiful “sky islands” in southern Arizona, which are tall peaks that rise from the desert and provide blissful cool forests and completely different ecosystems to explore. Just north of home base are the Santa Catalina mountains, probably the more accessible range because of the excellent road that winds to the top, and the multiple hiking trails.

I’ve talked about this range before. From our home base, it is the first thing we see every day through the window, a stunning range of brown (down low) and green (up high) frosted with white peaks in the winter. Everyone who I’ve talked to, even the residents who have lived here for their entire lives, says they never get tired of the Catalina view.

My friend Brent from the Phoenix area invited me to do some tent camping last weekend. Like us, he owns an Airstream Safari 30 “bunkhouse,” and like us, he sometimes wants to get back to the basics once in a while. There’s something about tenting that makes you really feel the experience. Just you, a thin shield of nylon, and an outdoor fire.

During the preceding few days the summer monsoon had finally kicked in, and I had been watching huge thunderstorms sitting atop the Catalinas, so it was a pretty fair bet that we’d get rained on up there, but what the heck. Tucson averages just 12 inches of rain per year, so a little rain would be a somewhat novel experience. Besides, for a New England camper like myself it would just be an average camping trip. Or so I thought.

There are several campgrounds located along the Catalina Highway. In the summer, most people avoid the two National Forest campgrounds that are below 5,000 feet (because they are too warm), and head for the three that are located at 6,000 feet or above: General Hitchcock, Rose Canyon, and Spencer Canyon. On weekends, that means you’d better show up early if you want to snag a spot.

When we arrived on Saturday morning, the camp host told us that terrifying thunderstorms had plagued the campground the night before. Some people bailed out and drove back down to Tucson, apparently leaving their gear to fend for itself. One camper told us he slept in his car, probably to avoid getting fried by the frequent lightning strikes. We figured we were in for more of that on Saturday night, so we quickly set up our camp and anchored the tents as best we could.

The minute we left the campground, the rain started. At the trailhead, just five minutes later, it was a steady drizzle. Being tough hikers, we decided to plow through. “A little rain won’t hurt us!”

For a while, the rain was intermittent and I captured a few shots during the drier moments, but that was not to last. The rain poured down, so much that our conversation turned to rain forests we’d visited in Washington state and Puerto Rico. There were no views except dripping plants, the occasional mushroom, and fog.

Soon our “water proof” gear began to surrender to the relentless rain. My hiking boots soaked through and flooded, leaving me “squinching” with every step. The sleeves and edges of my Gore Tex rain jacket became soaked, and the water migrated by capillary action up the sleeves and onto my forearms. My exposed hands became chilly from being constantly wet, and the rain was growing colder.

The cotton shorts I’d worn for the hike turned out to be a particularly big mistake. As hikers up north say, “cotton kills,” because once it gets wet it starts to leech your body heat. Normally this isn’t a problem in the southwest, but in these mountains the temperature was only in the upper 60’s, and the humidity was 100%. We were in the hypothermia zone, and those soaked cotton shorts were chilling my body rapidly.

By this time we’d turned around and were climbing up a steep hill, so my concern was minimal, but it was still a sobering revelation that, if something went badly wrong, one of us could die in these conditions. People die in the summertime from hypothermia. Imagine having a serious sprain that left you unable to hike out. In these conditions, you could easily suffer severe hypothermia while lying on the trail, waiting for help to arrive. The cold ground would steal your body heat, while the constant rain would ensure no chance to warm up.

Imagine the irony of dying of the cold just a few miles from Tucson in August. I told this to Brent to cheer him up — it didn’t work. He said, “I’ve never been this wet before in my life.”

Rather than head back to camp, we drove further up the mountain to the village of Summerhaven, where there is a little pizza and cookie restaurant in a log cabin. Looking like two people who had jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed, we recovered from our adventure while eating pizza and dripping water all over the floor.

Of course, the rain stopped completely once we got back to camp, and the skies were clear all afternoon and night. The cumulative rain total for the preceding 24 hours was 4.5 inches.

You know how good it feels to get out of cold wet clothes and into dry ones? Well, it feels even better when you’re camping in a tent. Those little pleasures are amplified by the starkness of your resources.

So we set up the fire and ate leftover pizza for dinner, told stories, and let the world revolve without any help from us at all, until late at night. There’s no exciting ending to this story. We just hung out, slept in our tents, and got up the next morning for some hot cocoa. It wasn’t long before we were talking about how we’d like to do it again soon. That’s good camping.

Aug 02 2010

Full-timer: Homeless by another name

One of the fun parts about being Editor of a magazine is that I get to meet all kinds of interesting writers. One of the writers to recently join the Airstream Life team is Becky Blanton, a very interesting person. Becky is a middle-aged single woman and accomplished writer with several awards to her credit, who just happened to become homeless late in life. She has since turned circumstances around again, so that now she is able to live as she pleases, but she chooses to continue as a “homeless” person while she writes for Airstream Life and many other publications.

Becky recently raised the question in a provocative blog entry over at Change.org: When she travels and lives out of her rickety old van, is she “homeless” or is she a “full-timer”? She makes the point that homelessness is an attitude, not a condition, because it is not defined by “living in a van” but rather by choices and status.

This resonated with me because we spent two years “full-timing” in our Airstream with no home or apartment to come back to. The Airstream was our home. We often told people that we were “homeless by choice.” It was less expensive to live in the Airstream than the house we previously owned, but we didn’t move to the Airstream because it was cheap. We wanted to improve our lives. Along the way, we tried to help people understand that having or not having a house is irrelevant, and could even be a detrimental factor, to having a good life.

Homelessness is descriptor that defines nothing. You can be living in a trailer or van and having the dream adventure of your life, or you can be down-and-out and addicted, or anywhere in between. Quality of life is a factor that, barring mental or physical illness, is within our control. After selling our house in Vermont and going on the road in 2005, I realized that I regarded myself as more successful and happier than I had ever been before. Eleanor and I traded the trappings of success for freedom. My startup business, Airstream Life magazine, was not able to pay me a salary for years. Our living quarters encompassed a measly 240 square feet — for three people. So why was I so much happier? As we said many times along the way, “We are paid in lifestyle.”

Coming back to a house, it was obvious that we could easily get caught in any number of house ownership traps again, so we did what we could to avoid it. We bought a small, moderately priced house that could be left empty for months at a time, should we choose to go traveling again. We refused to get into the trap of buying furnishings and other stuff to make it into “house beautiful.” (Our living room is still so empty it looks like a zen garden.) We have fought hard against accumulating “stuff,” especially stuff that doesn’t fit into the Airstream, on the theory that if we can go six months without missing it, we don’t really need it.

Even now, it’s still unclear which is our primary home: the house or the Airstream? But it’s just academic. A stripped-down life on the road brought us back to the things that were really important to us, and now we have a better perspective on the choices that lie ahead. Homelessness — or at least the positive mental attitude about having more with less — can be a factor to improve one’s life, under the right circumstances. Whether you live in a Malibu beach home, or a van down by the river, the bottom line is, “Are you happy?”

Jul 26 2010

Tonto Natural Bridge State Park, AZ

As we approached the final day of our 700-mile tour of Arizona’s high country, Eleanor and I found ourselves a little reluctant to contemplate going home. The weather was fine and I had only a little work pressing me to return by Monday morning. Our budget was holding out very nicely too: about $50 in fuel, one night of motel, and a couple of inexpensive meals were the total of our expenses. Another night would cost us virtually nothing, whether measured in money, lost work opportunities, or any other factor we could think of.

The real limitation was that we were running out of high country. Our third night was spent near the Mogollon Rim at the west end. From there, Rt 87 dips down to the towns of Strawberry, Pine, and Payson, all at elevations of about 4,500-5,000 feet. Although that was still moderately high altitude, it would be hotter than we wanted for tent camping. Our other option was to head north into the vast Coconino National Forest and stay at 7,000 to 8,000 feet, but such a detour would add two days to our itinerary, and that was too much time for me to skip work.

We puttered around for a while, but eventually decided that we’d make a very full day of going back to Tucson, with a big stop at Tonto Natural Bridge State Park (north of Payson), and anything else along the way that caught our eye. (Click here for map from Kehl Springs Camp to Tonto Natural Bridge State Park.)

Tonto Natural Bridge had been on our “to do” list ever since we first came through this area with the Airstream Safari in May 2007. The entrance road to Tonto has a very clear warning of a 14% grade, and to emphasize the point, a “trailer drop off area.” In our first visit we weren’t inclined to drop off the trailer, so we just parked there for lunch and then moved on without having visited the park. I’ve wondered if we could have done that grade with the trailer, so last week’s trip with the Honda was our chance to investigate it without any risk.

I’m glad we heeded the sign. The 14% grade is real, and it’s probably a little over a mile long. There are a couple of tight turns, and — the real killer — no RV/trailer parking in the lot. Don’t bring your rig down. Due to limited space in the parking area, you might have trouble turning it around to get back up!

As you may know, Arizona is one of many states with a budget crisis. Our legislators robbed the “dedicated” funds for state parks over the past two years (a total of $71 million!) leaving the park system underfunded and in danger of collapse. One-third of the state parks were closed in April 2010. Since then, a combination of increased fees at state parks and contributions by nearby towns and private organizations have allowed some of the parks to re-open. It’s pretty sad when the park system — a profit-making enterprise for the state as well as a critical cultural and recreational resource — is so mistreated by the legislature that towns have to run fundraisers to keep their state parks from being shut down completely.

When we arrived, the impact was apparent. Entry fee is now $5 per person (up from $3), and the park is closed Tuesday and Wednesday. We contemplated getting an annual state parks pass ($75, or $200 if you want to visit the Colorado River parks on weekends). We’ve always supported our national park system by buying an annual National Parks Pass, for $80 every year. But we realized the Arizona State Parks Pass was an iffy value if, at any time, the state might choose to shut down a third of the parks again. There’s no guarantee that any of the parks will be open later this year, since 23 of them are now dependent on local community support and that funding carried them only through the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010.

So we skipped the Arizona State Parks Pass. That was a sad moment for me, because I know that many other people will skip the pass as well, for the same reason, and that will only deepen the financial crisis. But if I bought the pass, would I be assured my money would go to the state park system and not be “swept” or “diverted” (i.e., stolen) by the state legislature to fund something else? Maybe I’d be better off buying a lot of cupcakes at the next Town of Payson community bake sale.

Enough of that. We were here to visit the natural bridge, not talk about politics. So we chatted with the volunteers managing the cash register and headed down to the parking area to begin exploring. The park is centered on a deep travertine canyon with a small stream running through it. The stream carves through a massive natural bridge which you can scramble beneath from a canyon trail. Uniquely, there is also a small waterfall from atop the bridge as well, for added poetry in a place that is already abundant with beauty.

I simply can’t do justice to this place in a couple of blog photos, so I’ve put an album up on Flickr with a better selection. It is an impossible place to capture in any single photo, since every view offers a completely different take on this gorgeous place. But here’s a bit of advice: don’t be so blown away by the grand views that you fail to notice the little details in the canyon. We saw fabulous cave-like formations in the travertine walls, swallows nesting up high, fresh-water crawfish scuttling around the pools down below, brilliant yellow century plants in bloom, and much more.

To really see all that Tonto Natural Bridge has to offer, you must make the effort to climb down into the canyon and hike along the stream through the tunnel beneath the bridge. I recommend going down the Pine Creek or Anna Mae trails (steep) to the river canyon, scrambling through the tunnel, and coming back up on the shallower Waterfall Trail. And hurry: at last report, Tonto is scheduled to close on September 27, 2010.

It was well into the 90’s even at Tonto, elevation 4500 feet, so we knew to expect plenty of heat by the time we got to the Phoenix area. But the road had one last adventure for us, the incredible Rt 87 “Beeline Highway” from the point south of Payson where Rt 188 splits off, southwest to Mesa. “Beeline” is a misnomer, as the road twists and rolls through high desert for fifty miles to Ft McDowell and Mesa. But I suppose that’s in keeping with the fact that it passes through a section of the Tonto National Forest that has no trees. Even though the Beeline was fairly swarming with pickup campers and boat trailers (from Roosevelt Lake) heading home on Sunday afternoon, I had a fun time zipping down it in the Honda Fit. By dinnertime, we were back in Tucson … and thinking about where we might go next.

Jul 23 2010

Mogollon Rim

One of the things I like best about Arizona is that it is so diverse. People who haven’t really explored it often assume the state is one giant barren desert of scorching sand. If you only flew into Phoenix for a short trip, you might easily be forgiven for that mistake. The state is so huge that you have to allow a lot of time in order to see even a tiny fraction of what it has to offer.

That was a big motivation for making the recent tent camping trip that I’ve been describing over the past few blog posts. We are now officially Arizona residents, complete with drivers licenses, vehicle registrations, and (soon) voter registrations. This is our home base between Airstream trips. I want to know this place that I’m calling home. So I mapped out a 700-mile round-robin (click map for larger view) to see the high-altitude parts of northern Arizona that we never venture near during the winter.

Our trip started up the Devil’s Highway (Rt 191) through Arizona’s White Mountains, and then brought us across the Mogollon Rim, staying almost exclusively above 7,000 feet elevation. This is the gorgeous green part of Arizona, where pines and black bears and tourists all flourish in the summertime.

The Rim, the focus of today’s adventure, bears some explanation, as it is not nearly as well known as the Grand Canyon to the northwest. But it is nearly as grand. It is a 200-mile long escarpment, sharply defining the edge of the high plateau. As you can imagine, standing at almost any point along the edge of the Rim yields fantastic views to the south, perhaps even more stunning in some ways than the Grand Canyon because you can often see five or more forested mountain ranges in succession over distances of up to a hundred miles.

To enjoy the view, you need only drive up Rt 260 from Payson and stop at the visitor center just at the top edge of the rim. But to really see the Mogollon’s many views, you’ll need to drive on some gravelly National Forest roads, namely FR300, and grit your teeth against the dust and constant jarring. This probably explains why the Mogollon Rim does not have the stature of certain other western sights. You have to really want to see it, and there are no signs along the paved highway indicating, “Turn this way for awesome views!”

We drove almost all of FR300, about 38 miles in total. With regular stops for photo and exploring, the trip took over two hours. Most of the travelers along this way are in pickup trucks, so our lowly Honda stuck out, but there’s no need for a high clearance or 4WD vehicle in good weather. The key is to go slowly, but why would you rush? Every turn yields an astonishing view from the Rim.

Bring a good map. The Forest Roads form a maze along the Rim, and Mapquest is not your best tool when planning this trip. It’s easy to stick to FR300 all the way (signage is good) but without a map you’ll be hard-pressed to figure out how to get back to pavement, should you wish to cut the trip short. Otherwise, it’s a long rugged drive from one end to the other.

Camping is available at many spots along the rim. With a few exceptions, you can camp anywhere within 300 feet of a road. Toward the eastern end of the road are several established campgrounds, all of which were mobbed on this Saturday of peak season. Ten to fifteen miles further west, the crowds disappeared and so did the campgrounds, but we spotted dozens of incredible single tent sites right on the edge of the rim. At a few, you could hang your feet out of the tent door and your toes would be dangling in mid-air. Most of the sites were occupied, but we passed a few others we could have snagged. The memory of the previous night’s huge thunderstorms were fresh in our minds, and we didn’t want to choose a campsite atop an exposed 7000-foot elevation escarpment if those storms returned again. This time, we were going for something in the trees.

Kehl Springs camp fit the bill. This old National Forest camp sits in a little valley, well sheltered from storms and apparently less-loved by campers than boondock spots along the maze of Forest Roads. We were only the second occupants of this 8-site campground. I can’t imagine why — it was shady and quiet, with the benefit of pit toilets nearby (but no water), and like our previous camp it was free.

This was perhaps the best night of the trip. We arrived at camp hours before sunset, with absolutely nothing to do. The sun was shining through the trees and the air was scented with pine, fairly dry and beautifully cool. As often happens in western camping, there were no biting insects, either, just lots of friendly butterflies.

So lacking anything structured to do with our time — the essence of vacation — we proceeded to make camp, pitching our tent just inches from the biggest tall pines at the campsite. We read our paperback books at the picnic table and made an Indian dinner over the camp stove with the gas lantern hissing in the background. It may not seem very traditional to be eating Trader Joe’s Indian food at camp, but we liked it just fine.

This was to be our last night above the Rim. Knowing that it would be well over 100 degrees by the time we reached the desert floor, it was hard to contemplate leaving this forested oasis. But at least we were rewarded on our final night with light cool breezes, a peaceful night among the trees, and no thunderstorms.

Jul 21 2010

Exploring the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest

In the morning after our near-encounter with the black bear, we decided to redeem ourselves by searching for signs of bear activity near the campground. If there were trash, food, or other human debris around, those things might help explain the presence of bears. But the campground was clean, and the bear-resistant trash cans seemed to be intact.

It was hard to say where the roaring sound came from exactly, but we took a guess and hiked up the hill across the road. As frequent hikers, we’ve been accustomed to identifying animal scat along the trail, and I was hoping to see some fresh bear scat. (Because you know he does it in the woods.) But our bear didn’t leave such a clue. We found plenty of horse manure (there is a horse trail nearby), cattle manure (free range, at least at one time), and elk droppings.

Looking for bear scat always reminds me of the joke about the guy who sells bear bells to hikers. He say they work pretty well for scaring off black bears, but not so well for grizzly bears. Fortunately, you can tell if there are grizzlies in the area by identifying their scat. Black bear scat has berries in it, and grizzly bear scat has bells in it.

The other clue we were seeking was claw marks on trees. We’ve seen those many times in other forests, but again, nothing here. Was our bear a tourist like us?

Further up the Devil’s Highway, we stopped at an overlook of the Blue Range Primitive Area. You just can’t stop seeing fantastic views in this part of the country. Eventually the road starts to wind down a little, rolling through gorgeous and peaceful areas like Hannagan’s Meadow, and eventually to the misty town of Alpine.

Alpine is a little piece of Montana plunked down in Arizona. It’s small, rustic, and scattered with cabins. Accounting for the altitude, coming up here is the equivalent of traveling up to the Canadian border, and you can see signs of that everywhere. Buildings are made from logs. Eaves and pavements show the slightly rotted hints of a long hard winter. Green meadows and tall forests cover the rolling hills. Nothing is like the hot desert down below in southern Arizona. We decided to have a second breakfast at the Bear Wallow Cafe, just because we could, and to enjoy the feeling of having gone to a completely different climate/culture/community seemingly 1,000 miles north of home base.

North of Alpine is the crossroads town of Springerville, best known for the ancient ruins called Casa Malpais. The ruins have been the subject of much controversy since they were discovered, re-discovered, and then partially re-buried for preservation purposes. You can take a tour from the community center daily for $8, but we arrived just after a tour and didn’t want to wait a few hours for the next one. Even still, the little free museum and video presentation were worth the stop, along with the extremely helpful volunteer who was staffing the place.

From Springerville we finally exited Rt 191 and switched to a westerly course along Rt 260. This road brings you along the north edge of the Mogollon Rim, which is still mostly National Forest territory, studded with little towns. Everyone talks about Greer, a tiny tourist hamlet just off Rt 260, so we popped in there to take a look. It is mostly a town of resorts, restaurants, and several very pleasant-looking campgrounds in the pines. Some of the houses in the area look like the type that rich software executives build as $25 million getaways and then only visit a few times a year.

The road also passes through Indian reservations, which you can almost always tell these days by the presence of a casino hotel. Looking at the ominous skies, we had a bad feeling about the likelihood of thunderstorms in the evening, and so we checked at the Hon-Dah hotel but it was booked solid for a Native American art show. Likewise, the town of Pinetop-Lakeside (four miles further) was nearly booked solid. But the clouds weren’t looking any better as the afternoon wore on. We checked three hotels and two cabin rental places before we finally found a berth at the modest Motel Six at an immodest peak-season price.

When you’ve spent the night sleeping in your car, and then relocated to a tent, a Motel Six looks pretty comfy. In the old days we used to alternate tenting and motels a lot, on the theory that the motel experience gave us a chance to shower, recharge the electronics, get a better night of sleep, and pick up some ice for our cooler.

I also was happy to have The Weather Channel, and see a monster set of thunderstorms develop over the area not long after we checked in. These were real gully-washers, complete with lightning every 2-3 seconds, and high winds. The power went out at the motel for an hour (an event the manager said happens weekly during monsoon season), and the force of the storms’ gust front was so powerful that it caused dust storms as far as Phoenix. It was a good night to skip tenting.

Not an exciting night on the road? Sometimes you have to just find pleasure in holing up and watching the rain. After the storms we went out for ice cream cups and brought them back to the motel to eat while watching a movie. It wasn’t much, but it was perhaps all we needed before another day of exploring and tenting along the Mogollon Rim … which I’ll cover in the next blog.