A bad turn unintended

This was written on August 25th, 2008.

5:07 AM. Amelia wakes again and starts in with the hungry song. I sit up, on autopilot, and put my feet on the floor. With my first step I realize I made a mistake the night before by not bandaging my Achilles tendon. The new skin that formed over night while I "let the wound breathe" has no elasticity, and it tears open as my foot flexes. Oh hell. I limp around the foot of the bed and kneel somewhat painfully (this time it is my aching quads) by the cradle to extract the source of our joy from her swinging nest. She is doing very well at ten days old - sleeping almost three hours straight between feedings. I deliver her to Melissa, still in bed, and they begin the simple beautiful act that has sustained the Mammalian Class for... an absurdly long time.

This post is not about the two girls that I am so in love with. It's about my selfish self, and a bad decision I made two days ago.

5:00 AM (two days ago). My alarm wakes me and I sit up. I have had about two and a half hours of solid sleep since Amelia last woke us. She and Melissa stir gently, but sleep on. I get up and make my way to the pile of clothes I prepped the night before, dress, and go make a triple espresso. I load my pack with 132 oz. of water; 100 in a Camelback bladder for myself and the rest in a quart bottle for Lucas. Everything else we will need is in the pack already so I take it to the truck then come back in to make a protein shake for myself and some toast for Melissa. I take her the toast with cold water and some fresh fruit. A kiss to each of my ladies and I am off.

6:00 AM. 40 mph on the Mt. Lemmon highway, Lucas drunk on the wind. We stop at the upper Bug Springs trail head and start hiking up the steep, well maintained trail. This trail gains several hundred feet as it cruises up a ridge line for about one mile, then drops off into the south facing slopes of Molino Basin. That is not our destination, however. I just wanted to see if this trail would take us close enough to some impressive and enticing looking crags to the north. With perhaps an hour of contour bushwhacking, it just might be the way. Adventure potential noted, save this one for another day. Lucas and I turn back and trot down the trail, arriving at the truck exactly sixteen minutes later.

8:00 AM. We arrive at the top of the ski lift road, the highest point to which one can drive for about fifty miles in any direction. Altitude, 9,151 feet according to my watch altimeter. So far, so good. I keep Lucas on a fifteen foot lead. He is generally fine off leash, but encounters with other hikers and their dogs are frequent here, especially on a Sunday, and especially this close to a major trail head. My real concern, however, is a rattle snake encounter. Lucas has responded well both times we have come across rattlers on the trail - he gets out of the way very fast. Faster than I possibly could. But you never know.

There are also black bears here.

The Lemmon Lookout trail is a two mile spur that connects the Mt. Lemmon trail to the Wilderness of Rocks trail, creating an eight mile loop around three enormous upper mountain crags; Rappel Rock, The Ravens, and The Fortress. The WOR trail winds through an amazing area of pristine forest and fantastic boulder formations. A splendid creek follows the trail for some length, with several secluded pools and falls. This is the perfect place to get away for a few days. My goal today is to drop down the spur - an elevation loss of roughly 2000 feet - and into the Wilderness of Rocks area for a nice picnic and a swim with Lucas. An early start would put me back on the road home by 2PM. My buddy Jeff might meet me with another friend or two.

Almost exactly one hour later Lucas and I arrive at the trail junction where the spur trail hits the Wilderness of Rocks trail. I have never been here before, so I decide to take a twenty minute detour down the WOR trail before returning to this junction to swim in the nearby creek and relax while I wait for Jeff. I cross the creek and follow the path over a small rise, then drop into something wonderful as I encounter what I believe to be one of the happiest places in all of Arizona. A magnificent stand of very tall, very old pine trees. The kind of trees that create their own weather, maintaining a cool and peaceful atmosphere among the towering trunks, allowing ample space between for sunlight and bird flight, and laying a deep bed of sweet smelling needles that cushion the ground. Beyond a few dozen yards the pine cones scattered over the russet needles look like peppercorns on a bed of cinnamon. The sunlight dapples everything with a permanent hue of autumn so that when a jay appears his blue plumage stands out with intense contrast. This place was not missed by the seasons of fire - I can see a few smaller trees that did not survive. Now all that remains is standing charcoal. Most of the giants, however, wear a thin coat of char on their lower trunks and appear none the worse for it. I stand here for a long time, just breathing, living, thanking.

We scout forward another ten or fifteen minutes and see that there is much more here than I can explore in one day, or one lifetime. Turning back we pause again in the happy pine acreage, then cross the creek to the junction. This time I head up the other leg of the WOR trail, and when it crosses the water again I stay in the creek, hopping from boulder to boulder until I come to a large pool with a sun drenched slab of bare stone for a beach. I strip naked and wade into the water. It is so cold that my hot feet are instantly numb. The rest of me soon follows. I sink my body into the deepest part of the pool and marvel at the refreshing silence. Lucas swims to me with his powerful webbed toes. The water inspires him to completely freak out, a thing at which he excels. After a few minutes I rise, dress, and gather my pack. I return to the junction and set up my hammock near a small fire ring. Here I wait for about forty minutes while I eat my lunch and nap.

11:30 AM. No sign of Jeff. I decide to give myself some extra time to make the hike out. 2000 feet and two miles down hill in one hour is a reasonable pace, but I had better plan on at least twice that to get back out. An extra half hour on the end just to play it safe - I want to get home to my girls before dinner. I am almost packed up when a fellow about my age comes up from the WOR trail, having started the loop hike at sunrise. We chat briefly, I tell him the spur is the fastest, albeit steepest, way back to the trail head. He carries a small half empty bottle and no pack. That's brave, I think, but do not offer some of my own water to him. I probably should have, but I was about to start the toughest part of my day, with about %65 of my water supply remaining, and no filter for the abundant natural source. Foolish choice, that. Anyway, if this guy really needed water I would probably find him parched on the trail soon enough, and naturally at such time I would oblige his thirst.

Lucas and I begin the ascent. The first half mile or so is mellow and well marked, gaining little altitude. We come to another water crossing where we meet two more guys in their mid twenties. They ask me what trail this is, and say the last half mile they came down was very poorly marked and maintained. I had come that same way only a few hours earlier, so I figured they were just a little green and having a tough go at reading trail sign - the odd branch laid across a misleading path, the occasional cairn when the path itself is hard to see. Stuff you need to be looking out for. I describe what lies ahead for the two fellows and take advantage of a brief pause in the shade. My thighs are already complaining, and I figure it's because I haven't had more than four hours of uninterrupted sleep for over a week. New babies will do that to you. No time to lament for more sleep, however, I have nearly 2000 feet to climb over less than two miles. It seems like a very little distance in my head, but I knew it was going to be hard work. I press on.

As it happens, within a few hundred yards I am utterly lost. I spend several minutes back tracking to the water crossing and looking for sign, but the path absolutely evaporates before my eyes. I see cairns and foot scuffs here and there and I follow each possibility into nothingness. Only rocks and trees and steep, steep ground. I know I am within a dozen yards of my salvation, but it eludes me still. I grow prematurely frustrated and curse the baffling circumstances I find myself in. What the hell! Without even realizing it, I am in the very last place I want to be - I am off trail. As I become aware of this fact, I start to think of alternate lines out of this wild place, this place so close and yet so far from something familiar. Somewhere in the distance, voices cry out. I cannot make sense of their words, but the tone seems casual.

I tell myself that I know the lay of this mountainside. I have climbed on Rappel Rock once before - four years back. Two old friends and I were on the second pitch of our ascent of a route called "Black Quacker" when a not so surprising summer storm turned our route into a sudden fury of falling water, driving us off the crag in a desperate soaking rappel. I knew I had hiked at least from the base of that crag back to the high ridge trail that would take me back to my truck. From my current position, the base of that crag was still about 1000 feet above me, up a fifty degree slope of loose rock, pine litter, and nasty thickets of extremely shitty undergrowth. A mile of very steep off trail bush-crashing to the base of Rappel Rock, then roughly another mile of the same to the ridge trail. That was one choice. Or I could try to follow the water up the gully to its source, a three inch pipe sticking out of the ground near a small tin shed on the ridge trail. I assume that shed covers, protects, and maintains a natural spring, but I am not certain. At any rate, this option involved climbing over a lot of loose rock on steep slabs, with heavy vegetation jealously guarding its precious water source. This was a pretty poor choice for me, even worse for the dog. The third, wiser option never even occurred to me. Go back and find the damn trail. In retrospect I know this is what I should have done. The line was there. I simply had not looked hard enough. Perhaps sleep deprivation muddled my thoughts - whatever the case, I broke a cardinal rule.

I chose option one.

At this point I was already off trail, so why waste more time? Easy to answer that one now. I could see a few less horrid looking stretches between the thickets, and I made for these weaknesses. I moved at a slow but steady pace, trying to conserve my energy reserves. As I gained altitude I remembered a survival tactic of back country orienteering. If I kept the towering hulk of Rappel Rock to my left and the drainage gully to my right I would eventually make enough elevation to suss out a contour path across the gully, inevitably intersecting the spur trail which I knew was to the right, or east of my position. Orienteering 101. I kept plodding upward. The pine litter was a slippery mess and I lost my footing frequently. Lucas fared a little better than me. It was very slow going, and I realized quickly what a horrible thing it would be to take a tumble and break an ankle, or worse. Getting found out here would be a stunning feat. There were countless hiding places under boulders and bushes, places a person could lay for days without being discovered. Now, more than ever, I had too much at stake to make such poor decisions, to behave with such selfish ignorance, to go off trail. On the other hand, this was not some vast tract of forbidding back country wilderness. This was our beloved Mt. Lemmon, and only a few steep square miles of it. In all likelihood, there was not one single bear within ten miles of my location. I had food, a water source, warm layers, a 250 lumen "Fenix" torch, pretty good legs and a very strong dog. Indeed, I could almost see my house from here. But the chance of a misstep was high, and a bad bump on the head could lead to a very unpleasant night. More than that I feared the idea of Melissa at home with the baby, not knowing what had become of me. I trust my durability to weather a mild night in mid summer, but what thoughts she could be dealing with... that just ain't right.

1:45 PM. The base of Rappel Rock. The granite behemoth towers up and over my head almost 500 feet. The first peoples to name this mountain called it Babat Do'ag, meaning "frog mountain." Looking at Rappel Rock from various distances I have noticed that it somewhat resembles a frog, crouching and preparing to leap. Either that, or the head and shoulders of an angry gorilla, scowling at the sky. It all depends on how you look at it. This was a sunny day. This day, the rock was a nimble frog for me. No angry apes, just me and the dog and a brief rest at the foot of an ancient friend. I took off my left shoe, pulled off the sock, and peeled away a flapper of skin from my Achilles tendon. I muttered something about how unprepared I am - no moleskin, not even a roll of climbing tape, something that I always carry. What was I thinking when I packed? Apparently I wasn't.

We began to make our way up and around the flanks of the crag. I was looking for climber sign, as I knew this rock was a popular place for multi-pitch trad routes. My timing was no good, however, as this crag had also been closed to climbing for several months due to raptor nesting. Any recent tracks had been washed away or overgrown. Plenty of small game trails came and went through the dense thickets, however, and after coming to a vertical wall of granite some twenty feet high, the only choice left was to follow one of these scant pathways. Of course they only seemed scant to me - to Lucas they were the shining paths, and so I told him to lead on. Time and again he located passages between the brambles that I would not have seen. I followed the dog as he cut a rough contour to the east - exactly the direction I wanted us to go. I could only hope we would not encounter any large and ornery mammals - or rattlers.

2:00 PM. I take the lead back from Lucas as we finally emerge from several hundred yards of the nasty undergrowth. More than once while in the thick of it I snagged a foot, stumbled and fell hard into the vegetation. I swear the thickets were set like crude snares intending to drag me down. Dead branches suddenly sprang out with malice aforethought. I managed to deflect most of these with my face. My shins were soon bloodied by the clawing brambles. My feet raged but stamped on at my stubborn behest to fight the inexorable tug of gravity. At last the thicket thinned. Small aspen stands gave way to open slabs as we drew near to the water course, a series of stepped falls , ten to twenty feet on average. We pushed on to a ledge where one shorter fall landed, splashing merrily on its search for a lower point. Lucas drank long and deep and I knelt beside him, letting the water soak my head and shoulders. I splashed water on my face and chest, I filled my hat with water and put it on my head. This water was among the finest I had ever worn.

Refreshed but still weary, I took a vantage point atop a large boulder and looked at the shape of the slope across the gully. I estimated another few hundred yards of traversing and bush whacking along this contour line. Then, as if waiting for me to take this particular point of observation, a family of hikers appeared on the spur trail, about a half a mile away, and then vanished into the woods again. Now, for the first time, I knew for certain that we were very close to being on our way out. Standing still on the boulder I felt my quads seize up like cinder blocks again. They protested further use, but I gingerly stretched them out and hopped off the boulder. We were close to the real trail.

Indeed only a quarter mile past the drainage, my theory proved sound. Cresting a small rise over pleasantly clear ground, I saw the wide and well worn track of the spur trail. I thanked Lucas and took a brief pause. From here it was just one step after another on auto-pilot. None of this orienteering nonsense, no more bush crashing insanity. No thinking required from here. The trail head was only about a mile away now. After a few minutes I paused again in a nice shady spot and took a long sip from my drinking tube. Not much water left, but enough. I gave some to Lucas. Voices rose up from the trail below. I waited, and soon the three hikers I had seen about three hours earlier appeared, moving slowly together up the trail. When they saw me they stopped in the shade, and we discussed our various adventures. According to them, the trail was never an easy find, and they foundered in roughly the same place as me. Their saving grace was a GPS device that allowed them to backtrack along their own errant path, eventually taking them to the spur trail near the point at which they first lost it on the way down. We continued on up the trail, and they gradually moved ahead of us.

I found out later from Jeff that he had crossed paths with all three of those other hikers, but they made no mention of meeting me. Nor did they tell me they had seen anyone else on the trail that day. Apparently, Jeff and I had missed each other while I was off trail. That made perfect sense. Of course. By the time I finished my staggering march back to the truck, my blister was screaming and Lucas was lagging about ten feet behind me. The big shiny machine never looked so inviting - not since last summer's unintentional fifteen mile rain soaked tramp with Melissa and a couple other friends - maybe you have read that blog post already...