4-23-09 201 trailhead in Pinals

Bela and I got a late start today but by about 4pm, we had reached the parking area for the 201 trail, just off of the Pioneer Pass road 112. The trailhead is about a mile past the trailhead for the 197 Six Shooter Canyon trail.

I had spotted someone camping here earlier in the week. It was a neat camp from a distance with no obvious humans in the vicinity. There was an older, 1970's Ford pickup parked in front of a blue, 4 person dome tent. Off to the side were two comfortable camp chairs, sitting side by side, allowing a long view of the opposite hillside and Pinal Creek below. It looked like an ideal setting, almost romantic, with perfect weather in a relatively isolated location.

Today, the spot was empty and from the moment I let Bela out of the truck, I knew something was up. There was the remains of a small fire, conservatively built and cold to the touch, built in front of where the two chairs had been placed. She ignored the fire completely and headed straight for the shrubby perimeter of the area where she quickly located her favorite food--maybe every dog's favorite-- human shit. The campers had made no effort to dig a hole or a trench, they just wandered 20 or 30 feet from their tent and let it loose under the cover of a couple large manzanitas.

Bela will go after fox, coyote, bobcat, or domestic dog crap wherever she finds it, despite my loud prostrations to the contrary. "Leave it! Drop it! Jesus, Bela, that's disgusting." There is no telling what more she eats when I'm not right on top of her watching her every move. She will step over dry cow pies to find the fresh ones that have just barely formed a thin crust, easily breaking through the air-dried barrier with her tongue, exposing the fresh, green custard inside. But human shit is her personal gold standard and it's always surprising how often she finds it in what you would think are civilized surroundings. I find it everywhere I go to run Bela. Sometimes it's hidden behind a large boulder or tree in what approaches a conscientious (but still predictable) attempt at waste management, but more often than not, it's right out in the open, oftentimes marked with the univeral white flag: four or five still connected sheets flapping in the wind.

True to form, she zeroed in on these scattered human defecants within seconds. She never gobbles fresh human feces, any more than I would gulp down a soft serve ice cream cone, and when I caught up with her, she was licking away, happy as a clam. I grabbed her by the collar and yanked her away, her tongue still lapping, and put her in the back of the truck until I put on my pack, pulled out my bincoculars and strapped my camera through my belt loop.

The trail head was about 50 feet away, and well before we reached it, Bela had found the heel of a loaf of white bread within throwing distance of the small fire. I never went back to look, but as we walked down the trail towards the distant sound of Pinal Creek below, I suspected that anything that wasn't burnable had probably been pitched over the hill. The glass bottles probably made it to the ground, shattering in coarse brown shards beneath the dense shrub canopy; everything else was probably caught by the tangle of branches, suspended, waiting for wind or rain-- or another dog-- to clean it up.

4-20-09 Six Shooter 197 trail below 112 Road in Pinal Mountains

7:30am. A clear, still, blue sky. I am comfortably wearing short sleeves at this time of the morning for the first time this year. White wing doves are singing in the back round with the familiar, warm-season buzz of tiny insects streaking by on all sides. They are invisible for the most part until they catch a glint of the sun, seen as a tiny dark spot of shadow if the sun is behind them or a sharp flicker of brightness when the sun strikes them head-on.

Though I have walked the upper part of the 197 trail literally dozens of times, I have only recently explored the section of the 197 trail below the 112 Road. This section had always looked hot and dry and uninviting to me, but that was before I discovered that it leads to Six Shooter creek within a quarter mile and then terminates at the Ice House picnic area about one mile further. It also intersects with the Check Dam trail about ½ mile from the picnic area and then connects with the Toll Road trail 200. I haven’t yet walked the Check Dam trail, mainly because it either requires a round trip or a car shuttle to the end of Jess Hayes Road at the lower end of the Toll Road trailhead.

The trail descends sharply from the 112 road, following a lumpy trail of light green, lichen covered rocks. It descends so steeply that this intentional granite armament probably keeps the trail from forming a deep rut right through the middle from heavy rains. At Six Shooter creek, there is plenty of bubbling water with pools just deep enough to reach to the top of Bela’s chin. A few smallish Sycamores and stunted Cottonwoods are within eyeshot, surefire indicators of a creek that spends more time dry than wet. Last year, the creek slowed to a trickle but it never completely stopped.

Like everywhere I have been this year in Arizona from 2400 feet to 5000 feet elevation, fleabane daisies, thistle, and yellow western wallflowers have been the big winners in wild flower season ubiquitousness. The fleabanes form close growing, low patches of white flowers with yellow centers during the day and then cup upwards during morning and evening, appearing more lavender than white. The thistles by contrast are large four to five foot tall plants, armed just about everywhere with sharp spines, both along the leaves and the stems. The flowers are pink to lavender and usually in groups of eight to ten, but innate frugality allows only one or two to be open at any one time.

A large two-tailed swallowtail was hanging precipitously from one of the flowers and then let go, resuming its characteristic punch drunk flying style, intentionally seeking what seems like the longest possible distance between two points. I have had these erratic butterflies fly towards me before and have been forced to bob and weave just to stay out of its way.

One of the thistles was loaded with mixed generations of lady bird beetles. The nymphs are three times the length of the adults and look aggressive and predatory, with a mix of orange and yellow pigments not unlike that of a Gila monster. In comparison, the adults are childlike with the orange shell with black spots. While nearly all of the activity was on top of the leaves, the undersides were covered with thousands and thousands of bright green aphids clustered tightly elbow to elbow and, for the moment, safe from the predators above. Perhaps the beetles topside were just enjoying the morning sun, or maybe they were digesting the spoils of a recent battle and re-polishing their armor before descending to slaughter the other helpless victims in the shade of the bottom half of the leaves below.

The manzanitas are still spectacular, with bright pink flowers hanging in clusters of a dozen or so, attached to the branches with bright red pedicels. They look like giant desert rhododendrons from a distance. Some of the plants are thirty feet across and fifteen feet high, with a unique branch framework of branches that appear to have been dipped in chocolate. The pollinators are sparse but include European honey bees and a small compliment of native bees, some with gumdrop yellow stripes and smaller ones with iridescent blues and greens.

There are two species of Manzanita in our area: Arctostaphylos pungens is the first to bloom in late February and March and A. pringlei flowers in April and May. Sugar bush is also in full bloom right now with white flowers tinged with a the tiniest bit of pink, oftentimes crowded up close to Manzanita, scrub oak, pinon pine, and all of the other dense chaparral shrubs.

The sound of the creek is not overbearing, just loud enough to provide the security that water is nearby, and that even though you might starve, you would never die of thirst. But every creature knows that as the sun migrates higher, the days of easy living will end and the sound of bounty and certain survival will slowly fade away as the water gradually slips below the surface.

April 18, 2009 Foothills of Pinals above Franklin St.

I did my morning run with Bela on the Pinal foothill’s road above Franklin Street and drove just a bit further than I usually do, past the hardened mud tire ruts, broken bottles, and the couch with the disemboweled batting, to a spot about a quarter mile ahead. I like to park my truck on a slight rise, not so high that I can see it from all directions, but just high enough that some reprobate might think that I can see it from all directions.

For the first time, I carried my binoculars while I ran. I carried them sidesaddle, like a woman’s purse with my right arm through the strap and the concave part of the binocs resting snuggly against the convex side of my ribs on the right. When I saw anything worth looking at, I just stopped, slid out my right arm, and pulled the binoculars up to my eyes. It’s a sequence of movements that I have repeated a thousand times, but never in the middle of a jog.

The first thing I saw was a western king bird perched on the bare end of a mesquite branch that was just beginning to leaf out (the mequite, not the king bird). I later saw a raven, flinching and buckling from an attack from above by a kingbird, perhaps by the same kingbird from the mesquite branch. I've witnessed this scenario many times before; each time the kingbird dive bombs him, the raven acts as if it has been shot, but then quickly recovers. I haven't yet seen a raven fall out of the sky nor have I seen any visible blood loss, so I figure that the kingbird is just another pesky annoyance that the raven has to put up with in his day-to-day travels.

Scattered throughout the ground plane are native hedgehogs in full bloom with flowers the color of the inside of ripe prickly pear fruits. Surrounding all these is a three inch tall cover of Cryptantha and Plantago, all looking spritely and in full flower, obviously benefitting from the nearly one inch of rain we received this week and the four or five days of abnormally cool days that followed.

Bela followed her familiar pattern of keeping a hundred feet ahead of me, distracted more by invisible smells than by any visible movement. I generally walk in front of her and then whistle for her to catch up, cutting short whatever smell is distracting her. This time, it was a collection of colorless, tasteless molecules at the base of a what looked to me Iike a generic clump of snakeweed. She caught up to me at full gallup when I whistled and then she foraged ahead, looking for the next olfactory distraction. She is a pleasant and dependable hiking and running partner, never going too far ahead or lagging too far behind, and always ready to respond to a short whistle or a more insistent “let’s go!” when she’s pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone.

Today was clear with very little wind, a welcome change from the very windy last week with temperatures just perfect for a morning run with shorts and a tee shirt. As usual, I didn’t see another person on this little road and once again I inwardly reminded myself of the great unsung advantages of living in a small town on the edge my own personal mountain range. As long as a person is willing to hike during the work week, his luck will hold in relative solitude with nothing but the familiar sound of distant cactus wrens, black-chinned sparrows, mourning doves, and the occasional whistle of the train as it passes through Globe.

The banana yuccas are flowering too with drooping, ivory-colored flowers fully open on the lower part of the inflorescences with unopened flowers above, the unopened sepals streaked with stripes of deep, saturated reddish-brown ruunning up and down along the outside. I never noticed until today that the new flower buds are identical in shape to certain kinds of ripe chile peppers, albino-esque in color but undeniably similar to a long, slender jalepeno.


Some yucca flowers are edible though Peter Bigfoot once told me that after eating banana yucca flowers, he had an explosive bout of intestinal distress, something that he described quite visually as “carbonated poop.” The flowers are a soft contrast to the rigid leaves of the plant below; the leaves are as stiff and as potentially lethal as any plant out there. An errant parachute landing or mountain bike accident would likely result in a multiple impalement, requiring the assistance of at least two stout individuals to pry you out and a few units of blood to keep you alive.