Chiricahua National Monument

February 2009

Back across southern New Mexico to southeast Arizona and Chiricahua National Monument, known for its extensive exposures of unusual hoodoo rock formations. Some 27 million years ago a volcanic explosion roughly 100 times the power of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens blast buried the area with layers of rhyolite basalt 800-1200 feet thick. Some unknown millions of years later this all uplifted, where erosion created a variety of shapes, stacked like pancakes. The most outstanding are the rocks where the underlying ones eroded more quickly than the overlying ones, giving the appearance of a highly improbable balancing act. The trails have signs pointing out various possible shapes: "Duck on a Rock", "Punch and Judy", "Chinaboy" (Chinaboy?), ostensibly to help the imagination-challenged but more likely in an effort to deflect attention from the fact that most of the formations are hilariously phallic.

I arrived around 4:00PM on a Saturday, something I would never have done in the past but had grown fairly complacent on this trip with the availability of camping sites. Here I was lucky to get the very last available site, and that only because someone had left early. Small, pretty quiet. Visitation rose above 100,000 for the first time in 1999, but dropped to 67,000 in 2002. Not the best years to compare numbers, I know.

I hiked a 12-mile lollipop loop trail covering most of the monument's central trail area. It took me about 7.5 mostly moseying hours. A shuttle runs from the Visitor's Center to the highest point of the hike, allowing people to walk all down hill. I skipped the shuttle and hiked uphill, and had Heart of the Rocks, the most dazzling ensemble of hoodoos, all to myself for an hour or so on a lovely Sunday morning. Pretty nice. Windy and just warm enough; I did not take off my heavy sweater until after lunch and I kept my windbreaker on all day. Inspiration Point wasn't that inspiring but it had fine views of Cochise Head, Masai Point, the desert floor, walls of hoodoos. It provided a good windbreak to sit and eat lunch.

Like so many western parks set aside and largely visited for their geological curiosities, Chiricahua has become more valuable for its habitat protection. Our old friends the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts overlap here, met by the northernmost extension of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, from which come species present nowhere else in the United States. One of these, the Apache Fox Squirrel, frequented the scrub oak next to my campground. It is large and burnt-orange in color with a multi-hued foxlike tail. The crows had it thoroughly cowed. One night at dusk I caught a glimpse of a sub-species of the white-tailed deer, also up from Mexico, and with its white flowing tail looked like something out of a Disney animation. I was skeptical enough to verify with the ranger what I had seen to make sure I wasn't losing it.