Page 17 - Volume 3 - Walks In The Black Range

growth of evergreens and the yet to leaf out low growing shrubs. It has been this way for a while unlike areas further south in the Black Range which had a thick growth of pine and Douglas fir before the Silver Fire a few years ago. Really this entire area is a very dry part of the already dry Gila. The riparian areas are the only really lush parts of the forest.
Then we entered the burn area. The riparian growth of large trees was gone replaced by the aforementioned brushy oak and thorny locust. The gray-brown hillsides were thick with a low growth of Gambel oak punctuated with hundreds of black pine snags. It would've been a much prettier scene had the oak and locust leafed out already, as it was, it looked wild, desolate and very much like a place that people don't belong, at least not for long. The trail was gone, as were most of the blazes. There were occasional cairns and a bits of blue tape tied to shrubs, but they weren't really all that helpful as our speed was most likely cut in half now, and our momentum lost. We stopped to eat in a grove of tall, tall pines that had escaped the flames.
After lunch, the now trail-less hike only became rougher as we searched for blazes, cairns and short stretches of tread, but mostly followed the ground disturbed by cattle and elk. Along the way there were leafed out chokecherry and lemonade bush on the creekside, providing a bit of electrifying green to the drab scenery. My wife decided to stop at a sweet little area where the stream cascaded between huge boulders and a few large pines still lived amongst the dead.
I continued on now very steeply up hill
and high above the creek bottom, still
finding the occasional blaze or cairn and
even some rusty spools of barbed wire,
as I slid on gravel, climbed over
downfall and pushed through brush. A
huge cone of rock, with large alcoves at
the bottom, topped a huge mountain
that would not have looked out of place
in the desert, on the north side, of the valley. On the south was the high ridge of the Black Range looking gray. I gave up and stopped at an old blaze on an alligator juniper. At least a mile and a half and 1600 feet below our destination. I could not even see Diamond Peak, but I did spy a small
grove of small aspen in a pocket below the ridgeline which brought a smile to my face.
It was not meant to be today. The clouds had made getting this far possible. Had the sun come out, it would have been unbearable in this completely open terrain. I reunited with my wife and we began our long descent. The sun did