Trail Layout Epic

10 hours of trail layout. That qualifies as epic in my book.

There’s no Arizona Trail between Oak Tree and Fagan Lake. The Cienega Corridor project (~25 miles) is getting close to done, but the section south of there hasn’t even been laid out yet.

Mark and I went out to flag as much as possible. The rough route is about ~12 miles. We had hoped to cover half of it. But precisely laying out trail is hard, and very slow.

It started well enough, hiking for several miles to the forest boundary. Then we started hitting the challenge of the day: drainages. Nasty ones. We searched low and high for good places to cross, with varying success. Progress was slow. Linking up the reasonable crossings required a lot of reworking. Tying flags, untying, retying. I tied hundreds of knots.

Bushwhacking in the desert can be hard. There wasn’t much clear ground.

Mark standing on a slope filled with shin daggers


Mother Brain The day went fast. We ate lunch very briefly and resumed tying flags. When we reached Mulberry Canyon it was clear that we were out of daylight and needed to break off for the cars. We didn’t get nearly as far as we had hoped. But we had layed out many miles of quality, sustainable trail.We walked out Mulberry Wash (finding a dripping pipe spring that isn’t marked on any map) then climbed to look for a 4×4 road shown on my topo map. It was there, if only faintly.

Mark’s feet were killing him, and the car was at least a mile further than the highway, so we parted ways at the road. On the map that road went out to the highway. So I was going to pick him up there.

I ran down the bumpy ridge road into a very nice, cool, wash. Neat rock formations, big trees… I got distracted too long. I started my bushwhack too late, and ended up back on the road Mark was supposed to keep following!

“Uh oh, I hope the turn out of the wash is obvious.” I thought about cruising back down the road to make sure he found it, but the road looked more worn where I was. The sun was dropping and I had a long bushwhack ahead of me to get back to the car. Radios would have been a very good idea here.

It was pretty rough going for a while, but the evening was quite nice. After being a little warm in the sun all day, the absence of heat was a relief and very comforable. Evening light is always a treat. I rationed my last bits of water, and thought of all the folks crossing the desert “undocumented” to come to the US of A. Definitely some epic stuff, that is.

I made it with 10 minutes to spare. No sign of Mark. He wasn’t at the road. I parked there and ran up the hill to see if I could spot him with the last remaining light. Nothing.

He had never seen the turn out of the wash, but knew something was wrong when the wash turned north. So he started his own scenic detour back to the highway. He walked up the road not long after I came down from the hill, just as darkness fell.

I can’t believe we were out there all day. It’s a good thing volunteer work pays so well. It was actually a really nice day, and I’m looking forward to seeing/flagging the rest of the route.