The New Mexico Bootheel

Sunrise at Granite Gap, just north of the Bootheel, with the Pyramid Mountains in the background.

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I scoured Mountain Project (an online crowd-sourced rock-climbing guide) before moving to Southern New Mexico in 2023, hoping to find climbing areas near Silver City. There are a few, but Granite Gap near the “Bootheel,” the southward protrusion of New Mexico that borders Arizona and Chihuahua, Mexico, sounded especially intriguing because of its obscurity, even though the climbing wasn’t very tempting. The Mountain Project reporter noted that: 

“Much of the rock is dubious…This is a primitive desert environment where it seems every plant and animal is hostile. Cactus everywhere and huge rattlesnakes. Sounds great heh?”

Though bouldering with fat rattlesnakes and cactus spine landings didn’t appeal, empty desert along the Mexican border did, and I looked forward to exploring and photographing this unknown (to me) piece of New Mexico. Web searches revealed few images except for those by Continental Divide Trail hikers on the first few days of their northbound treks, taken as they slogged across shadeless desert, drinking from cattle troughs to get to Lordsburg and then the Gila National Forest, where the trail becomes less stark. A few people have documented tiny towns and mining ruins, but images are scarce, prompting dreams of unique photo opportunities, rare in a world so awash in imagery.

A cholla flower at Granite Gap, where the coarse soil supports a lusher vegetation than in much of the Bootheel.

Sotol flowers at Granite Gap.

Technically, Granite Gap is a little north of the Bootheel, though everything south of Lordsburg is usually lumped in. The Bootheel itself isn’t small, covering about 1,500 square miles, but that’s a tiny fraction of the area of New Mexico, and with a population density of about one person per square mile, most living around a few tiny towns (Animas, Cotton City, Hatchita, Rodeo) between mountain ranges, there’s a lot of empty country. But much of the land is private or inaccessible. 

An old saloon and its mural in the small town of Hatchita. Hatchita and the ruins of old Hatchita were mining towns. Now CDT hikers stop at the Hatchita store to refresh on their way north or south.

The Cotton City Grocery and Laundromat. 

The Diamond A Ranch, one of largest ranches in the Bootheel, is committed to conservation and cooperates with the Nature Conservancy but doesn’t allow public access, even forcing the CDT to be rerouted around their holdings and causing controversy due to locked gates on county roads which are supposed to be open to all. Some of the prominent mountain ranges (Big Hatchets, Alamo Huecos, Peloncillos) in the Bootheel include large Wilderness Study Areas but are difficult or impossible to access, while others (Animas, San Luis) are mostly private and off-limits. That’s a lot of intriguing country that is out-of-bounds for most of us.

Beth and Steve Buskirk and Ellen hiking in the Southern Peloncillo Mountains. Access to parts of the Peloncillos is blocked by the Diamond A and other private land holdings.

Despite the harsh arid environment, the Bootheel was home to indigenous people for thousands of years. I’ve read journal articles describing archaeological sites all over the area, many along the margins of playas that were presumably a source of water or in the foothills where water was also more abundant. On one trip, armed with waypoints gleaned from archaeological site descriptions, I tried to visit some of these pre-contact sites but was stopped every time by locked gates or No Trespassing signs. 

A cattle guard at the entrance to a road leading out onto a playa (dry lakebed) in the Bootheel.

More recently, Geronimo, the Apache military leader, surrendered in 1886 to Lt. Charles Gatewood near Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains before being shipped to Florida to join other Apache prisoners. He died a prisoner of war in Ft. Sill, Kansas in 1909. A stone monument to his surrender west of the entrance to Skeleton Canyon incorporates matates once used to grind corn or mesquite pods, but that end of the canyon is blocked by private land, requiring long hot hikes to access it from the east or south. The title of David Roberts' book, Once They Moved Like the Wind, about Geronimo and the Apache wars, evokes the freedom Apache and other indigenous people enjoyed before ranchers and miners claimed the land for themselves.

A storm over the Chiricahua Mountains looking west into Arizona from near Skeleton Canyon.

Part of Mexico until the Gadsen Purchase in late-1853, the Bootheel and southern Arizona were the last significant addition of land to the contiguous United States. The $10 million purchase facilitated a southern transcontinental railroad between the South and the West Coast. This was before the Civil War, but southerners, including Gadsen, feared that without a southern railroad line, the North would benefit disproportionately from trade. Events leading to the purchase were complicated, but the result was the addition of close to 30,000 square miles of territory to the U.S. extending from near Las Cruces to the California border and incorporation Tucson, Yuma, and other important southwestern cities.

Sunset looking westward across country added to the U.S. by the Gadsen Purchase of 1853.

Today, the Bootheel is a hotspot for illegal immigration despite Trump’s wall and the heavy presence of the Border Patrol. In the Southern Peloncillos, I’ve seen border agents on horseback, rifles in scabbards, riding into the hills like a posse from the Old West to track immigrants. Border Patrol pickup trucks drag tires along road margins and fencelines, smoothing the dirt so that fresh footprints can be detected and followed. Camping near the border is said to be dangerous, and there are occasional incidents with smugglers moving people or drugs.

Water and juice perhaps left for immigrants in a chapel in Hatchita.

So, the Bootheel is an interesting and complicated place, but despite a half-dozen driving trips and a few exploratory hikes, I’ve seen little of it and photographed even less, mostly without much success. In the wide-open desert, it’s hard to find ways to anchor a 35 mm frame. The morning sun bursts over the horizon, transforming the Borderlands in minutes from soft to glaring light. Sunsets linger a little longer but are also fleeting, and the sky is often cloudless, less visually interesting than when storms sweep through, rarer during weak monsoons like I’ve experienced since moving to New Mexico. In summer, the Bootheel bakes in the sun and temperatures are often over 100 degrees, discouraging outdoor adventure. Still, the lure of obscurity is strong, and there is a lot of exploring to be done, particularly in the mountains. With work, these ranges can surely be accessed, even while we can no longer move through them like the wind.

A sofa in the living room of an abandoned house in Hatchita.

Seating (for funerals??) in the Cottonwood Cemetery along the Geronimo Trail in the Southern Peloncillo Mountains.

A sluggish Gila Monster at Granite Gap in November 2024.

A cowboy hat at a church in Hatchita.

The view southeast into the Bootheel from the ruins of Old Hatchita (now abandoned), a mining town.

Don't Let the Old Man In

Larry Scritchfield descending Cathedral Wash in cool early morning shade.

My friend Larry Scritchfield and I set our alarms for 5:30 a.m., ridiculously early for a 3.5-mile round trip hike down Cathedral Wash to the Colorado River and back. Historically, early starts were for more serious endeavors, like climbing the Chouinard-Beckey route on South Howser Tower in the Bugaboos, when a pre-dawn approach minimized our chances of getting whacked by enormous pieces of serac falling from a hanging glacier and gave us enough time to climb the 2000’ wall, descend the other side, and get back to our camp by dark. 

 

Times (and climate) change, neither to be taken for granted. 

 

We camped at Lee’s Ferry, Arizona in March during a record-breaking heat wave that sent temperatures into the 90s, 20 or more degrees above normal and not fun to hike in, especially under a blazing sun. Also, we were slowed by health problems. My left knee had painfully given up the ghost in December, leading to an agonizing wait for early February replacement surgery, during which I could barely walk, even with crutches. Nearly simultaneously, my right shoulder and left wrist announced semi-retirement thanks to osteoarthritis, requiring steroid shots, postponed until after knee surgery to minimize infection risk. At one point, I couldn’t even lift a coffee cup (thanks Ellen for feeding me my coffee!). More seriously, Larry has pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease forcing him to carry an oxygen concentrator (in a daypack) on hikes, limiting his range and stamina. 

Now less than two months out of surgery and dosed with steroids, I can walk a few miles and make my own coffee. Larry is participating in a drug trial that shows some evidence of mitigating his fibrosis. Despite these improvements, we called ourselves Elder Hostel canyoneers, even that moniker a little grandiose since the canyoneering in Cathedral Wash is minimal, rated 2A, meaning that there is a little scrambling and some “judicious route finding” according to the Park Service. Parents are advised to keep a close eye on their children in the canyon. We saw some children and were secretly proud, or at least relieved, when asked by their parents if we made it all the way to the river.

 

After our judicious hike, we returned to the shade of the van well before the heat set in, pleased with our accomplishment. I sipped a late-afternoon margarita, and Larry nursed a fizzy water while we both watched a pair of grackles eager to share our chips. On another day, we descended a less challenging (but hotter) canyon (Wiregrass) near Bigwater, where vacationers store houseboats close to the shrinking Lake Powell, itself dysfunctional in the midst of long-term Western drought. 

Short canyon hikes that would have been trivial even a few months ago become touchstones encouraging recovery. Larry and I were grateful to be in the desert adventuring again, even in oppressive heat. As we get older, health setbacks are inevitable, some way more serious than joint failures, and I’m lucky to be as healthy as I am in my late-60s. 

I'm not much of a poetry aficianado, but the dying Tony Hoagland, in his poem "Into the Mystery" acknowledged gratefulness for what might once have been taken for granted:

This life that rushes over everything

Like water or like wind, and wears it down until it shines.

Now you sit on the brick wall on a cloudy afternoon and swing

your legs,

happy because there has never been a word for this

as you continue moving through these days and years

where more and more the message is

not to measure anything.

I’m also not a country music fan, but the late singer Toby Keith, after asking the then 88-year-old Clint Eastwood how he kept going, put some of Clint's predictably feisty answer to music:

"And I knew all of my life  

That someday it would end

Get up and go outside

Don’t let the old man in"  --Toby Keith (Don’t Let the Old Man In)

 

Larry ledge-walking after some judicious route-finding in Cathedral Wash.

Larry downclimbing a short chimney in Cathedral Wash.

 

The Colorado River at the mouth of Cathedral Wash below Lee's Ferry.

Larry enjoying van shade after our early morning hike.

The infamous Glen Canyon Dam with the much-reduced Lake Powell behind it. Water levels are almost below the conduits that allow power generation, and "dead pool" is a real risk in the next several years due to climate change.

Tourists at the Wahweep Overlook on an extremely hot March day looking down through early season wildfire smoke at the much-reduced Lake Powell. Today's climate might look pretty appealing 20 years from now.

 

Remembering Parents at Christmas

With my parents in Virginia in 2014.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Christmas was a big deal at our house in the Washington D.C. suburbs. We set up the tree in our 1950s-style basement with its linoleum floor, brick fireplace, knotty pine paneling, and, down the hall, a cinder block fallout shelter in case we had to weather a nuclear attack while waiting for Santa. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, there was an enormous pile of presents under the tree—my parents always went overboard, and their generosity was augmented by grandparents so that we were beside ourselves with excitement by Christmas morning, waking at an ungodly hour to rouse our parents and start the long-awaited opening of gifts. My parents loved surprises, so we never knew what great thing we might get. It seemed magical. We were a fortunate bunch.

Last summer, I met my three siblings, Kim, Clark, and Emily, all of us now in our 50s and 60s, at our family cottage north of Traverse City, Michigan to scatter our parents’ ashes, saving a few for other places that were important to them. My father died in September 2019 just before covid shut everything down, and we never had a formal memorial. My mother died in the spring of 2024, and it took us a year to find a time when we could all get together. It was a week of laughter, cocktails on the patio overlooking Grand Traverse Bay, and good meals, but it was also melancholy as we read love letters that my parents exchanged before they had us. We visited Bellaire, where my grandmother was born and is buried beside my grandfather, and we revisited places that were expansive to us as kids but now seem smaller. We told stories about our teenage years, marveling that we never ended up dead or in jail, and we went through a huge wooden trunk of my grandmother’s, full of photographs and letters from when she was a teenager herself in the early 1900s.

Cocktail hour at the cottage last summer. Emily is reading love letters that my parents exchanged before we were born.

My father was born in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. His family built the cottage “up north,” as they say in Michigan, around 1950 and spent summers there for years afterwards. His father worked for the Pierre Marquette Railroad but died of cancer at age 52, before I was born. His mother, Nelle, was an English teacher, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in Michigan. Going back even farther, Nelle’s father, Clark Densmore, was an attorney in Bellaire and a passionate advocate for women’s education and suffrage, though he and his wife, Hattie, had nine children, which probably caused some suffer-age on Hattie’s part if not for them both.

My father, Ed, with his parents, Ken Driese and Nelle Driese (nee Densmore).

My mother, on the other hand, was born in Enterprise, Alabama: the deep South. Her father, “Mac,” worked on the Pan American highway and eventually owned a furniture store in downtown Enterprise, a small town known for its Boll Weevil Monument, lauding the pest for forcing a switch from cotton to peanuts, which turned out to be an economic boon. When we were kids, men sold soggy bags of boiled peanuts on the streets of Enterprise (delicious), and the air smelled of peanut butter thanks to a processing plant on the outskirts of town. My grandmother always had cats around the house, and for her whole life, my mother was seldom without pets (mostly cats). We’d visit Enterprise in the summer, driving south in hot, un-air-conditioned Buicks, fussing at each other unbuckled in the back seat, eating at Howard Johnson’s, and sleeping at Holiday Inns that my parents found in a big newsprint publication that listed all of them in the U.S. They’d find a payphone and call ahead for a reservation once they knew how far we’d get or how much longer they could stand to be in the car with us. 

My mother, Barbara McCall in Alabama with pets.

In Enterprise, we walked into town in the hot Alabama sun from my grandparent’s house on Crawford Street to dust furniture at my grandfather’s store in exchange for soda money and to watch the monkey that hung around (literally) in the rafters of an adjacent feed store. My grandfather had a big, cluttered office in the back of the store that smelled of cigars. He’d take me to lunch at The Enterpriser, where I ordered shrimp cocktail and chocolate milk, both of which I like to this day.

My Mom's father, Oscar "Mac" McCall with me and my sister, Kim, at the furniture store in Enterprise.

My parents met in Northern Virginia where my siblings and I were eventually born, my father there for his first engineering job after graduating from the University of Michigan and my mother to teach high school English with a degree from William and Mary. When I was born, they lived in an apartment in Falls Church, near where my dad worked. My mom quit teaching to raise the four of us over the next thirty years, and she must have done a good job, because we all thrived. Of course, my dad had an important hand in that too, but he worked hard as an engineer, so my mother dealt with day-to-day parenting. There was a lot of it with four kids. We adored our dad, and I’ll always remember lining up on the living room couch with my siblings to watch out the window for his arrival home from work every evening, excited to see his sportscar pull into the driveway, usually in time to join us at the dining room table for a meal somehow cooked by my mother while she juggled everything else.

All of us in front of the Northern Virginia house we grew up in when we gathered to help our parents move to the Chesapeake Bay when they retired in 1996.

My dad’s companies designed equipment for the federal government, some of it classified. He rose into management, becoming the president of Scope Electronics, a company that he and friends had started in a garage. When Scope was purchased by another company, he consulted for a while and then worked for E-Systems, a descendant of the company he had first worked for (Melpar) after college, until he retired. It seems remarkable that he earned enough money to support our family comfortably, put four kids through college, and still retire with few financial worries, but those were different times.  

My parents retired in 1996 and bought a big old house (Point Breeze) on the Chesapeake Bay near Gloucester, Virginia, living there until my dad’s death. Despite the humidity and the bugs, they loved the house on the bay, even after Hurricane Isabel flooded their main floor while they waited it out in the attic, waves sloshing around in their living room, their house transformed into an island. The storm washed away the boathouse that came with the property, and they never replaced it or bought a boat, despite living on the water all those years. 

The original boathouse at Pt. Breeze, lost to Hurricane Isabel early in my parents' retirement and never rebuilt, though the dock was repaired.

Their main activities were working on the house and property and visiting with friends and neighbors. My father had a well-equipped woodshop, and he loved building things or using his tools for house projects. He played tennis avidly well into his 70s. They were both collectors, my mother of antiques and decorations, my father of tools and books. Their house was beautifully decorated (a gene I did not inherit), but drawers and closets were crammed with treasures from a thousand outings.

My parents wading in the Chesapeake Bay in front of their house.

My mother stayed on the Chesapeake for a few years after my father died despite declining health and our worries about her in such a big house by herself. She increasingly relied on her kind neighbors to help with appointments and minor emergencies. In 2022, she reluctantly moved to assisted living near my youngest sister, Emily, in Austin, Texas, where she seemed less anxious with Emily and her husband, Joe, nearby to visit and bring her treats and with regular attention from the staff at her apartment. She never really embraced Texas though, and if asked I’m sure would have said that she preferred Virginia. She spent lots of time on the phone, chatting with friends, her social life diminished to long-distance phone calls and dinner conversation in the dining room downstairs from her apartment.

I sat in our Silver City courtyard on a warm New Mexico evening a few days ago grilling chicken and roasting chili peppers that Ellen grew in her garden and felt sad that my dad never knew that I moved from Wyoming to New Mexico after all those years and that my mom was never healthy enough after we moved to visit. My dad would have loved sitting with me while I grilled, and I missed having the chance to make small talk and show them around this new place. I was lucky to make it into my 60s with both parents alive. Losing your parents when you’re my age is expected, but not without grief.

Grilling Anaheim chilis in New Mexico. My dad loved to grill as much as I do.

I get embarrassingly nostalgic when I hear Christmas songs that we grew up with. Maybe the worst (best?) are melancholy tunes from the Charlie Brown Christmas special that we gathered around the TV to watch every year. I sometimes play them on Spotify during the holidays when I’m driving around, and I think about that basement and the tree loaded with gifts, my parents coming down the stairs to see their kids hovering around the tree, thrilled with expectation. It seemed like nothing would ever change and that our parents would live forever.

My parents in Boulder, Colorado in 1997 on a rare visit to the West. 

Chiricahua Storm

Storm over the Chiricahua Mountains viewed from the New Mexico Bootheel.

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Southern New Mexico has been in drought since we moved from Wyoming over two years ago. In normal years, the Arizona monsoon brings summer storms, blocking the sun and cooling temperatures. Even then, this is a sunny place, so it's exciting when rains come as they have over the last few days thanks to two low-pressure systems that swept from the California coast across the Southwest and then into the Plains. After rain, locals check their rain gauges and send texts to each other. It can feel almost competitive.

“How much did you get??” 

“We got 0.7 inches. How about you?” 

The sunshine is nothing to complain about, especially for those of us who love the arid West. For most of us, sunny skies and expansive vistas beat the dreary gray and oppressive undergrowth of more humid places. 

Photographically, startling clear blue skies are less interesting than dramatic storms or even well-spaced summer cumuli, so I was excited last weekend while driving home from visiting friends in Bisbee, Arizona when a storm engulfed the Chiricahua Mountains of Southern Arizona. By then, we were in New Mexico’s bootheel, looking west at the mountains where the sun poked through the clouds just enough to highlight a few places in the landscape. It was spectacular, and I stopped to shoot a few photos over the barbed wire fence beside the highway. 

Roadside view. 

The big picture.

Moody version of the storm

Interior Alaska

A view from the Denali Highway.

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We spent our second night on the Denali Highway camped east of the Tangle Lakes at the edge of a large gravel pull-out. The view north across rolling tundra to the Alaska Range and southeast to the Wrangell Mountains was spectacular, and we enjoyed dinner as the sun set, watching the light change on the peaks. But just after going to bed, we heard human footsteps crunching in the gravel, approaching our unlocked van. Immediately alert, we sat up and peered into the darkness. The footsteps passed close and receded. I locked the van from the inside and moved bear spray from my daypack to a bin beside the bed, more worried about humans than bears. 

Ten minutes later a truck entered the pullout and unloaded several loud guys just far enough away that we couldn’t hear their conversation. They left and then showed up again at the far end of the pullout, piling out of their truck and milling around noisily. There was more loud discussion and more driving around. We contemplated fleeing to another camp spot, but neither of us felt like packing up and driving.

Slowly, it dawned on us that these were moose hunters looking for an overdue buddy, presumably wandering the tundra in the dark trying to find the road. A couple of days earlier, one of the few moose we’d seen in Alaska was splayed beside the highway being converted from an impressive herbivore into someone’s winter meat supply. We knew it was the start of moose season when the ruckus began but, in the unexpected anxiety of darkness and half-sleep, hadn’t put two and two together. Eventually we managed to relax and sleep before continuing to Paxson and Delta Junction the next morning.

It’s presumptuous to title a post “Interior Alaska” after driving tiny corridors through the ten or so percent of the interior that even has roads. North and east of where we traveled is the other ninety percent, a vast landscape, much of it wilderness, that I know little about. To access that deeper interior requires bush pilots, canoes, bushwacking, bear spray, and a lot of time. We had bear spray but otherwise were unprepared, so instead we visited Denali National Park, spent a few days driving the Denali Highway, and returned to the Yukon on the Top-of-the-World Highway that connects Tok to the tiny mining town of Chicken before continuing through a remote U.S.-Canadian border station west of Dawson City. 

We nailed the timing except for camping during moose season. Our route traversed a vast mountainous landscape in full fall color with almost none of the mosquitoes that Alaska is infamous for. It only frosted once or twice, though it rained often, and despite it being berry season, we never encountered grizzly bears, though we looked for them eagerly from the safety of the van and nervously while we hiked. We ate huge cinnamon rolls at Chicken just before the Chicken Creek Cafe closed for the season, and we walked through bright yellow aspens to a river where Klondike miners had toiled to dredge up gold over a hundred years ago when the Alaska outback was utterly different than it is now. The only thing we missed was wildlife, seeing almost none the whole time we were in Alaska. Moose and caribou know better than to stand beside the road in September looking like impressive trophies with their enormous racks glinting in the sun. 

This is as close as we got to a moose while in Alaska--an old skull and rack in Denali National Park.

A local denizen in Talkeetna where we stopped to walk around in the rain. In the background is the office of Talkeetna Air Taxi, the famous flying service that has shuttled climbers in and out of the Alaska Range for more than half a century.

Baked goodies at the Talkeetna Roadhouse.

Ellen hiking in the mist on the Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

The foggy crest of Healy Ridge.

A drainage in autumn tundra near the west end of the Denali Highway.

An appealing cabin on the Denali Highway.

The Denali Highway, mostly gravel, was the route used to access Denali National Park before the Parks Highway was built. It traverses a gorgeous tundra landscape and parallels the Alaska Range.

Wood plank bridge over the Susitna River on the Denali Highway.

One of hundreds of small lakes along the Denali Highway. 

Ellen hiking from the MacLaren Summit with our friend Terry. We met Terry and her husband, Bruce, in a laundromat at Denali National Park and ran into them again on the Denali Highway. From there we leapfrogged each other all the way to the ferry at Haines. 

Patterned ground beside a tarn along our hike on the MacLaren Summit.

Lenticular clouds over the Alaska Range. I looked at the forecast for the Denali summit one day while we were in the area: 90-100 mph winds with subzero temperatures and three feet of snow. Not a great time of year for Alaskan mountaineering.

The infamous Alaska Pipeline south of Delta Junction. The pipeline carries oil from the North Slope to Valdez.

Northern lights near Chicken, Alaska. 

The Top-of-the-World Highway crosses rolling mountain ranges from Tok, Alaska to the Yukon border.

Ellen ordering cinnamon rolls at the Chicken Creek Cafe in Chicken, Alaska. Supposedly, miners wanted to name the town "Ptarmigan", but couldn't spell it, so they settled for "Chicken". These cinnamon rolls were huge and delicious.

A floating dredge viewed from a bluff above the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile River near Chicken. These huge contraptions were used to extract gold from rivers during the gold rush.