Written by Dexter Kopas, Wild Stew Field Crew Senior Crew Member.
Gather round! Spring has sprung anew! The sun shines hot, reaching the low 90s Fahrenheit in Tucson, and wildflowers abound. Wait… Isn’t it still February? Yes, it is! Might we have fallen into some sort of time warp? A temporal gulch of sorts? Clearly, something chronologically fascinating has just happened! What’s that? The Wild Arizona crew was working on the Temporal Gulch Trail (#595)? Good heavens, someone must have fallen into the titular wormhole, which causes time to skip around. No wonder Tucson set daily temperature records on the last three days that our crew was working to maintain this beautiful, if temporally treacherous, trail. My my… Well, what did they get up to in the meantime?
Before succumbing to the Temporal Gulch, our crew journeyed just south of Tucson to the Cave Creek Canyon Trail (#149). Located on the far side of the Santa Rita Mountains from the popular Madera Canyon recreation area, this trail was expected to be in rough shape, given the time that had passed since the Forest Service last had it maintained. However, after a scouting trip on day one, we found that the 3.6-mile-long trail was in good condition overall. Fortunately, it appears that there is a strong network of volunteer work being done. So, with the help of a welcome visit by the Coronado National Forest’s Recreation, Heritage, and Lands Staff Officer, Adam Milnor, we decided to spend just two days working on the worst parts. In all, we brushed 2 miles of trail; built 2 steps, 2 armored drains, and 6 drains; cut 5 logs off the trail; and rebenched 300 ft of tread.
In the 1870’s, gold was found on the eastern slopes of the Santa Rita Mountains, leading to a rush of small exploratory mines being dug in the area. This was the origin of the Cave Creek Canyon Trail, whose lower half lies on an old roadbed until you reach the ruins of the Rock Candy Mountain Mine. Many more abandoned mines were encountered while driving to our new worksite at Temporal Gulch, and on after-work bike rides on the wide network of trails and two-track roads that crisscross the parallel drainages off of Mt Wrightson.
With our primary trail objective in good shape, we moved camp to a cowpie-covered field of mustard flowers beside flowing waters to access the Temporal Gulch Trail. A trip up the bumpy road took us from there to the trail, while the sun beat down harder each day. While Cave Creek featured pinyon-oak-juniper woodland over yellow grasslands, Temporal Gulch was a rocky grotto slot canyon featuring a slow-moving series of interconnected puddles. The trail was well-traveled, but encroaching vegetation and ambiguous stream crossings had pushed hikers far and wide, so there was much to do for defining a single, easily followable route. Detective hats had to be donned several times to determine where the trail used to be. We built steps, retaining walls, and a big drain, but most of our work was the steady flow of brushing cat-claw and building cairns to mark stream crossings.
As usual, many deep thoughts were spoken, laughs were shared, and natural treasures were found (but no gold). The highlight was a petite whiskered screech owl by Davis, who has recently been on quite a bird phase. He captured this amazing image of the little half-foot-tall fellow. All in all, the trip was well worth the chronological anomaly caused by our disturbance of the Temporal Gulch. Perhaps next time we can return here in August, and cause time to skip ahead to winter.
