We scour our AllTrails maps for days, looking for hiking trails with water and cooler temps to escape the dry scorching sun. The state suddenly seems so small; the "water features" all warn of super packed trails, so I sigh and keep looking, my hands heavy from holding my phone, zooming, reading, filtering. That's when Doug texts: "I made the mistake of looking at Greer...OMG!"
"Are you ready for this?!" he asks when I pull up to his condo Friday afternoon, throwing his duffel in the Subaru trunk before we head up US87 to Payson.
Doug and I gather our hiking gear and leave our cozy cabin around 10 am to find our Saturday trail, the Government Springs 95A. The walk there is nice, with towering trees and rich morning stillness, but we’re already out of breath. At more than 8,000 feet elevation, Greer--located at the far east side of the state, near New Mexico-- is the highest town in all of Arizona, and we're feeling the burn even on slow ascents.
We make a bet when we start the trail of how many people we’ll see; I say three groups, he guesses five. He wins. The first part of the trail is thick slick mud that then leads to shin-high snow pockets that suck us down at the same time we crack up. It reminds me of my hell hike in Colorado, in 2020, when I panicked and almost lost my shoe. The difference today is that the snow is really spotty and mostly rare--aside from the white, there's lots of dry moon rocks and brambles.
We lose the trail over and over in all the rocks and shadows, even though we can’t actually get lost since the whole thing winds along the Little Colorado River. Butterflies flit around us, enriching the aesthetic: the sloping views to our left and right are hillsides of bare, burned trees and everything carries the air of a depressing winter morning in Tennessee. But I try not to complain–we’ve already pointed out that neither of us complains a lot, and we don’t want to start. We do, however, agree that we should just eat lunch at one of the river’s small "waterfalls" and turn back without reaching the actual end. There's not much sun or wildlife at our chosen spot, just the sound of splashing water and the crunch of salty snacks.
The way back is faster and much quieter. We stop along the river and skip a couple of stones and look for fish. We reminisce on the night earlier, when we had a couple tall jack'n'cokes at the Molly Butler Lodge & Restaurant, when I glanced at the elk head on the wall and called it a moose. Someone threw the Dixie Chicks on the jukebox and Doug and I danced, the whole while me saying 1,2,3, step and glancing at my feet. Buzzed with Jack and Green Tea shots, we met an old wrinkled man named Earl; he warned us about ghosts in the lodge and told us he’s from Maryville Tennessee; we decided Earl himself was a half-ghost who shows up like a spirit guide, the perfect mountain man you meet in a small town bar.
"If anybody asks," Doug reflects as we walk back to the cabin, "we’d say it all started with a mountain man named Earl and a shot that went down too easy."
We relax in the cabin for a short while before heading out again for our afternoon hike–Amberian Loop. The trail starts on the other side of the small river, across a collection of wet and slippery logs; we keep low, our hands outstretched for balancing, and then begin the hike. It's supposed to be only a couple of miles long but we take a wrong turn that leads us around the base of the hill we're supposed to climb and past someone's decorated backyard; I smirk as Doug jumps back and tosses a rock at a rubber rattlesnake.
After about twenty or thirty minutes of walking the wrong way, with little change in scenery, we assess more closely our AllTrails map and turn back around. The views from the actual summit are sweeping, but everywhere we see hills of burned trees--wheat-colored slopes littered with brown logs like a bag of spilled pretzel sticks--and scattered stands of pine. I wish I had binoculars not for the scenery but for the homes, the far-off cabins people capped with green roofs and solar panels. I often wonder why people choose to live where they do, when their multi-story homes suggest they could afford a remote getaway anywhere, somewhere more beautiful. I often wonder what people find beautiful, and how often it changes. When I was in high school, I hated the desert. Now I know the colors and sounds, the tumbleweed and the way cactus grows and falls and deflates and dies, the way everything is constantly reborn. The hikes today feel similar to Tennessee, when you see little wildlife and trip over things in your path. There is no clear way forward; only a few trail markers we lose in our travel; the wind is so variable, and I constantly take off my sweaters only to put them back on. We end up near a pile of bones before guessing our way back to the path, where I bend down again and again to tie my unraveling shoe.
After the hike, we drive to Safeway about 20 minutes outside of town, listening to the Dixie Chicks and Fast Car and Tub Thumping and Fleetwood Mac. At Safeway we get S’mores and water, then drop our things off to go eat at the lodge’s restaurant, where Bavarian music is playing. I feel so happy sitting there by the window reading an all German/Hungarian menu, trying to decide whether I want CurryWurst only because it reminds me of Mom. I end up ordering The Original instead, a two-sausage platter with fried potatoes, sauerkraut and red cabbage, and then steal mashed potatoes from Doug's Hungarian meatloaf plate. He tells me to have as much as I want, which is the perfect response. We hot tub afterward on the frigid deck of the lodge and make smores around the cabin's fireplace, the melting mallows perfectly crisp against the graham.
On the way back to Phoenix, we're talking about bucket list items when Doug suddenly rubbernecks in the passenger's seat and exclaims, "That guy's walking across the country! We should go talk to him!" So I turn my Subaru around and we park off the road and wait for Travis to walk by, a retired veteran who was hiking from Arizona to Maine to raise money. He tells us a little bit about his life story, the rehearsed part about battling depression and fighting chronic pain by walking around, and how he’s not religious and hates taking pills because they make him feel sluggish. I notice the wedding ring on his finger and he says his wife and son have been extremely supportive of the whole venture, and he even had a dog pal for a brief time but his pup couldn’t keep up with him. We take a picture and wish him well, then drive toward Tonto National Forest for a hike.
When we get there, we realize the chosen route we wanted was closed for hazardous conditions. On the map, Woods Canyon Lake doesn't look so far away; we don't measure or calculate miles, we just swing on our backpacks and head down gravely federal roads. We walk and walk and walk in a straight line, with woods surrounding us, and by the time we've walked two miles we realize it will be another two before we get to the lake. We're hungry but committed, and we have positive inertia, so on we go.
Lunch tastes soo good when we arrive–working up an actual healthy hunger, rather than eating out of routine or necessity, is one of my favorite parts of hiking--and I nibble on so many snacks on a picnic table in the sun. We stay a while, saying how perfect it all is, then walk the four miles back, bantering about what we’d name the town we’re walking so far to establish. He decides he could see himself as a town banker or rancher. The road seems so long, never-ending, and I say how strange it is that everything is just desolate, that there’s no wildlife anywhere, and Doug stops walking and is like, "well, you taught me to just…" And we both stop and listen and hear birds singing and many small things crunching, like a haze lifting until you can start to see edges and lines.
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