Portal, AZ - Rodeo, NM

Hike report, Dos Cabezas Wilderness 5/9/24:

Everybody sees the Dos Cabezas Wilderness area as they drive west on I 10 but hardly anyone goes there.  Lucky us - it is a beautiful place worth exploring:

  

Six of us met at Foothills Road and we met two more hikers in San Simon.  We carpooled through Bowie towards Apache Pass, turning off the paved road onto Happy Camp Canyon Road.  We made a quick stop to admire some wildflowers, then continued to an old Ranch site that some call Sheep Camp (cows there now).  This spot has interesting bedrock mortars, including one set on a vertical rock face.  Some theorize that an earthquake tipped the rock off to vertical - others think it was a climbing wall :)

We had to make a slight detour around a beautiful brown Diamondback Rattlesnake (which didn’t rattle) and went up a steep cow trail onto the first bench above the desert. 

 

Pine needle milkweed, mesquite, ocotillo and several cacti were in bloom.  We looked at pictographs under a boulder and enjoyed the incredible rock formations all around us.  

There is no trail, only routes used by the cattle to negotiate through the sparse vegetation.  Boulders and bedrock covered the hillside as we climbed up the drainage.  We got to an upper basin for lunch in the shade of a huge rock (next to pools of water and a velvet ash tree) and contemplated how long a lever would be needed to move a certain rock off the hilltop. 

After lunch four people hiked a bit further to look over the ridge top to the north above the Indian Bread Rocks Campground.  

We headed back down the route (more or less) that we came up.  We only hiked about 4 miles total, but with 1400 ft elevation gain.  We took a brief drive to the Indian Bread Rocks Picnic area then returned to Portal.

Next week we will travel over Onion Saddle to the Chiricahua National Monument and hike on a Park Service trail.  Meet at the Silver Peak parking lot at 8 AZ, 9 NM.  Bring lunch, water, hat, sunscreen and camera.  We will try to arrange a shuttle so we can hike downhill from Massai Point to the visitor center.

Hike report from Al, photos from Elaine