Walkabout

I haven’t always been a huge fan of hiking.  First, and most importantly, I’m incredibly lazy and don’t like physical discomfort.  Sweating up the side of a mountain isn’t my idea of a good time, the two minutes of incredible views be damned.  The horde of small children were also a deterrent.  While I have had some friends who magnificently wrangled kids through entire summers of hiking challenges, I have always found it easier to avoid the whining and stay home close to emergency popsicles (which should tell you everything you need to know about my parenting).

Recently I’ve found myself back on the trails.  There are multiple factors to blame, primarily that my kids are now all old enough to walk themselves and that El Paso, for all that it has the same population as Alaska, just doesn’t have that much to do if you don’t like shopping.  I firmly believe that anyplace you live is what you make of it; you can only spend so long sitting on butt and binging Netflix without going a little nuts.

Hiking is a big deal down here.  Dozens of trails surround the city, mostly in the Franklin Mountains that divide the West Side from the rest of El Paso.  We’ve hit three so far: Aztec Caves, Upper Sunset, and the Lazy Cow Trail.

I hiked a lot as a kid.  My dad in particular liked taking us on volksmarches in Germany, and I remember me and my three-year-old brother toddling from rest stop to rest stop through various scenic 5 and 10Ks with fruitcake and prizes at the end.  After moving to Arizona, our hiking experiences held decidedly less fruitcake and more snakes. We never went anywhere official, just long walks along the washes and forgotten back roads that are little more than rabbit trails crisscrossing the desert between Snowflake and Woodruff.  For extra fun he’d sometimes bring along an empty bucket for us to load up with either petrified wood or cow pies, then take turns carrying it home.  He used to say it made us stronger.  We used to say we didn’t like him very much.

I tried things a little differently with my kids.  For starters, before hitting the trails, I gave them an orientation because there are rules about hiking in the desert, especially near military bases.  If you’re curious or unfamiliar, here are the main points.

•    Don’t flip rocks over.  That’s where everything lives, and they don’t like you.
• If you hear something hissing or rattling, stop, locate the source, and back in the opposite direction.
• If you see something that looks like a giant corroded metal bullet, don’t kick it.  
• Seriously, don’t flip the rocks over.
• Wear a hat, sunscreen, and drink plenty of water. 
• All the plants want to kill you, so don’t touch them.  They won’t let go without a fight.  You won’t win.
• STOP. MESSING. WITH. THE. ROCKS.
• And, for the love of all that is holy, wear sneakers or hiking boots if you’ve got them.  Not flip-flops, sandals, slippers, dress shoes, or your girly Elsa cowboy boots.  Sneakers. Because I said so, that is why.

Armed with knowledge and extra water, our first excursion was to Aztec Caves.  To be honest, I chose it off name recognition, not familiarity with the trail.  It’s always the first one everyone mentions, and my rule about local adventures is to listen to the locals.  I checked the Franklin Mountains State Park map; it was a 1.2 mile out-and-back, marked easy to moderate.  You think I’d know better by now than to believe trail reviews left by people who actually hike, but if you’ve known me for any length of time you know I tend to just jump in sometimes and stubborn my way through the rest.

It was a twisty, uneven little trail, clearly marked but scarred with arroyos and erosion from the summer monsoons.  It wasn’t difficult, but it would have been easier if several of my crew didn’t have short legs.  The last leg of the trail is a short, vertical scrabble over scree, dirt, and broken bottles thoughtfully left by previous hikers to the eponymous caves.  If you’re curious, the caves actually have nothing to do with Aztecs; when they were “discovered” by settlers, there were bones and artifacts from indigenous people that were incorrectly assumed to be Aztec, but the name stuck. 

We poked around in the caves—which are actually little more than a double set of rooms reaching about thirty or so feet into the cliff face—and had lunch, then started the precarious slide down.  My mom, who was visiting at the time, is kind of a beast when it comes to hiking, but I worried about her and Claudia in particular until we were back on slightly more level ground.  Somehow we all made it back to the car without anyone making friends with a cactus.  Win.

Our second jaunt was back to the West side and the Franklin Mountains, this time to the Upper Sunset Trail, a couple of miles across a ridgeline. It was uneventful.  Like most of the trips I take, it was on a weekday so the trail was pretty empty.  It was one of Rick’s rare days off, so we conscripted him to carry all the water.  He still beat us all.  While the girls and I carefully eased our way down some of the steeper parts of the trail, Rick literally ran up and down the craggy trail like some sort of showboating mountain goat.  Still, it was good to get out, especially with him.

This past week, Rick and the older girls went back to Snowflake.  I’m usually pretty good about puttering around the house, but the oppressive knowledge that summer is almost here and El Paso is only weeks away from becoming hotter than the devil’s butthole made me anxious to get outside while we could.  I herded the smalls, Aeryn, and the dog into the van and struck out for the Lazy Cow Trail.

This time, I at least did some Google homework and found a trail that was fairly flat.  This was partly for the smalls and partly for me—this was the first time we were taking our dog out on a public trail.  If I had to wrestle with the dog, I didn’t want to have to worry about five year olds falling off mountains.

The Lazy Cow is still a heckin’ drive from us, but at least it’s on the eastern side of the Franklins.  We refreshed ourselves on the protocol for bombs and cactus (“Don’t touch that, stupid”) and set off for adventure.  The trail quickly splintered into a warren of dusty tracks.  It was easy enough to stay on larger trails, and I actually have a rather good sense of direction, so getting lost wasn’t overly likely.  Our first wanderings took us past a flood-control basin and into a barbed wire fence; with a couple of snack breaks we navigated back to another, straighter trail that turned out to actually be the Lazy Cow.  By then it had been about two hours; the sun was all the way into the sky, and the kids and dog were ready to go home to check on the popsicles.

The only wildlife encounter (besides with intermittent roving mountain bikers) happened on the way back to the van.  Aeryn had taken the dog and gone ahead while I stayed back with the flagging smalls.  All of a sudden I heard Aeryn yelp; I looked up and saw Thura frozen in a point towards a clump of creosote and Aeryn trying to pull her away.  A snake had crossed the trail in front of them.  What kind of snake we’ll never be completely sure, but if I was a betting woman it’s probably a rattler or a bull snake.  Everyone lived, so it doesn’t really matter.

I think everybody did pretty well, to be honest.  The tween started off a little grumpy but on the ride home conceded it “wasn’t terrible.” The smalls wore themselves out running ahead.  Even the dog did well.  I’d worried particularly about her because she hadn’t been properly socialized as a puppy thanks to Covid and Alaska winters, so while she is a very sweet-natured dog, she is very leery of strangers, especially when she is leashed.  Other than borking once at a couple of cyclists, she was a model citizen.  Like the smalls, she was done by the time we got home and took a good nap.

Mischief managed.

We’re going to try and get a couple more hikes in before summer chases us inside. (Yes, yes, we could always go during the cool hours of the day and all that, but have you ever tried hiking with kids at 5 AM or right before bedtime? I’m going to pass, thanks.)  Our next trip is Hueco Tanks, which promises an easy trail with petroglyphs and a nature guide if I remember to make reservations.  School AND exercise?  Allow me a cruel chuckle.