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    Categories: Lifestyle

Climbing The Florida Mountains Of Southwest New Mexico

Summitng South Peak From The West Side Made For A Long Day.
 
The day started as soon as it was light in the east.  I’d gotten the food and water ready the night before and was on the road before sun up.  It’s not a long drive to where the cattle guard and gate mark the end of the pavement, and the beginning of a quickly deteriorating two track road.  The further I went, the worse it got.  The mountains were still quite a ways but rather than beat up my pick up driving through the sharp rocks and boulders, I parked in what appeared to be an old gravel pit, down off the ridge, and began walking.  Parking where I did would later prove to be a mistake.

It was a gradual and gentle walk to the base of the Mountains through barrel cactus, dried grass and rocky terrain to where the mountain got steep and the hiking got difficult.

A lot of the climb was hand over hand, up windswept chutes and through loose rock footing.  I could see where Ibix, desert goats brought in from deserts in the Middle East,  had gone.  I tried to use their route but I couldn’t get enough of a foot or fingerhold to make it to the next rocky, little plateau.  At the bottom of some of the slick rock chutes I could see where goats had made a run and then hoped their momentum and flailing feet would carry them to the top, before gravity took them crashing to the bottom.  Not wanting to end up in a pile of rocks thirty feet down the mountain, I skirted the faces until I found climbs more suited for mortals, and not just playgrounds for mountain goats.  At various times, I tried climbing where it was obvious the  goats had gone, only to find I had to backtrack and look for someplace more climbable, and not just a runway and slick rock.  

Mountains are like many things in life, they trick you into believing you’re almost there and the summit is just over the next rise.  Often, when you get there, you find what you thought was the top is nothing more than a false summit, with more of the same beyond.  Picture taking was limited to rest breaks, it was too steep and the rocks too loose to get a secure foothold. 

Ibix are very elusive creatures.  I never saw a goat, and hadn’t expected to.  Occasionally, I was lightly showered with small pebbles but it was impossible to say if it was a goat far above or just the wind that caused the rocks to dislodge.

The wind had hardly been a breeze down on the flats but as the height increased, so did the wind.  The mountains on the big island of Hawaii are a good example of the phenomenon.  The tradewinds might be blowing twenty on the beach but on the summit the wind could be one hundred mph or more.  As the wind contacts the mountain, it’s compressed and added to the air above.  The more air that’s added, the faster it rises, that was the case with a west wind, on the west side of the Floridas.  At one rest stop, on an overhanging point, I wasn’t able to take off my backpack for fear it would be blown over the edge.

After multiple dead ends and traverses across the slope, I could see what I thought was the real summit.  An old, gnarled juniper clung precipitously to the rocks.  The top of a post, with rusty guy wires holding it semi-vertical, could be seen above and to the left of the tree.  The juniper provided a good foothold and the scene below offered some excellent photo opportunities. 

On the top, I filled out the sheet that was stuffed in a plastic pill bottle along with the stub of a pencil.  Most of the entries were dated and, from the notes that were left, it had been a long time since anyone had visited that spot.  The climb had been difficult, but worth the effort. 

Looking north was a view of Deming, NM  that could only otherwise be possible from an airplane.  East was Gym Peak, my climbing challenge on another day.  South were mountains in Mexico and southwest were the Tres Hermanas that had seemed so large when on their summits, but now so small in comparison.  To the west was the aerostat balloon, almost eyeball height from where I was standing at 7000+ feet.  Below to the east, and hundreds of feet lower, I could see a Border Patrol helicopter disappearing around the mountains that taper off to the south of Gym Peak. 

Looking east, and down slope, I saw some type of a building, juniper trees and what looked like cottonwoods.  New adventures are more likely on new trails, so I chose not to backtrack and headed down the mountain in the direction of the trees.

 

Larry Miller: I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.
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