Pangs of home, missing daughter and wife, haunt me for the first few miles as they always do. This time things would be different, later on and halfway up Little Creek, I'd break free of my other life and fully live in the one I was walking. For now, dropping into Little Creek from the scorched rim above, I spot Inov-8 trail runner tracks in the hardened mud. Looking up, five horsemen pass by, two carrying bloodied elk skulls, racks spread wide behind them. "Where did you find those?". "We're the shooters, we just pull the trigger." The guides in front of the line pass word that the elk were in McKenna Park.
Grasses high, ponderosa spaced wide. McKenna Park is as great of a place as I'd imagined it. No severe burn here, just the feeling of "healthy" fires having passed by. Pines and yellow-leafed Gambel Oak left with tons of space as they were meant to have. I'm scanning for elk, and hoping to find wolf tracks due to the story I'd been told back down at Little Creek before starting the climb out. He'd heard two Mexican Grays last summer while camping with his dogs. "Wildest thing I've ever heard. Incredible."
Turning around after failing to photograph the subtle beauty of this park, a man hikes up, wind jacket glistening with sweat. Bill is from Tucson and has been coming to what he considers the best Wilderness in the Southwest for 40 years. We chat capital W wilderness and he can't stop saying "You Get IT! You're living it!". Blushing and awkward we talk about our reverence for the Gila, the sopping wet earth here, it's vast size, these trees. He's counted the rings on a ponderosa pine cracked across the trail, "175 years old! The Gila was still part of Mexico then." His enthusiasm and cheer help me cruise the remaining miles down to White Creek as it dumps into the West Fork of the Gila River just as darkness fell.
Staring at topo maps under a full moon, headlamp barely needed, I decide to re-route my trip. 20 miles of sloshing down the Middle Fork to make camp at Jordan Hot Springs now seemed like an idiotic idea in the deep chill of autumn. Instead, I decide to traverse the mesa between the West and Middle Forks, allowing me to visit Prior Cabin on Prior Creek. The foliage had been enjoyably vivid on this hike, and I'd hoped that a north-trending drainage would hold good deciduous trees. My leaf-peeping notions were slightly misguided, but the location of the cabin did not disappoint. Built into rolling hills in an open meadow, this is for some reason not what I'd expected. The Forest Service has done work to this cabin, the date 1954 scraped into concrete at its foot. I'd hope to catch it in a crumbled state like Skunk Johnson's cabin on Big Dry Creek, and was sad to see it locked up and in nice shape. Internet sleuthing upon returning home shows that the Forest Service built this cabin back in the '50s. Why had I wanted so badly for it to have been built by some pioneering miner trying to make a go of it in true wilderness?
Poking around downstream trying to find the evaporated trail, I run into a large hunting camp. No one is around, but the smell of horse shit is intense. I hike cross-country only to run into the trail which is now pockmarked by hooves and filled in with puddles. As I'm stumbling and annoyed by the trail, three elk dart across the trail, crashing through the grass and brush. I smile wide, mind wiped clean.
In the deep shade of the Middle Fork, my toes burn cold with each meander. Soaked to the waist, my focus is intense while picking a route through milky, translucent white water. I've picked a shitty crossing, and at this steep bank of reeds, the water is now up to my navel, swift. Reminding myself to keep it together, I prod my quivering ultralight trekking poles into the slimy boulders beneath for one last lunge upward. Smiling huge, dripping cold, I realize I've finally embraced the Gila as home. Not once on this trip did I find myself daydreaming of the snowy angular peaks of Colorado, insted excited for the humble beauty of where I then stood. The intensity of the fords never dropped off, but their effect on my mind did. I slipped through the water with relative ease, later grateful to share Jordan Hot Springs with only two bullfrogs on its edge.
