Arizona Republic (October 20, 2025) by Joan Meiners

Editor’s note: Over seven weeks this fall, Arizona Republic climate reporter Joan Meiners is biking the length of the 850-mile Arizona Trail from Utah to Mexico to report on how climate change is affecting the state’s landscapes and communities. You can follow her journey in a series of weekly dispatches, beginning with this one, which takes her from Arizona’s border with Utah, through the White Sage burn scar and around the Grand Canyon.

Day 1, Mile 0 (Passage 43: Buckskin Mountain)

My first day on the Arizona National Scenic Trail started with a near-knockout punch of a climb.

Within half a mile, my longtime friend Danny Sadleir and I were pushing our bikes up the rocky switchbacks leading away from the trail’s northern terminus at the Utah border to make our way south up Buckskin Mountain toward the Kaibab Plateau.

At one mile, I tripped on a loose rock, fell into another rock, and blood trickled into my sock. Months of planning and training and years of pitching this idea to my editor — and I hadn’t even lasted an hour fully intact.

Two minutes later, it started to rain, which brought relief from the heat though it meant stopping to seal up the electronics and deciding whether sweating under a raincoat would be worse than just absorbing the storm. When you live outside, keeping your body mostly dry and within the right temperature zone is an unrelenting pursuit.

Eventually, we gained the ridge and began to pedal again. For the next few miles, the iron-rich, red-hued trail — a classic signature of the southern Utah, northern Arizona expanse — dipped and twisted through soft green sagebrush and gnarled juniper trees. It had rained hard the night before, after a long spell of seasonal drought within a much longer multi-decadal drought. This high desert plateau, the source of slow-trickling groundwater that bursts out from the bedrock at Roaring Fork springs to supply the demands of Grand Canyon tourists and beyond, needs the rain, so I didn’t mind the inconvenience. Plus: petrichor.

At camp that night, my friend Glenda Yenni, who met us in her truck, warmed up brats on the camp stove (the first night out allows for refrigerated luxuries) while I set up my tent and adjusted how my fork bags attached to my bike. With 900 or so miles and six weeks still ahead of me to the border with Mexico, I wanted to make sure all my gear seemed ready to stick it out.

Glenda is an ecologist, and Danny’s partner. She’s particularly good at identifying plants and noticing subtle shifts in how species mixtures carpet the landscape across altitudes or latitudes. We met in grad school, and I’ve traversed countless Southwest backcountry destinations with her since. Stopping to examine a shard of Anasazi pottery or a sun-bleached animal bone. Pausing to appreciate ancient petroglyphs or a primrose that blooms for just one day.

In ecology, a species mixture, a collection of coexisting organisms, is called a “community.” Together, these living puzzle pieces complete the picture of how any given ecosystem appears and functions. If you’re someone who needs to count things, it’s measured in biodiversity. If you’re a community ecologist, the sum is always, mystifyingly, greater than its parts.

Day 2, Mile 11 (Passage 42: Kaibab Plateau North)

The community that built the Arizona Trail was inspired by a Flagstaff schoolteacher named Dale Shewalter, who attempted to walk from Mexico to Utah in 1985. After he succeeded, he set about persuading others to try it too and to help designate an official, maintained route.

Arizona State Parks got on board, as did the Kaibab, Coronado, Coconino and Tonto national forests, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. They formalized a partnership in 1990 and birthed the nonprofit Arizona Trail Association four years later. The construction of one last connection along the Gila River completed the trail in 2011.

Like any stable ecosystem, the route is constantly in flux and requires ongoing repair and renegotiated relationships with neighbors. It has breathed and rebounded through rock slides, wildfires, drought and government shutdowns. All the while, it’s been a team effort.

On my second day biking the Arizona Trail, we crossed into the burn scar of the 60,000-acre White Sage Fire, a lightning-sparked conflagration less than 2 months cold. Our surroundings went from green to black in a line so stark as to be rarely found in nature, which prefers to operate in gradations.

Little life was left in this spot where White Sage’s fury must have been severe. The soil was black. Between the black skeletons of still-standing trees, black burn holes showed where the root systems of others had been eviscerated.

Southwestern ecosystems evolved to tolerate and even thrive amid low-intensity fires. But the blazes now raging through Western forests, fueled by warmer temperatures and excess dried-out timber — a result of human attempts at fire suppression and landscape mastery — are testing the limits of biological adaptation.

When the Dragon Bravo Fire torched the Grand Canyon’s North Rim in mid-July while the White Sage Fire spread further north, politicians immediately jumped to assign blame. The National Park Service’s handling of the initial spark came under fire, as did the U.S. Forest Service’s management of thinning efforts. The Trump administration’s recent crippling cuts to all these agencies were scrutinized, along with the policies of former President Joe Biden.

Climate was barely mentioned, though scientists have been studying and shouting about its relevance in worsening wildfires for years. At an ecosystem management conference I attended in Flagstaff in September, UCLA researcher Park Williams presented data showing that the annual area burned in the Western United States has expanded by 258% since 1985 — despite parallel increases in federal suppression costs and no rise in human ignitions.

The difference, he told me, comes down to temperature.

“When we look at how much forest area burns in a given year, or what proportion of that area burns at high severity, we see extraordinarily strong relationships to the heat and dryness of the thermosphere,” he said. “It’s very hard to imagine how those same relationships would not be applicable on the timescale of decades. As the climate has gotten warmer and drier, forest fires have grown larger and more severe.”

This is not to say that forest management has not been important, he clarified.

“But it’s not an either-or question, and there’s just no basis behind the argument that the increases in forest fire sizes and severities in the Western U.S. are only due to mismanagement.”

Fortunately, biodiversity often confers an ecological community some resilience. Soon after pedaling past the northern edge of the White Sage scar on the Arizona Trail, we crossed into patches of forest it had skipped or only singed.

A cluster of flowering orange globe mallow stood amidst a circle of healthy grass left waving in the wind to sparse surroundings. A few miles later, a stand of purple lupine appeared to be thriving immediately next to a charred tree trunk.

In the desert, being able to hold on to just a little bit more moisture than your surroundings can make all the difference.

Day 2, Mile 17 (Passage 42: Kaibab Plateau North)

We saw the creeper when we stopped for lunch. It made its way down the trail, then turned and descended the hillside in our direction, hauntingly slow. A woman with a long, large-toothed saw walked in front and three men in hard hats followed.

Journalists tend to be the type of people who run toward suspicious scenes. And by nature, wilderness lovers threw normal precautions to the wind long ago. So I sidled over to her for a chat (there was no real danger, of course).

Young and vibrant, with a dark braid that matched her burned surroundings, Olivia Woods works as a full-time contractor with Flagline Trails, building, restoring and maintaining trail systems. But on this Sunday, she was out on the Arizona Trail as a volunteer. After spending the morning clearing deadfall, the crew was returning to their vehicles at the pace of the creeper machine, a mini excavator that can plow a new path through difficult terrain.

Along with a dozen others camped out at the end of the passage, they’ve been tidying up the state’s hiker thruway in the wake of the White Sage Fire. The volunteer community’s dedication is a crucial puzzle piece in how the trail ecosystem functions.

Another central piece — help from the feds — has gone missing lately. Even as wildfires grow more damaging and agencies find themselves in the crosshairs of the mismanagement blame game, federal funding to hire wildland firefighters, study forest resilience and fire patterns and conduct prescribed burns has been slashed by the Trump administration like a logging clear-cut.

The threat started ramping up decades ago, when humanity’s widespread burning of fossil fuels for energy slowly began to change the chemistry of the atmosphere into a warmer and more chaotic one. It hit a fever pitch in Arizona this July when dry, hot, windy conditions in an overgrown forest allowed the runaway Dragon Bravo to become the state’s seventh-largest wildfire to date, and to burn the Grand Canyon Lodge to the ground.

With the loss of visitor facilities and the risk of mudslides and falling trees, the park’s northern side was closed until further notice along with more than 50 miles of the Arizona Trail. By the time Glenda and I rode Passage 42 months later, lifting our bikes over many burned logs still in the way, portions of the trail had reopened as a direct result of volunteers clearing the most dangerous hazards.

This free labor makes public lands an absolute steal of a deal for taxpayers, Steve Linton told me. He came up from Mesa to help piece Arizona Trail access back together, retiring each evening to a camper in the relatively deserted North Rim region of Jacob Lake, my endpoint for the day.

I ran into Linton twice on the trail, miles apart. After a morning clearing deadfall with Olivia Woods, they flipped to a section further south, ahead of my path, where I was excited to see him again. That’s “thruhiker” community ecology in action — in the middle of nowhere, seeing a vaguely familiar face can feel like a reunion with an old friend.

Linton has been volunteering with the Arizona Trail Association for about five years, and has put an estimated 60,000 miles on his personal truck in the process. He handed me a business card that identified him as the steward of Trail Passage 27A, atop the Mogollon Rim. It advertised the experience as replete with free exercise and new friends. Another volunteer I’d met a mile or so earlier, Art “Karts” Huseonica, had a similar card, which seemed to prove the point.

Linton has met hikers from all over the world while doing trail maintenance. And he’s watched with frustration as politicians push proposals to sell off public lands.

“They’re sitting in an office somewhere, and all they see is, ‘Oh, we can make some dollars doing this or we can create some jobs doing that,’” he told me trailside. “But we can do all of that by creating these trails and getting tourism on them. It’s profitable, and oh my god, the mental health benefits are huge.”

Day 3, Mile 27 (Fire detour)

The economies along the northern Arizona Trail passages are as interconnected as the ecosystems in which they thrive.

At Jacob Lake Inn, personnel manager Melinda Rich Marshall, whose family opened the remote outpost in 1923, told me that — in addition to owning the only gas station or restaurant for many miles — their business has taken responsibility for maintaining the region’s water infrastructure. The Kaibab National Forest visitor center relies on it, as does every tourist and firefighter who stops for an overnight or a bathroom break on their way to the North Rim.

The tiny Jacob Lake tourism industry played little role in creating the conditions that caused parts of the forest surrounding it to look like the crispy inside of a pizza oven. Fierce and focused firefighter defenses left the immediate vicinity peacefully intact, reflecting the historic Inn’s importance to the region.

But if the business still shutters for lack of visitors turned away by the damage, it may precipitate the decline of access to North Rim viewpoints and adventures — just as biodiversity loss often forecasts the ecosystem failures that follow.

Day 6, Mile 172 (Fire detour)

While trail volunteers and a skeleton crew of federal employees and contractors work to restore access to the passages of the Arizona Trail that have — in every other year since the route was established — ushered hikers and bikers rim-to-rim right through the Grand Canyon, this year’s cohort was forced to make other plans.

My ride around the canyon with all my gear (I’m a stubborn purist, so I’ve insisted on carrying it all the whole way) was, thanks to climate-fueled wildfire, 100 miles longer than the official portage, and busy with traffic. I’ll skip detailing the long days on hot asphalt with semi trucks and motor homes speeding past that felt somehow unendingly uphill and into the wind. Suffice to say, the experience made me even more grateful that volunteers like Woods, Linton and “Karts” are tending to the trail.

On the third of four unseasonably warm fall days of this detour, Glenda caught up in her truck with our friends Kerry Shea and Ryan Choi to find me lying in the meager shade of a juniper tree with 6 miles left to our site at Desert View campground. Sour gummy worms, Kerry’s company on her bike, and the promise of a rest day revived me enough to finish the climb.

We end this dispatch as I arrive at the South Kaibab Trail connection to the rest of the route near the South Rim’s Grand Canyon Village. Two thousand miles away, the government had shut down as the nation’s leaders fought to contain their own wildfires.

 

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her award-winning work has also appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, ProPublica and the Washington Post Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles, on BlueSky at @joan.meiners.bksy.social or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.