Arizona Republic (Dec 8, 2025) by Joan Meiners

Rest of Day 35, Mile 800 (Passage 4: Casa Blanca Canyon)

Traversing the Santa Rita Mountains toward the final passages of the trail manifested ups and downs in new dimensions.

My conversation with Arizona Trail Association Director Matt Nelson at Kentucky Camp had been energizing after so much solitude on trail. But it also delayed my start on the 30 miles into Patagonia.

When Nelson turned back after joining me for a few miles, I pressed on with gratitude for the expertly laid singletrack that contoured along steep hillsides while offering rose-gold sunset views of snowy purple peaks above softly backlit tufts of Santa Rita Mountain grama grass.

Then things got weird, as they tend to when new shadows cast on unfamiliar landscapes are filtered through a brain that has spent entirely too much time alone. The fading light forced me to focus on not losing sight of the trail’s abrupt cliffside edge. This became harder when I passed piles of green, still-steaming large-cat scat just as the last sunbeams abandoned their post as my witness. After dark fully set in, I paused for a snack and glanced to my left to find a cow’s skull staring back at eye level from its eerily lofted perch in a juniper tree.

I had almost made it up the last climb of the passage when I noticed a string of lights drifting silently toward me in a ghostly smooth, gently bouncing motion. Given the evening’s Blair-witchy vibes and my having met almost no one else bikepacking this trail in 800 miles, and definitely not after dark, it didn’t occur to me that it might be mountain bikers.

When they caught up to me at the high point, I was feeling low and ludicrous, sitting by the trail trying to recharge my night-riding lights with my solar battery pack, which had not been as reliable in recent cloudy conditions. The damp evening was turning chilly, as was my enthusiasm for this whole endeavor, particularly these remaining miles after dark.

My worldview tends to be rooted in science and hard evidence for what is real. But I can’t deny feeling like the universe had sent me an angel from the darkness in Ashley Klassen. Not only was this professional ski guide from Colorado keeping up with her three male companions on a six-day bikepack of the Arizona Trail, but she somehow found the energy to lend me a brighter light and ensure I made it to Patagonia in their company.

In a group, I was revived. The thrill of pushing the pace on terrain that remained shrouded in blackness until illuminated two seconds before our wheels were suddenly navigating its rocks and cliffs and cactus pushed all else from the mental spotlight.

I had spent most of my trip riding cautiously, over-carrying water and food, planning out every interview and storyline and trying not to make any mistakes. But there’s nothing like the alchemy of outdoor adrenaline, adventurous companions and a late-night dose of athletic audacity.

Day 36, Mile 824 (Passage 3: Canelo Hills West)

Safely in Patagonia, I met with Tom Nelson, the current board president of the environmental nonprofit Save the Scenic Santa Ritas.

The organization was started 30 years ago to keep mining out of the Santa Rita Mountains, he said, and has spanned opposition to a string of attempts. The most recent project, Copper World, will “supply the copper that we use every day and the copper essential to powering our green energy future,” according to its proponent, Hudbay Minerals.

“Hudbay is the third company to try this here,” Nelson said. “Mining is central to the history of Arizona, particularly copper mining.”

But that doesn’t mean it needs to happen in every part of the state, he added. Hubday’s first phase plans to invest $1.7 billion to generate copper and jobs over a project lifespan of 20 years. After the ore has been extracted, smelted and used in products like plumbing systems, wind turbines and electronics, the impact across 4,500 acres in the heart of the Santa Rita Mountains would leave behind an open pit that Nelson said would dip below the region’s water table. As a result, water would collect in and evaporate from the hole forever in a region where the survival of wildlife, plants and trail users often depends on small, dispersed pools.

The mine would also force a reroute of passage 4 of the Arizona Trail, which I had just ridden at night with new friends.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has already granted the required air and water permits and Hudbay has purchased land surrounding the mining site. But the company has yet to complete its final feasibility study, Nelson said, and the plan still faces legal challenges related to the disposal of 1.9 billion tons of waste rock. Like the activists opposing mining at Oak Flat by Resolution Copper, this group trying to save the Santa Ritas argue that there is plenty of copper available for recycling from urban spaces or mined from less sensitive or sacred areas.

Hudbay counters that its plan will secure better outcomes for both the environment and miner safety, due to stricter domestic regulations, compared to if the global demand for copper was met overseas. In less developed nations, conditions in and around mines often border on humanitarian crises of indentured servitude, toxic exposure and more.

Hudbay has not escaped these allegations in its international operations. It recently settled three lawsuits over human rights violations in Guatemala that included rape and murder.

Still, the company and some locals I met at Oak Tree Trailhead last year during a tour of critical minerals sites say that mining in the United States allows more control over how much damage is done to both the global environment and the community of humans within it. The question of how to weigh local versus global impacts of climate consequences and climate solutions is one that often seeps into these tough conversations like scarce water into a desert mining pit.

That evening in Patagonia — a town founded as a trading center for surrounding mines that now thrives as a tourist destination for birders and bikers — it rained so hard that my only pair of pants were drenched in the time it took me to run across the street to the only open restaurant. I ate my enchiladas while dreading what the downpour was doing to the trails.

Sure enough, the sticky surface of the connector segment back to Arizona Trial passage 3 brought up haunting memories of being mired in muck the previous month near the Mogollon Rim, and forced me to employ a new mud-scraping stick within an hour of getting back on trail.

By the time I reached Canelo Pass near the end of the day, however, the soils had shed their squish and I was able to make it to a tent spot with a view that fellow travelers had described on the trail app as “resplendent.”

It was. I bundled up and spent my last solo night of this whole journey perched on a rock watching a cold, undulating fog accentuate the final landscape layers between me and Mexico.

Day 37, Mile 846 (Passage 2: Canelo Hills East)

In the morning as the clouds cleared, I saw that my surveillance of the Canelo Hills scenery was itself being surveilled by a hovering blimp belonging to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. It felt like being watched by the all-powerful Oz, if Oz was also cutting a track for a giant wall to control traffic on the yellow brick road. Each time I crested a hill, I saw the blimp overhead.

In Tucson, I had met with Sarah Swallow, a bikepacking pioneer who has carved out a career as a routesetter and international gravel biking ambassador. My first question for her was what she thought of the Arizona Trail’s route up and down every accordion fold of the state’s landscape.

She laughed and answered, essentially, that she prefers gravel roads that connect places and people in an experience that feels more like community building than rock scrambling with a bike. When she designs routes, she looks to link remote vistas with interesting rural towns.

Swallow has bikepacked all over the world. We traded stories about men who have seemed to insist we should be afraid of doing this. “Aren’t you scared to be out there alone?” “Don’t you worry about running into the wrong types?” “You’re doing this all alone, all by yourself?” This last question was posed to me no less than six times by one man at the bar I’d stopped at for water before Saguaro National Park. At that point, yeah, being alone seemed like a risk and I waited until he left before continuing. But most of the time, I felt comfortable in my own abilities and preparations and lucky to be able to transport myself through such beauty.

As she rides through places like Tajikistan, where she witnessed glaciers melting and floods that washed away a main bridge, Swallow has thought more about threats to rural lifestyles than about suspicious individuals. In Morocco, she passed through a village that seemed to be aging out of existence after its youth fled impossibly harsh new conditions.

“I am meeting migrants in all of these places, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Belize,” she told me. “And they’re making their way to the United States because their old lifestyles don’t work anymore, often because of drought.”

Swallow has met migrants in southern Arizona while out riding her bike, and has stopped to help families exhausted from heat exposure and the desert landscape. After watching a group of cyclists ride right past migrants slumped on the side of the road ready to surrender, she decided to get involved in bringing more humanity to bikepacking.

So she launched the Rute del Jefe, which she described as a binational cycling festival designed to give people a more emotional and contextual connection to the places and issues that span the border between southern Arizona and northern Mexico. It’s on hold for 2026, but will resume in spring 2027 to raise awareness about wildlife migration corridors and borderlands communities divided by ongoing wall construction.

Toward the end of the day I also met “Packtoter,” who runs a YouTube channel of the same name where he answers questions from thruhikers. He has already hiked the Arizona Trail multiple times but was out enjoying the southern passages before the holidays.

I rolled up to the Parker Canyon Lake Trailhead at sunset two minutes after my shuttle back from the end of the trail had arrived. After so much wild solitude, seeing one of my oldest friends sitting in my own car that I had packed with treats and comforts for the final night and last day of this journey hammered home that this experiment I’d been planning for the past two years and chipping away at for the past two months was nearly done and dusted.

Day 38, Mile 859 (Passage 1: Huachuca Mountains)

In the morning, Darin Grassman, who I had befriended when we were 11, packed up the car while I loaded my bike with all my usual gear, determined to finish the trail with the full load. We examined the map together and picked a meeting place at a road junction two miles from the Arizona Trail’s bike route endpoint at border monument 103.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration had other plans. When Darin and I arrived at the trail’s final turn, we were met by a sign that the road was only open to construction access. I knew there was border wall construction happening in the area, but I had been assured there were no explosions planned for that day so I’d expected to be able to roll right to the border.

I was trying to decide what to do when a white SUV rolled up and a security guard asked what I was doing there. I explained: I have ridden and dragged my bike nearly 900 miles on treacherous trails across the state from Utah over the last two months and I was not about to stop within sight of the end point.

To this man’s credit, he took this declaration surprisingly well and offered to escort me through the heavy equipment so that I could still claim victory in this quest. So I rode the final two miles with a border wall security guard and my childhood friend following in vehicles, mentally sifting through the layers of meaning in this moment as I descended to its conclusion.

Unfortunately again, the spot to which I was granted access by construction crews did not include any border monument. A supervisor told me that no such thing existed but that I could have 10 minutes at the metal barrier marking Arizona’s southern extent. With a background of excavators scouring new east-west access routes in the hillsides to limit south-north travel, we snapped some photos then loaded my bike into the car.

I had heard about the southern terminus of the Arizona Trail for hikers, which was a short distance away and not open to bikes, being recently walled off into Mexico by razor wire in preparation for the border wall. And I had asked Matt Nelson about that during our interview a few days prior.

“The end of the trail is one of the three most important points on the journey, with the other two being the start and some point in the middle where you have a transformative experience,” Nelson said. “It’s a beautiful contradiction, to go from this freedom of these landscapes to a barrier.”

When he found out about plans for wall construction near the Arizona Trail’s end, Nelson had requested a meeting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They granted it, but answered few of his questions. He came away with the impression that these officials had zero qualms about cutting off the triumphant conclusion at the border end of the Arizona Trail, and that they may even derive enjoyment from disrupting such experiences and values.

“I thought that all the legislation that was in place would provide some kind of protection,” Nelson said. “But no, they just got waivers for everything. Then they targeted high profile and ecologically sensitive areas for construction first.”

“At what cost are we willing to create this barrier?” Nelson asked. “The landscape will recover someday but the impact to wildlife, migration, scenery and the trail experience will last.”

After driving away from the construction zone, Darin and I decided that it all felt a bit anti-climactic and that we should drive up the road and also hike the trail to the other terminus.

When we reached it, I climbed through the razor wire to touch the southernmost point on the official Arizona Trail, as much for myself as for future travelers on the route who will arrive at this spot to find the monument walled off behind steel bars 30 feet high.

Back in the car heading north at twilight, the journey home felt like a hurried unraveling of the insights, moments and miles I had shed literal blood, sweat, tears and shoe rubber to stitch together inch-by-inch. I was glad that Darin, who has witnessed so many other weird events in my life, had been there for the end.

Climate change will unravel our world in both predictable and unpredictable ways. We have the scientific knowledge and collaborative networks to be able to warn and take care of each other as that journey unfolds. Or we can silo ourselves off and navigate the darkness divided, in fear of the unknown and of doing things differently.

At a time when million-year-old peaks may give way to 20-year mining projects for the production of powerful communications technologies, we get to choose whether that path connects or crumbles our access to nature and community.

We decide if it ends with a monument to success or razor wire.

 

To read the article online, click here.