Arizona Republic (Nov 3, 2025) by Joan Meiners

Day 12, Mile 309 (Passage 31: Walnut Canyon)

Riding my trail rig through Flagstaff on busy streets felt strange after a week in the wilderness. But the car traffic was reasonably courteous about sharing the road, and the miles on a paved surface to reconnect with the singletrack felt easy.

That didn’t last long.

Several sections south of town offered up steep, short, rocky inclines that did not feel particularly rideable on a bike loaded with camping gear and five days of food and fuel. Still, pushing my bike, I was glad to be back on quiet public lands and looking forward to seeing what surprises nature had in store for me this week.

There were many.

First, as I neared the Marshall Lake trailhead about 10 miles south of Flagstaff, I came upon what modern federal or municipal land managers might refer to as a fuels thinning project, and what their predecessors might have called a logging site. Massive stacks of timber loomed overhead. The trail had been cut across by heavy machinery, leaving me second-guessing the route in a few spots.

Thinning the Coconino National Forest down to between 50 and 80 trees per acre instead of the 600 to 2,000 found in some areas around Flagstaff is also critical for protecting the city’s watershed and avoiding a possible $3 billion price tag if fire damages it (again), Smith said.

Tree thinning and prescribed burns are among the best tools scientists recommend for reducing risk where natural fire cycles have been interrupted by human investment in structures that then require firefighting. The warming and drying effects of human-caused climate change also up the ante.

The Trump administration recently used this argument — that overgrown forests are the culprit behind runaway wildfires in the West — to authorize roadbuilding in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, and to push a repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule. This Clinton-era conservation win made about 45 million acres of the least developed, wildest national forest system lands off limits for logging, mining and drilling operations that would require new access roads to be built.

But Don Falk, a fire ecologist who has spent his career studying forest resilience at the University of Arizona, told me over coffee the morning I left Flagstaff that the idea that more logging will fix the West’s wildfire problem is a gross oversimplification.

“It’s absolutely a fallacy,” Falk said at Kickstand Kafe. “Roads are used by vehicles, which are used by people, who set fires. The evidence is all in support of the opposite: that building roads increases the risk of wildfire.”

Without roads that bring humans who build structures, large wilderness areas are usually already maintained in healthier condition by regular, small wildfires that burn unsuppressed, he said. When intervention is needed, “you can still get a crew in to do a prescribed burn or thinning project.”

In the meantime, these wilderness areas harbor diverse migratory wildlife and healthy cycling of water, nutrients and atmospheric carbon, he said, all of which improve human quality of life.

“We benefit from things we can’t see all the time.”

Day 13, Mile 329 (Passage 30: Anderson Mesa)

The U.S. National Forest system covers about 193 million acres, portions of which provide clean drinking water to 80 million people. Some 37 million acres are considered wilderness and 49 million are labeled “suitable for timber management.”

Another 74 million acres are open to livestock grazing — nearly twice as many as were protected by the Roadless Rule.

The second surprise of my week came as a rattling reminder across Anderson Mesa of America’s love (and marketing enthusiasm) for beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and milk (“got it?”). After recent rains, the trail had dried on the sunny mesa into the rutted, bumpy shape left by hundreds of heavy hoof prints.

One of the Biden administration’s environmental wins was to designate conservation as a valid use of public acres under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. This made it possible to hold back certain areas from leasing for oil and gas drilling, logging and other efforts designed to extract private profit from public resources. Many federal scientists whose work has recently been defunded have found that these disturbances, often conducted by foreign entities, degrade the quality of American lands, fragment habitat for wildlife and result in climate-warming emissions.

That rule is also on the Trump administration’s busy butcher’s block as of early September. And in mid-October, the White House announced plans to streamline rancher access to additional acres of public lands for grazing. The Agriculture secretary called the move a matter of national security to prioritize America’s food supply.

I don’t mind sharing the trail with some cows. Some of the water access along the Arizona Trail is thanks to ranchers installing rainwater collection tanks. But, bumping along between manure-filled ponds, I wondered — without conservation as a valid use of public lands — where, someday, the hoof prints would stop.

Day 14, Mile 147 (Passage 29: Mormon Lake)

Back when Arizona had more cattle, one of its signature “Five C’s,” the Flagstaff area also had a thriving timber industry. The second half of my journey across Anderson Mesa and into the Mormon Lake passage made use of the steady grade of old railway lines that had been “hastily constructed by lumber companies seeking to extract timber from the forest,” according to a Department of Agriculture sign posted miles from where I’d last seen another human.

At first, this bit of history kept my pedaling pleasant along a pine-needle padded 0 to 5% grade.

Then I encountered what I’ll always now think of as the “muddy-on-rim” range. As I left the Flagstaff timberlands and entered the highlands heading to the Mogollon Rim, the sticky volcanic mud left by an uncharacteristic week of heavy rain bogged me down more than the Mogollon monster said to inhabit these parts.

I lost count of the number of times I had to stop to scrape mud off my tires, out of my drivetrain or off my shoes with a stick. It took me five hours to go 15 miles. But, alone in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing to do but mosey on.

Day 15, Mile 362 (Passage 28: Happy Jack)

The next couple of days on trail were sunnier and more social, but no less slow. The trail surface seemed to alternate between flat but sticky with mud and drained but seemingly vertical.

Seeing others out enjoying the forest made the miles go by faster. At the Gooseberry Springs trailhead I met “Outlaw,” “AZPopeye,” and “Spam,” three hikers doing a section on the trail with a support vehicle that they used to provide “trail magic” for others — offering water, snacks, even trash removal (thanks, Outlaw).

Seeing me on a bike, hikers I passed asked if I had ever considered doing the Arizona Trail mountain bike race, which takes place this time of year and is a display of some truly astounding athletic feats. The unsanctioned, unsupported event tracks riders as they climb and descend some 90,000 feet on the 800-mile journey from Mexico to Utah, the reverse of my trek. This year’s first female finisher, Karin Pocock, completed the distance in just 11 days, 3 hours and 13 minutes, beating all but three of the men.

I was delighted to share a few minutes with Pocock on course, and later with a few of the men trying to catch her.

Jake Cullen, a racer from Vancouver, was taking a short snack break when I saw him on trail. I asked if he felt like climate change had played any part in his experience.

“The trail goes through a lot more burn areas than I was expecting,” he said. “The southern parts of the trail are really eroded, which might be a climate impact, cause you don’t normally get half a year’s rainfall all at once like happened right before the race start.”

Cullen ended up finishing about 12 hours behind Pocock, who he later said greeted him with hot chocolate at the end.

I was glad to not be on that kind of schedule. But I did have to push hard through this passage to make a trail appointment with Mogollon Highlands expert Tom Fleischner.

We ended up using spotty cell service and the fact that this part of the Coconino Forest is criss-crossed with access roads to identify an earlier intersection to meet. I found him wandering up the trail toward me with his bird-watching binoculars.

After landing a job teaching conservation biology at Prescott College decades ago, Fleischner set out to learn everything he could about the area. He found that the Mogollon Highlands region, largely missed by research efforts based at large universities, has exceptional “beta diversity,” a measure of how quickly the species that are present in any given spot changes over a relatively short distance.

As we walked the trail back to his car, he bent to touch a soft tuft of blue grama grass, a drought-resistant native. It’s clear Fleischner has bottomless fascination and affection for this place. He also has a passion for nature’s right to exist without a human-defined “use.”

“It is for us, but it isn’t only for us,” he said. “Biodiversity has immense value for its own sake, and for the human experience as well. One of the special things about this place is you have a confluence of ecological communities from all over the continent in this region. It’s a biogeographic crossroads.”

We talked longer than either of us realized — about the right balance of having enough access roads so people can get out to enjoy and make use of wild places, but not so many that they all cease to be wild — leaving him to drive home and me to ride on in the dark.

That night in my tent on the Blue Ridge, I listened to the sounds of hunters and bugling elk taking their shot at sustainable coexistence.

Day 16, Mile 392 (Passages 27-26: Blue Ridge, Highline, into Payson)

The next miles of rocky, scenic cliff edges dropping me into Payson had me questioning the sanity of this trail and my own for taking this on. Popping in my earbuds got me through.

On “The Landmark” podcast by the Center for Western Priorities, deputy director Aaron Weiss discussed their recent 10-day tour of Western states, motivated by a series of rollbacks to federal protections for parks and public lands.

“The message from everyone we talked to was clear: Our public lands are not OK and neither are the people who care for them,” Weiss said.

Their panel of environmentalists called attempts to defund federal land management agencies while expanding access for grazing, mining and drilling a “Trojan horse for development to take place.” If they can “make public lands fail,” the advocates argued, there will be less resistance to selling off camping, fishing and hiking spots that are already run-down.

A massive bipartisan groundswell against a provision in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to shift public lands into private hands forced its removal from the bill before it became law in July. The 200,000 public comments opposing the repeal of the Roadless Rule, according to CWP, also show a democratic desire to protect public places.

On another podcast called “Our Public Lands,” environmental lawyers Gary Macfarlane and Katie Bilodeau talked about how the Roadless Rule actually hasn’t been as protective as conservationists had hoped, but it’s better than nothing. In environmental law, wins are temporary and losses are permanent, Bilodeau said.

Lifting my wheels up rock stair-steps after crossing East Clear Creek, I thought about something Don Falk said about people wanting their favorite places to never change.

Change is natural, he said. But nature-directed change is best.

“If we can make room for that, without feeling like, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look the way it did when my grandfather was having a picnic,’ then maybe we can preserve something we can live with and even celebrate.”

And as I rode into Payson well after dark on the bike bypass route around the Mazatzal Wilderness — bicycles are strictly banned from wilderness areas even where drilling, mining and logging operations find a way in — it felt obvious from the week’s mud, rocks and inclines that no matter what we do, nature always bats last.

It’s up to us to find ways to share space and survive.

 

Read the article online here.