Arizona Republic (October 27, 2025) by Joan Meiners

Day 7, Mile 196 (Passage 37: Grand Canyon South Rim)

From the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, I cruised south on a paved, downhill path out of the park toward Tusayan, riding with Ryan Choi, an ecologist in from Alaska and an old friend. It was a cool, sunny morning and we were feeling breezy on our bikes. The rest of my crew from graduate school left that morning in their truck after one last evening talking science and adventure around the campfire. It was just the two of us now, on our bikes in the wild.

Rader Lane, the ranger, said researchers had found that the elk might be crowding into the village because the Coconino Rim just south of there, where we were headed next, had a particularly high concentration of mountain lions. The lions liked to avoid tourists, so the elk cozied up to them.

In our graduate programs, Ryan and I had, for the most part, been taught how to evaluate the patterns of nonhuman animals. Community ecology, or the study of coexisting organisms, is a relatively young branch of science, and rapidly changing. Only within the last generation has the field embraced the reality that humans have an outsize influence on the natural world. Many departments still separate this into a “human dimensions of conservation” category.

As we set up camp that night, mountain lions weren’t really on my mind. We slept near Grandview Lookout tower, which offers uncommon views of the evergreen fingers jutting out along the rumpled and red South Rim. In the morning, Laurel Major, a friend from Flagstaff, joined us with her bike for the weekend.

Day 8, Mile 216 (Passage 36: Coconino Rim)

The next night, though, Rader’s fun fact about the cougars along the Coconino Rim echoed loud in my head at 3 a.m. when I awoke to screeching and chirping noises on either side of my tent.

Reader, when I tell you that not recording the audio of this is an oversight that haunts me even more than the presence of predators right outside my tent, you’ll just have to believe me. We were out of cell service and I had turned my phone off to save battery. And while I did spend a while telling myself the sounds could possibly be exaggerated elk bugles, I knew the timing and chirps were most likely coming from large cats.

Somehow, Ryan and Laurel slept through this (they must lack my lifelong insomniac familiarity with 3 a.m.). Ryan was cowboy camping, laid out on the ground like a feline appetizer, so I was glad to see his head hadn’t become a chew toy in the morning when I emerged from my shelter.

Day 9, Mile 234 (Passage 35: Babbitt Ranch)

From camp, we could spot just one windmill. I’ve seen similar setups on other ranches, where a lone turbine provides power to a well pump filling an off-grid tank for cattle or wildlife. It wasn’t until we descended several rocky, meandering switchbacks and tucked under some capsized trees — angling our bikes sideways to get through — that we saw the fleet of them, towering in formation as if on duty. You could imagine, here, why Don Quixote took offense.

As we pedaled through the squadron, I thought about the war our own government seems to be waging against literal windmills. Some of President Donald Trump’s first actions back in office for his second term were to issue executive orders revoking permits for wind power projects, redefining “energy reserves” to exclude wind and most solar and calling for American oil reserves to be “unleashed.”

Other leaders across the country appeared to heed this call to arms. In February, I covered a bill introduced in the Arizona House that would have banned the construction of wind turbines within 12 miles of any property zoned for residential use. With a colleague at USA TODAY, we calculated this would eliminate 90% of Arizona from consideration for this renewable power.

While nearby property owners may reasonably view specific wind projects as too damaging to the land, climate activists assert that solutions require sacrifice. Broadly fighting wind power statewide with a 12-mile-wide brush may be, in this mindset, the definition of quixotic.

Global markets, myriad analyses have shown, are tilting into a reality where wind and solar are the cheapest ways to generate electricity. It took time to get the critical minerals and tech operations up to speed. But once the infrastructure is in place, gusts and photons are free.

Yet in 2024, Arizona generated just 2% of its net electricity from wind and 13% from solar, despite being ranked among the top five states for wind potential and overall sunniest — a resource often marketed more to winter golfing tourists than retail energy providers. Renewables experts tell me that, in a world ruled by logic and economics rather than imaginings about the wrong enemy, both numbers would be much higher. And climate scientists have long been clear that transitioning away from fossil-fueled power is our best hope at preserving a livable environment.

This wind project on Babbitt Ranch, I later learned, is one of Arizona’s largest with a 163 MW capacity, enough to power about 40,000 homes. In 2023, Phoenix-area utility Salt River Project invested $280 million in the installation as part of its progress toward a 15% renewable energy standard that, in 2025, state utility commissioners voted to repeal. In 2024, the wind energy started flowing not to homes, but to a Google data center in Mesa. Sometimes forward progress is its own illusion.

We used our own power to pedal through these menacing threats to an oil-based society. Then we watched them blink a soft, festive red that night from our campsite on a distant ridge.

Day 10, Mile 262 (Passage 34: San Francisco Peaks)

The next morning, we were savoring coffee made from the clear, cool water pouring straight out of a pipe into the East Cedar tank when a thruhiker walked up the hill to join us.

“Lonesome,” her trailname, was as thrilled about this as we were. Water is hard to come by on the Arizona Trail. And not having to filter out bugs and debris from a shallow puddle is also rare. A common first topic of conversation with the other hikers on trail so far had been where we’d all found luck filling up. At a tiny state wildlife “drinker,” we’d met another hiker, “Thrifty,” who had begrudgingly walked a mile out of his way on injured feet to the source marked on the offline trail app as the last reliable option for 20 miles.

“It’s a very different situation on the Arizona Trail,” said Lonesome, who teaches elementary school in Arizona but grew up on a ranch in New Mexico. She’s hiked sections of the Colorado Trail and said water was less on her mind there. Now, she gauges how careful she has to be about water each day based on whether she feels chilled enough to put on her fleece when she wakes up. “I knew it was going to be a toasty day and I’d need more water. So there’s more planning thoughts like that.”

Matt Nelson, the Arizona Trail Association director, told me before I got on trail that it’s been a challenge making sure the ongoing Western megadrought doesn’t render the trek impossible.

“The last couple years have been extraordinarily dry,” Nelson said, adding that he thinks every long distance trail is now prone to some added planning obstacles related to climate change.

Fortunately, he said, they’ve had success installing rainwater collectors in a few dusty stretches. But he can’t control whether or not they fill.

“Someone asked, ‘Well, what if it stops raining?’ And I think, then, we’re gonna have bigger problems statewide.”

Limited water in the form of snowpack in the San Francisco Peaks has already caused several bigger problems. When Snowbowl, Flagstaff’s ski resort, secured approval from the Forest Service to use reclaimed wastewater for snowmaking in 2005, the plan sparked a now 20-year conflict with local tribes who oppose blanketing slopes they consider sacred with sewage.

The existential threat of climate change also affects winter sports athletes and alpine enthusiasts worldwide. In 2024, a study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee predicted that only 56% of previous Olympic Games sites would have enough snow to be a suitable host by 2050.

During graduate school in northern Utah, Ryan and I spent weekends with our friends out exploring the Bear River Mountains on backcountry skis. He laments recent shifts in the traversability of Western peaks.

“Like these yellowing aspens all around us, Snowbowl is sort of at the upper range of its climate here now,” he said as we sat in the shadow of Humphreys Peak, Arizona’s highest point at 12,637 feet. “There really isn’t a whole lot of room for adaptability in these warmer, drought conditions.”

This, of course, is trivial compared to the risk the Colorado River Basin’s shrinking snowpack poses to nearly every Southwest settlement, livelihood and life form that relies on its steady trickle downstream. The seven states dependent on the river’s dwindling flows have been locked in tense negotiations over this for years.

Before we stopped for camp that night, we made sure to not pass the Kelly Tank water supply. According to posts on the hiker app, the natural tank has long been dry. But a “trail angel” has been stocking a nearby bear box with gallon jugs.

It’s one example of the interventions now required to bring balance back to climate-altered landscapes that are legitimately — unlike Quixote’s tilting at windmills — under threat from human activity altering predator-prey dynamics, energy flows and the future of adventure opportunities.

More immediately, the Kelly cache is a crucial link in a stretch of increasingly unreliable water sources that recent hikers have flagged with updates like “sticky, sticky mud on my shoes,” “es no bonita,” or, simply, “no joy.”

Day 11, Mile 294 (Passage 33: Flagstaff Urban Route)

As we rolled into Flagstaff the next day to long-awaited showers, I thought about Lonesome on the trail behind us.“I don’t feel like you have as much awareness about climate change,” she had told me, “until you’re out here and you’re trying to find water sources and figure out how to balance things.”