Mt. Baldy Wilderness (White Mountains, AZ): July 2024

In mid-July 2024 Herman, Brian, Eduardo and I spent three days backpacking in Mt. Baldy Wilderness in the White Mountains of Eastern Arizona.  It was a very relaxed trip that covered only about 16 miles over three mellow days.  The trail started at an elevation of 9,200′ and climbed to 11,200′, making for mild midsummer temperatures that were a delightful break from the blazing heat of the desert. Happily, none of my pre-hike worries—altitude sickness, thunderstorms and lightning, bears—came to pass, and all in all it was a very enjoyable trip. 

Day 0 

We headed north out of Tucson around 8 AM on July 15, aiming for Globe and Show Low, where we would turn south-east towards the trailhead.  Traffic was light and we made good time.  We had an issue with the air conditioner in my car, but luckily Herman knew how to fix it using refrigerant we picked up at an auto parts store in Show Low.  

The trailhead is about an hour's drive from Show Low, and our plan was to camp somewhere nearby overnight.  We found a very pleasant campsite off FS 409.  There were a few other campers around in RVs, but parked far enough away that it didn't really feel like we had neighbors.  It didn't take long to set up camp, and then we sat around and relaxed.  The sky turned cloudy above us but we didn't get any rain.  The evening was calm and quiet, and we turned in around 8.  There were a couple of brief rain showers overnight, but the sky was clear and glittery when I went out around 11:30. 

 

Our campsite off FS 409

 

Day 1 

The day dawned clear and crisp, with a cloudless blue sky.  We were on the trail a little before 7.  After a brief stretch on East Baldy Trail we headed roughly due north-west on Baldy Crossover Trail.  It passed through a mix of pine forests and open meadows.  The hiking wasn't hard, but I could definitely feel the elevation on the uphill portions.  There were a lot of tree roots and rocks sticking out of the ground, waiting for unwary hikers, and we had to step carefully and focus on where we were going.  

Baldy Crossover Trail

There were lots of wildflowers along the trail: showy yellow sneezeweed, shy little bluebells, and little white daisies, with bugs and butterflies flitting among them.  Likely the coolest part of the day's hike was when we came out of a forested section at the edge of a meadow and startled a large herd of elk (Brian counted 18) that took off away from us.   There were plenty of mosquitoes too, big ones that looked like miniature attack helicopters and didn't seem the least bit fazed by the bug spray I squirted on me.

After about 3½ miles on the Crossover Trail we came to the West Fork of the Little Colorado River.  There was a dubious sort of "bridge" consisting of a couple of wobbly logs lying across the creek, and not all of us were able to get across with our feet dry.  

The Crossover Trail ended on the West Baldy Trail right after the creek crossing.  We turned onto the West Baldy Trail, which generally headed southwest alongside the creek  for the next several miles.  Our plan was to camp near the water that day, then take water with us for a dry camp the next day.  After a couple of hours of hiking Brian found a nice secluded campsite by the creek , and we set up camp shortly before noon.  As we sat and relaxed in camp that afternoon, every so often we would see hikers on the trail walking across the hillside across from us.

West Baldy Trail (lower portion)

Although the day had started out clear, clouds had been building up on the horizon as the morning went on, and by early afternoon they covered the sky.  A little after lunch it began raining, sending us scampering for our tents.  There was quite a bit of thunder but it didn't seem to be very close.  I fell asleep for a little while to the sound of raindrops on my tent.  The rest of the afternoon was relaxed and lazy.  After dinner we stashed our bear canisters a safe distance away.  I headed into my tent for the night around 7:30.  A storm rolled through a little after midnight bringing a good amount of rain and some loud peals of thunder, but other than that it was a pleasant and peaceful night.

 

Day 2 

The sky was clear and cloudless when we came out of our tents in the morning, but everything was soaking wet from the overnight rain.  The ground was soggy, the grass was wet, and digging any sort of reasonable hole was next to impossible.  The rainfly on my tent was soaking wet when we packed up camp, luckily I had a spare trash bag that I could carry it in so it wouldn't get the rest of my gear in my pack wet.

We got on the trail a little before 7 AM.  There were no water sources nearby where we expected to camp that night, so we had to carry enough water for an overnight dry camp.  I was carrying a total of five liters of water, and the unaccustomed additional weight in my pack made me just a little bit off balance.  We had to cross the creek to get on the trail, and tiptoeing across a smooth log while off balance from the heavy pack was tricky.  But we all managed to make it across without any mishaps.

For a while the trail meandered along a hillside that more or less paralleled a large long grassy meadow, then began a gradual climb into a pine forest.  Once in the forest the trail grew rougher, with a lot of downed trees blocking the trail that had to be climbed over.  The sun was pleasantly warm and although I was huffing and puffing from the elevation, the hiking wasn't especially hard.

West Baldy Trail (upper portion)

As we climbed higher the vegetation changed.  The sneezeweed and the bluebells disappeared, replaced by what I think were lupines and, for a brief spell around 10,000′, columbines.  As we approached 11,000′ there were a lot of dead and dying trees, victims of bark beetles and years of drought.  In some places where there were more dead trees than live ones.   

 

We reached the junction of the East Baldy and West Baldy trails—which, at 11,200′, was the highest point of the hike—around 10:30 AM.  There was a nice campsite nearby but it was just a few yards inside the White Mountain Apache Reservation, and unfortunately we didn't have a permit to camp inside the Reservation.  After a little searching we found a workable campsite just outside the Reservation.  There were enough flat spaces in between the tall trees for our tents, though many of them were dead, and the thought of camping so close to so many dead trees in peak thunderstorm season made me uncomfortable.  Dead trees aren't very firmly anchored to the ground, and if one got knocked over by a strong storm and fell on a tent, someone could get very seriously hurt.  But we didn't have a lot of choices, so misgivings notwithstanding, we camped there.

The clouds thickened as we set up camp, and a little while later there was a good-sized downpour.  We all retreated into our tents.  I think I may have fallen asleep.  The weather stayed unsettled all afternoon: a few drops of rain, then sunshine and patches of blue sky, then rain again.  After a while we gave up on trying to anticipate these changes in weather and decided to go ahead and start making dinner.  Thankfully the rain held off and we had dinner and sat around and relaxed for a while.  It was a very pleasant evening.

 

Day 3

It was still dark when, around 4 AM, I was awakened by the sound of wind in the trees.  We were quite sheltered where we had camped, but I worried that the wind could be the leading edge of a storm coming through, and I was already uneasy about all the dead trees around our campsite.  So I lay in my tent, listened to the whooshing outside, and fretted.  Slowly it grew light outside.  At some point the wind calmed.  No downed trees.  Yay!

As on previous days, we were on the trail by 6:30.  Our packs were light, and the day's hike was an easy six miles of mellow downhill.   The landscape was very similar to the previous day's hike,  with one small stretch of an amazing dense thicket of bright purple wildflowers.  A short section of the trail passed through the Apache Reservation, and interestingly, that stretch seemed a lot better maintained than the rest of the trail that ran through National Forest land.  Closer to the trailhead, there was an area with big rock formations vaguely reminiscent of the top of Mt. Lemmon.

East Baldy Trail

We had the trail pretty much to ourselves: we didn't see anyone until almost the very end of the hike.  The miles unwound quickly, and we were back at the trailhead a little after 10 AM.