Thursday May 9, 20.3mi/32.7km

Road FR679 (110.8/6320ft) to Pine Creek (131.1/5920ft) (Arizona)

At some point during the night last night, the wind had shifted and smoke from the prescribed wildfire had made its way to my camping area. It wasn’t a great night of sleep, and when I started hiking in the morning it was in a forest that looked like it was in eternal sunrise.

As the morning progressed, the winds shifted again and the air started to clear up a little bit. I passed by the first of several cow ponds and noticed a whole family of cows standing around having a breakfast of grass, of course.

After a couple of hours I picked up the Tramway Trail, which descended into the canyon of West clear Creek.

It’s a massive 700ft deep canyon and I had pretty good views, even despite the smoke.

Looking East, the views were quite a bit more smoky.

It was an impressively engineered Trail, as it seemed impossible to get down the steep cliff walls. There were a few little steep sections of trail, but overall it was a nicely graded and switchbacked trail.

At the bottom of the descent I entered into a green tunnel of lush vegetation, which must be loving all the water down here.

Once I was at the bottom of the canyon, there was no longer an official trail, but only a series of herd paths that I linked together to make progress downstream. Every time the creek went around a bend, I would have to cross it before I got cliffed out on one side or came to a deep pool of water.

But it was really fun walking in the creek for a couple hours!

I kept coming to insanely deep pools of water that were hugging the cliff faces, and created some really cool scenery.

I would follow these nice little herd paths through the riparian vegetation, most of them were actually pretty good trails.

Well this area is difficult to get to, it’s not completely undisturbed by people. I saw a few campsites with campfire seats made of rocks!

It was slow 1 mph progress through the canyon, but I didn’t mind with all the gorgeous scenery.

When the river wasn’t capturing my attention, the cool sandstone cliffs and boulders were.

And this little lush waterfall looked like it was out of a magazine.

As I was walking through the water in one of the shallower spots, I saw a couple of these tiny crayfish.

After an hour and a half of meandering through the canyon bottom, it was time to climb back up to the rim, using an official trail.

It was quite a steep trail gaining 500 ft in half a mile. I got to the top pretty quickly, and then walked some nice forestry roads through a Ponderosa Pine forest. I had just sat down for lunch, and a truck pulled up with the official emblem of the USFS.

The guy was super nice and we chatted for a while, apparently he remembered me from hiking in Northern California 4 years ago on the Bigfoot Trail. Small world! He was driving through doing a sweep of this area to make sure everybody had exited the forest, as they had just expanded the wildfire closure area yesterday to include this section. I finished my lunch and walked a couple more miles down dirt roads, exiting their official closure area. I dropped down into a much smaller canyon, which had another neat old ruins of a cabin.

Much to my excitement, I got to follow another small stream for a few miles.

This one was much smaller, so I didn’t have to get my feet wet but it’s always fun to walk next to a flowing water source under the shade of all the riparian vegetation. As I hiked upstream, eventually the water mostly disappeared and it just became a dry wash.

And for the rest of the afternoon it was just some nice forest hiking.

Though I did start to notice these strange little chevron symbols on the trees, marking some sort of trail.

I had been very gradually climbing since I left Clear Creek Canyon this morning, and by now I was up at 7200ft elevation on the plateau.

My last task for the day was to drop into Pine Canyon, which I could see very clearly from the top of the rim.

This trail goes directly to the village of Pine, and seemed quite popular as it was wide and easy to follow.

It didn’t take long to get to the bottom of the canyon, and I hiked a couple more miles to try to reduce my hiking tomorrow. I found another nice campsite underneath some Ponderosa pines!

Tomorrow, a town day!