Fugads Geocaching Blog: Cutting my teeth in the Pecos Wilderness

We've only been in New Mexico for a week, and already my head is full of hiking possibilities. Lonely caches, remote wilderness peaks, unfound caches in obscure wilderness canyons... m,an I live for this stuff. So with our house mostly getting settled, I took a day off from moving in to go out and tackle one of my new nearby wilderness adventures. There were several hikes/caches I was looking at, but the one I settled on was a recently published cache called North Macho Falls. It was placed only a month ago, mid may, but nobody had gone after it yet, and there was no one watching it. I could tell why, the description talks about a brutal off-trail trek up and down a wilderness canyon. It talks about needing to have expert route finding skills, and repeatedly stresses the rugged nature of the area. Yeah, that sounds like something I'd be into. I packed up my kit and got up at 5am. Made a quick coffee and was on the road soon after, on my way to adventure!

Sunrise on my drive into the Pecos

Just driving to to the starting point for this cache had some hiccups. I totally missed the turn off for forest road 123 and lost nearly a half hour of time doubling back. Then driving up FR123A was slow going in my CR-V. Luckily the road was passable for my poor little SUV, which is more like a mini-van than an adventure mobile. I crawled my way up several steep rocky sections, and eventually made it to the coordinates that the CO had given for one of the starting points. It was 7am. I wolfed down a banana and hit the trail.

An easy meadow for the start of my hike

All smiles at 7am

There wasn't a trail really, I was just following a drainage/creek down until I reached Macho Creek. And it started off pretty easy, with an open meadow. The meadow didn't last long though and soon I was rock hopping the stream bed, which was choked with willow and other brush. The going got slow, but I forced my way down it, sometimes resorting to climbing up the embankments to escape the lunch vegetation of the stream bed. I reached Macho Creek in 50 minutes and was delighted to immediately see a pool full of trout. They were roiling the water every step I took, fleeing from my shape. Most were pretty tiny, but in the bigger pools I caught glimpses of bigger fish.

The descent down to Macho Creek

The going was slightly easier in Macho Creek, it being a bigger drainage, but it was still kind of slow. A short ways upstream though I came across an old mining camp, and from the camp was an old road bed leading up the canyon. This provided only a short 0.1 miles of easy walking before the road disintegrated and it was back to boulder hopping and brush-beating. I passed a really large and nice swimming hole, which had to be passed on the right by climbing up a steep crumbly slope. I made a mental note that I could swim here on my return, but plowed ahead.

Mining camp

Nice swimming hole in Macho Creek

In a short while I came up to the North Fork of Macho Creek, which was where the cache lay. The intial foray into North Macho Creek involved a steep climb over a few waterfall pools, where much to my dismay I discovered poison ivy. I thought I had left that behind in Tennessee! Apparently not. And to add insult to injury, at one of my rest stops I felt something crawling on my leg and discovered a tick! What! I thought we were done with those when we drove out of Tennessee. Two big disappointments all in one hike.

Rock formations near the confluence of North Macho Creek

TICK!

North Macho Creek seemed to have a whole lot more waterfalls, carved into the granite like bedrock. The trout continued up the creek as well and I was in awe about how they could have migrated up beyond some of the waterfalls I had circumnavigated. I began to suspect that they had been "seeded" higher up in the creek, but this theory was shot through when I reached a long dry section of creek-bed, and then encountered not a single trout beyond that point. It seemed unlikely that there would not be trout upstream if they had been seeded from up on high, so perhaps that means that the trout really have jumped up the many waterfalls at the start of this creek.

I can't say what the main macho Creek looks like, but the North Macho Fork was just wonderful. I lost count of how many waterfalls and pools I had passed (I kept better track on my way down, marking each one on my GPSr). Often the going would be slow around these waterfalls, or in the thick growth that often choked out the bottom of the ravine. but at other times there were open meadows, and easy walking. I had a few miles to go up this creek bed, and I cherished those miles, taking in the various sights and sounds. The warbling vireos were going full blast this morning,a s were tanagers, warblers and thrushes. At one point I flushed a grouse but rather than fly off to get away from me, it tottered a little ways off and did a broken wing display. I suspected there was a nest or young nearby, so I cautiously crept up the slope to where the grouse had flushed. I couldn't spot anything, I climbed up onto a fallen log and peered around some more. The mother hen kept displaying, trying to lure me in her direction, but I was scanning for a nest or some young. i took a step down off the log and a baby grouse exploded from practically under my foot, a flurry of brown feathers arcing away from me across the gorge. The other soon let up her feint, and made her way over to where the baby had flown.

I made it to the coordinates for the geocache at 10:20 am, and found the cache almost immediately. The coords were actually pretty good considering the canyon walls, and the cache isn't that well hidden. But how many people would stumble their way down this canyon. my guess is that unless a forest fire sweeps down/up this canyon, this geocache is good and safe for decades to come. I wasn't at all surprised to see a blank log. I took a few minutes to compose a log entry, then rehid the cache and sat down to eat my sandwich lunch. The waterfall that the cache was hidden by was not flowing nearly as much as the pictures the CO had posted showed. It made me appreciate how much more difficult the route was only a month ago, with volumes more water to contend with

Falls near the geocache, not much water right now

The CO had hidden this cache on a one-way route from the ridge-top in front of me, but I was going to backtrack down North Macho Creek. While I wouldn't be covering new ground, I was looking forward to taking a dip in one (or more) of the many pools. I also wanted to see if I could catch a trout with my bare hands. Some of the trout I had passed were in tiny shallow pools and it seemed like I should be able to corner one and scoop it up. I also kept track of the waterfalls on the way down, marking each one with my GPSr. I'm not sure how consistent I was with marking them, and may have counted some small cascades as waterfalls, and missed others. But in general it gave me a good idea of how many cool spots there were along this hike. Here is what the route looks like:

North Macho Creek Waterfalls

The waypoint named "Trout Limit" is the extent furthest extent up the stream that I saw trout. beyond that point, the stream was fish free, much to the enjoyment of the water striders. Not that there is one section of very dense waterfalls. This section looks like this:

Section of many waterfalls and pools

this section was especially nice, with cascade after cascade, each with lovely little pools that would be perfect for bathing in. At each waterfall, I would create a waypoint with the Code WF# with sequential #s working down from the geocache waterfall. I also added the approximate height of each waterfall.

Section of dense waterfalls

Once I got down to where the trout were, I set about trying to catch one by hand. The trout seem to be adapted to this kind of hunting style, either by bears or racoons, and would immediately scurry to dive head-first under rocks where they would wedge themselves out of sight. Unfortunately, some of them were too big and in too shallow pools to get completely out of sight, and I spent some time chasing them about the shallow pools until I finally landed a couple. Somehow, it felt reassuring knowing that I could catch fish with my bare-hands out here, like I would be able to forage my own food if needed and live out in the wilderness.

As I made my way down North Macho, it finally began to get hot. The moringin had been cool and enjoyable hiking weather (although I wish I had worn pants instead of shorts for all that bushwhacking). I se tmy sights on one of the best swimming pools, WF13 as marked on my GPSr. This pool wasn't very wide, but plunged to a nice depth of 10' or so and had both a nice jumping off ledge, and a convenient shallow exit point. Just perfect for cooling off.

I water was cold, but not overly so (like little Chasm Falls on the Rio En Medio trail a few days ago) and I could have relaxed there for quite a while if it hadn't been for the thunderstorms. The massive grey clouds seemed to come up out of the north and practically out of nowhere. First just a few faint rumblings of thunder up on the ridges above, but growing steadily until the canyon nearly roared with the noise of thunder reverberating up and down its walls. Kind of scary stuff, although I felt safe from lightning strike down in the canyon. There was the hazard of flash flooding though... So I hastily put my clothes on and started rushing down the canyon. I took a bit of video of the storm chasing me, and while I pretty much suck as a vlogger, the video is amusing enough, and is good enough to close out this blog post.