City Folks Saddle Up for a Trail Adventure

Patagonia Mountains horseback riders get a taste of the Old West City Folks Hit the Trail

Sylvester Mowry has been absent from the Patagonia Mountains for at least 100 years, so it's hard to guess what he might make of our little procession. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Our horses saunter the narrow trail through rocky defiles and small meadows bursting with wildflowers. Certainly the year could have been 1860, considering our mode of travel, except we are not soldiers or miners or politicians. In the 19th century, Mowry had been all three in the country through which we are riding.

A small group of city dwellers in search of the quintessential Western experience, we are headed back in time to savor the joys of going slower, but we're not going to cut ourselves off from the 21st century completely. The wranglers and guides may be wearing spurs and bat-wing chaps, but they're also carrying cell phones, and one of them, we discover, knows how to cook like Julia Child.

As we set out from Rio Rico, a resort on the Arizona side of the U.S.-Mexico border, I am painfully conscious that it is April Fool's Day. Not that this has any particular significance. I can only speak for the others, and they do not appear to be fools. Like the characters in the movie City Slickers, they just want to do something a little different on their vacation.

Suzi Offenberger, for example, normally spends time selling cashmere clothing to millionaires in Boston and Nantucket when what she really wants is to experience the joy of basics getting rain-soaked in the mountains, leading your horse through slick mud, trying to get your feet back into those sopping boots. Ah, yes, this is the life.

"My friends back East think I'm crazy," Offenberger says. Her husband, a psychologist with a National Hockey League team, does not share her love of the Wild West. From her description, I can almost see his bemused smile when his wife gets off the plane in her cowboy dress and pointy boots. Offenberger and the others on this trip have taken previ-ous excursions with Dan and Melody Skiver, the wranglers and owners of Ride the West, and by now they feel like part of an extended family.

Dan and Melody met us at Rio Rico, where they man-age the stables, and told us that the next morning-the first full day of our riding and camping excursion-we'll take a short day trip to see if we're compatible with our horses and saddles. Everybody seems so enthused about the trip that it becomes clear to me several of these guests would ride a horse with nothing more comfortable to sit on than a coating of Elmer's glue.

Most of the guests have brought their own cowboy hats, spurs, chaps, buckskin jackets, leather gloves and high-fashion Western shirts. If you're going to play like Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, you might as well look the part. Certainly they do not look like they make a living selling furni-ture in California and Wisconsin. But that's our group, a handful of furniture dealers, a woman who owns an art gallery in El Cajon and an executive in the federal government whose title is longer than a sleepless night (and who happens to be an experienced rider). They all look like they've just come in from a day of branding calves in Alberta, and after 24 hours they're starting to sound like it, too. Pretty soon they're gonna start writin' cowboy po'try.

After meeting our horses, we start on a storybook journey through meadows blanketed with swirls of yellow, white and red wildflowers. We poke along Sonoita Creek in the foothills of the San Cayetano Mountains and see a rarity: not just the flowers, but running water. I am reminded that it was this water and the presence of gold and silver that once made this area so attractive to Spanish explorers who arrived in the 16th century and also, in more recent years, to American miners like Sylvester Mowry. In keeping with our hands-on cowpoke program, the following morning we brush down our horses and learn to saddle them. Then the horses are loaded into a trailer and we leave Rio Rico for the 30-minute drive to Patagonia. At a dirt pullout in the hills a few miles southeast of Patagonia, we mount the horses and begin a narrow, steep ascent on the Arizona Trail, a route that will one day traverse the entire state.

Within a few hours, we have our first adventure.

It starts with a hat. Rita Gundlach has accidentally pulled the stampede string (the string that ties under the chin) out of her hat while riding along. Knowing she can't fix it while we are moving, she has waited until we are all standing still. Her horse, Gretchen, is not very sociable and doesn't much care for company.

The wrangler leading us, a lanky fellow named Zay Hartigan, offers to fix the hat and swings his horse alongside. Gundlach's horse does not like this at all. Gundlach reaches backward to hand her hat to Hartigan and the mare spooks. Her front legs momentarily go rigid and she jerks backward, nearly slamming Gundlach against the hard trunk of an oak tree.

Fortunately, the horse spins away from the tree and lurches to a clearer spot. The rest of us watch, dumbfounded, as Gundlach is tossed into the air. She lands on her back in a clump of weeds and quickly recovers her composure. She's a little rattled and her neck and leg are sore but, luckily, there are no serious injuries.

An hour later we stop in Red Rock Canyon, tie the horses to some bare mesquites and have lunch in a field facing a red cliff that looks like it could be 200 feet high and about as wide. After lunch the trail gets narrower and steeper. Around 4 P.M., we come over a hill and find ourselves facing a long sweep of the yellow grasslands in the San Rafael Valley, one of the most unspoiled portions of Arizona.

I ride along with Mike Hart, who owns a Scandinavian furniture store in San Diego. Hart tells me he made his first trail ride with Skiver in 1999. He liked it so much, he decided to buy a saddle; then he realized if he was going to do this sort of Western thing, he needed to buy a truck to haul his gear. Finally, it occurred to him that what he really needed was a ranch, so he bought a spread in New Mexico, and if only he could get away from his furniture business more often. He smiles, imagining his future on the range.

By the time we have ridden nearly eight hours, we're ready for a break. It comes at the beautiful Poco Toro Ranch, which is owned by Melody Skiver's mother, Margie Buyer. The place is a picture-postcard and reminds me why some scenes for the old movie Oklahoma! were shot in the San Rafael Valley.

About a quarter-mile from Mrs. Buyer's ranch house, the Skivers have erected a handful of large canvas tents, complete with cots and wood-burning stoves, in a grove of pine trees. As we settle in, the cook, Mark Jensen, begins grilling steaks and stirring a pot of beans. This is child's play to Jensen, who normally works as a flight attendant for U.S. Airways. Wrangling and gourmet cooking are his hobbies, and in the next few days we will be the beneficiaries of his culinary skill.

Bright and early the next morning, Dan Skiver suggests we take a day ride over to the ghost town of Mowry. This is going to be an easy ride, he says, not like the epic of the day before. About midmorning, we're riding in a ragged column through an oak forest. Blue Duck, my horse, is acting like he'd rather be sipping a margarita on a beach in Mexico. Clip-clop, cliiiiip . . . clooooop. Are we there yet? Hart is riding behind me and everybody else is somewhere in the distance in front of us. Suddenly, a low branch knocks my hat off my head. Uh-oh. "I'll get it," Hart says. He swings from his saddle and retrieves the hat, but as he remounts, the motion of his arm with the hat in his hand makes his horse nervous. Does this sound familiar? Two minutes later, Hart is lying in a dry creek bed. His horse panicked, and that spooked my horse. Guess where I am? Down here on the ground, of course, momentarily stunned when my head hits a small rock. Three people have now been thrown from their horses. Can we have a little less adventure, please? An hour later, we find ourselves at the remains of Mowry. The place was known as the Corral Viejo or Patagonia Mine until Mowry purchased it for $25,000 in 1859. During a period of four years, the mine reportedly produced over $1 million in silver. Mowry once served some time in prison and later some time in the U.S. Congress. Very little remains of Mowry's namesake town today-a crumbling adobe, remnants of a schoolhouse's walls and a stone building where explosives were stored. The granite building is roofless, but the walls look like they'll be there for eternity. We, on the other hand, will only be here briefly because we have a long ride back to camp so as not to offend Jensen, who is getting ready to bake some salmon steaks over an open fire. Jensen has marinated the salmon steaks in balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, lemon and olive oil. He adds a tad more brown sugar before lowering the baking pan to the hot coals. Within an hour, we are consuming ambrosia under a starstudded sky.

Thus far, we've had delightful weather but, on the following morning as we begin the long ride across the southern end of the Patagonias, the sky is an ominous gray. We're on a narrow, precipitous trail through Sol-dier Basin when the rain starts. By the time we reach camp, we're in a deluge. Nevertheless, Jensen and Skiver get a fire going and bake a bunch of chicken and a pot of mashed potatoes.

The rain is unrelenting, but we've had a long day on horseback and we're starving. Skiver is serving the potatoes from a huge pot. He leans over my plate with a big iron spoon and says, "I'll try not to get my hat drippings in your potatoes."

The next morning, after I roll away from the puddle that had collected next to my sleeping bag, I notice a hole in the canvas tent a few inches from my head. "Yeah," Skiver says, "dang mouse chewed right through that thing." I look at my fellow horsemen. Several smile and paw the ground as if to say, "Isn't this great? We're getting back to basics!"

A couple of weeks later, Suzi Offenberger sends me a postcard from Boston. "Was just talking to friends about that rainy, cold, miserable morning when you asked if I was still having fun. Thought I'd let you know that after you left, some of us went back to camp, saddled up and herded the rest of the horses back.... It was the best riding day ever!"

Darn, and I missed it! Sometimes, you just cain't win. Al

Man, with the Help of Rain, Forestalls the Natural Order of Fire

THE GIANT PONDEROSA pine reached highest among its forest companions. That was its undoing. As the boiling gray thunderheads rolled low over the woods, it took the first bolt of searing lightning.

With a splitting CRACK, the bolt snaked its way around the trunk, exploding limbs and branches into fiery sparks across the clearing. Clumps of grass and piles of needles sizzled with smoke and flames. Two-thirds of the fire-weakened upper trunk split apart, crashing to the ground. Flames spread quickly over the grass, searching for stronger fuel.

Simultaneously, the first drops of rain sputtered through the needles, steaming up from the superheated coals of the burning trunk. The battle had begun. The drops came harder and faster, splattering the ground with cool, protective moisture.

In the distance, claps of thunder rolled out. Another tree in a faraway part of the great Kaibab National Forest had been struck. But here, where the giant was smashed, torrents of rain soaked into the ground, extinguishing the onceleaping flames. Rivulets of water hurried down the gentle slope, joining their cousins in the rush of stormy runoff to become a flash flood miles below the forest.

The clouds rolled past. As quickly as it started, the rain stopped. The jagged trunk stood mute and black, steam still rising from its chimney. The shattered remains lay dark and quiet. Only an acrid odor remained, settling amid the stillness of the scarred clearing. The danger was over.

Or so it seemed. Five days passed. Buried under the broken trunk came a glow. Dim at first, it crept along the inside cavity, searching for dark cracks and crevices. Magically, it hopped from one splinter to another, seeking the hidden treasure of unburned spots.

A wisp of smoke appeared. A flicker of red lit the inside of the log. Suddenly it burst into flame. The smoke drifted lazily, straight up into the cloudless sky.

Twenty miles to the northeast, the ranger atop Grandview Lookout Tower at the Grand Canyon's South Rim sighted the smoke in the early morning sunlight. Within minutes, contacts from the Hopi Fire Lookout Tower and Red Butte gave a triangulation on the forest map. The ranger radioed the dispatch office in Williams.

There was a sense of urgency in the flame. The log glowed red with coals. Some of the outer wall of the trunk began to flame. Chunks of fiery coals broke away, dropping on the now-dry clumps of pine needles and grass. With a sizzle, the needles melted and curled from the heat. Tongues of flame tasted each morsel of grass, sucked it into an increasing circle of smoldering ash. All the fire needed to leap into life was a little breeze, heading in any direction toward not-toodistant trees.

A few miles away, a green pickup truck with the official Forest Service emblem on the door turned off State Route 64 and headed east on the Ten-X Ranch turnoff. It was traveling north of 7,326-foot Red Butte, which rises like a beacon to travelers between Williams and Grand Canyon. The truck traveled fast, churning clouds of dust.

Just as the flame was about to gather itself for a lunge, the dust cloud boiled over the scene, catching up with the braking truck. Two men jumped out and grabbed fire rakes and their trusty Pulaskis-the firefighters' indispensable cutting and digging tools. Splitting up and working feverishly, they began scraping a circle around the fire. They chopped out grass and twigs, building an ever-widening fire line around the burning trunk.

As if sensing the threat, the trunk flared in heated anger, forcing the men to move away from the circle. But the fire was in a race it was about to lose. An hour passed, and the two men met on the other side of the circle. Without stopping, they crossed and shoveled the dirt back onto the glowing grass clumps, expanding the fire line once more.

The fire died, choking on itself. The broken trunk lost its flame and crumbled into a pile of coals. By the time the sweating figures met again near the truck, the battle had been won. All that remained were the smoldering embers, burning back upon themselves.

Drinking from his canteen, the Forest Service firefighter spoke into his radio.

"We got to this one in time," he said. "Another 30 minutes and it would have been too late."

They sat in the truck cab drinking from their canteens, watching the embers die. Then, the firefighter started the engine, shifted gears and turned the truck back to the road. He looked up at the sky.

"The clouds are building again," he said. "Looks like it might rain this evening." Al