Hike of the Month

Like of the Month For Fall Color and a Touch of History, Check Out the Thunder Mountains

Legend has it that “long ago the Apaches watched with awe the turreted white masses billow thousands of feet into the air and, with threatening booms and growls, send down jagged forks of lightning and gray sheets of rain upon the peaks. Wah-chu-kay, the Apaches murmured — “Thunder Mountains” — and Thunder Mountains they have been ever since.” So wrote Weldon F. Heald in the June, 1952, Arizona Highways, describing the Huachuca Mountains that throw their uneven shadow over the town of Sierra Vista in southeastern Arizona. Today there is little agreement on the etymology of huachuca. Some say it's a Tohono O'odham word meaning “it rains here,” which the Apaches borrowed to describe thunder; others say it came from an old Spanish map that named a “Guachuca Creek.” As we head up to Brown Canyon Box in the Huachucas one winter morning, Rob, my canine hiking companion, trots (OPPOSITE PAGE) Sycamore and Rocky Mountain maple leaves litter the floor of Brown Canyon in the upper reaches of the riparian area.

WHEN YOU GO

To get to Brown Canyon Box from Sierra Vista, take State Route 92 south, keeping an eye out on the right for the small sign for Ramsey Canyon. Take Ramsey Canyon Road west 2.1 miles to a Forest Service gate on the right. Park just inside the gate if you have low clearance, or continue on .4 of a mile to a large ravine and more space to park. The trail follows the old road up the hill. From the parking area, it's about three miles to Brown Canyon Box, elevation 6,400 feet. Do not climb up the Box if it is raining in the Huachucas - flash floods are a danger. From the Box, you can continue on Brown Canyon Trail over the ridge and down Ramsey Canyon back to your car, via the Hamburg Trail through The Nature Conservancy's Mile Hi Ramsey Canyon Preserve; it's an eight-mile round-trip hike. Call (602) 378-2785 to ask about preserve hours, trail permits, parking reservations, and other requirements.

Brown Canyon can be cold because the trail is usually in shade. There may be snow December through February. Take plenty of water.

For more information, call the Sierra Vista Ranger District of the Coronado National Forest, (602) 378-0311.

Happily ahead of me, nose to the ground reading the “news” on every rock, bush, and blade of grass: two coyotes passed here, one raccoon ate there, a cow stopped here. We've been hiking for about 20 minutes and, after climbing a small ridge, are beginning to drop down into the now-dry creek bed of Brown Canyon on the northern side of the mountains. The trail is easy to follow, parts of it remnant mining roads. We pass an old mining camp and the grave of its owner. Slowly we climb as the canyon begins to close around us. At a stone water tank, the trail forks right. The canopy of trees spans the narrow canyon, the springfed creek surfaces and gurgles, dancing in the lacy sunlight.Underfoot crunch the reds and oranges and yellows of autumn-hued maple, ash, and sycamore. Upper Brown Canyon is moist, dark, an intimate place altogether removed from the grassland desert now 1,000 feet below us.

In 15 minutes or so we come to a hairpin turn where the trail begins its climb out of Brown Canyon, up to the Hamburg Trail and down Ramsey Canyon. We follow the creek upstream instead, about 200 yards, to the Brown Canyon Box. Rob scampers fearlessly ahead of me up the 15 feet of rockfall, and when I climb over the lip, he's drinking from a nearly perfectly round pool, about 30 feet across, carved from whorled black rock.

I stand at the 10-foot-wide entrance to the pool chamber, its slick walls towering 20 feet above me. During spring and summer, the pool, whose bottom we cannot see, is filled from a narrow funnel that dumps huge amounts of water over the top of the far wall. This day, the funnel is dry.

While we eat lunch, I imagine summertime in the canyon: the Box is dry, the black rocks hot, echoing the trill of cicadas into the dense canyon air. A thunderhead towers over Ramsey Peak and suddenly splits open. Rain fills dozens of little creeks that join into thousands of gallons of water racing, roiling down Brown Canyon. Faster, faster, down the chute, into the funnel, bursting with unimaginable power into the Box... and at the mouth of the canyon, the sound of the water thunders across the grassy plain, the voice of the Thunder Mountains.