Going With the Flow

Going With the

HIKE THE BLUE AND SAN FRANCISCO RIVERS

Flow

THE SKY ABOVE THE SAN FRANCISCO RIVER shines its sunniest blue. The early-morning canyon air, however, resuscitates slowly, barely starting to revive from a frostbitten night. Cottonwoods shiver, their leaves chattering like teeth, in an icy breeze that toys with the smoke from our campfire. My hiking partner and I will wait a half-hour for the temperature to warm up before continuing on our 25-mile hike along eastern Arizona's San Francisco and Blue rivers.

It's hard to imagine the canyon was 50 degrees warmer yesterday afternoon, soaring to the mid-80s and holding heat like a Thermos. We leaned wearily on our hiking sticks, sweating under the weight of our backpacks while we took a break on a grassy sliver of land along the San Francisco River.

My serendipitous glance toward the other side of the river caught a rattlesnake slithering out of the water. We watched, not quite believing our eyes. The viper slid over the rocks onto a sun-drenched ledge. Suddenly, the water didn't seem as safe as we'd thought.

With that in mind, the third day of our week-long hike begins. The rivers' wild remoteness has made me feel like I'm in my own private sector of the planet. I take a deep breath as I slip my sandaled foot into the San Francisco's frigid flow.

Frank Hayes, district ranger of the rivers' managing agency, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, had warned that our route would demand accomplished hiking skills. Besides the threat of flash floods, the going rarely proves easy. If we're not bushwhacking through a labyrinth of willows and spindly cottonwoods spiked with burrs and thistles or rock-hopping, we're performing a balancing act with our backpacks, the slick river rocks and a forceful, sometimes thigh-deep, current. Shallow sandbars become quasi-quicksand pits, swallowing our legs up to our shins, and muddy banks make for slippery entries and exits.

An attention-getting meld of geology redeems the rivers' lack of convenience, from the Blue's sandstone walls, weathered smooth as a rock tumbled in a flood-ridden stream, to the mineral-rich spires of the San Francisco's molded volcanic cliffs.

As if the rivers aren't wild enough, their side canyons drip in an eerie, prehistoric atmosphere, in which everything seems oversized, overgrown and unexplored. Huge patches of fungus grow on towering oak trees whose interlaced limbs form canopies over dry, boulder-wracked watercourses; constellations of zeolite crystals glisten inside fist-size air pockets dotting giant basalt boulders; and seemingly dry, desolate washes harbor pristine pools of water.

The farther we explore the rivers, the more I feel their flow is locked inside a time warp where little has changed since mountain man James O. Pattie trapped beaver along the San Francisco in 1825. Pattie, however, was menaced by bears, panthers, wild hogs with enormous tusks and hostile Indians. One-hundred-year-old Kittie Potter, born and raised on the Blue, recalled the days before the frontier was tamed.

“When word came about Indian raids,” she said, “we were put in the cellar, and Dad would ride up and down the Blue with a rifle all night. After a while, Dad decided to move farther north on the Blue to get away from the Indians.”

The cowboys arrived around 1885, using the rivers to move cattle between New Mexico and Arizona. Potter's father, Toles Cosper, would drive 2,000 head of wild cattle at a time down the rivers, sometimes skirting stretches of quicksand and enduring sweltering temperatures.

Sitting on a boulder on the edge of a blue-green pool in the Blue, I imagine the trouble a cowboy might have had with quicksand, and envision a cowboy pulling with all his might on a rope attached to a cow stuck up to its belly. Another cowboy pushes the cow from behind, trying to get its legs out of the mire. With eyes bulging, the cow lifts its head and bawls mournfully as the cowboys push and pull.

In my mind's ear, I hear whistles and shouts from other cowboys keeping the rest of the herd a safe distance away. The hot sun glistens off the backs of the cows as they plod through the cool water, uninterested in the ensuing drama. The cattle low and splash, stirring up mud and dispersing Steller's jays to the treetops, from where they safely scold the intruders. Finally the stuck cow jerks forward with a start, then quickly rejoins the herd.

“Before cattle were introduced,” said biologist Bob Csargo, formerly with the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, “the rivers were more meandering and had more benches. I suspect the banks were much more lush.” Cattle no longer plod through parts of the Blue and San Francisco rivers. Without their impact, the rivers have rejuvenated their banks with ground cover, and their water quality has improved.

Csargo spent hundreds of hours studying native Arizona fish in both rivers. The Blue sustains a healthy population of loach minnows, a threatened species.

“It's important for native fish to stay around,” Csargo explained. “Each river is an ecosystem where one species depends upon another. Also, when floods come, the natives are properly adapted to them so they don't get washed downstream like the non-natives do.”

Floods were anathema to riverside farmers whose crops, grown in what little arable land was available, provided food for miners and military outposts. If Indian raids, diseases or grizzly bear attacks didn't harass them, the water did.

“That Blue carried an awful lot of water,” Potter said. “Roar? My goodness, it made a lot of noise. Scared us kids half to death. Thunderstorms made us hide under a pillow or a bed.”

The sound of the rivers, a cross between thunder and a violent ocean surf, roars when the rainstorms and snowmelt cause waters to rage up to a hundred times their normal flow. Trees jettison end over end, and banks collapse from the rivers’ force. The floods of 1905–07 destroyed all of the small farms settlers had cultivated along the Blue.

Today only the sound of our metal hiking sticks echoes off canyon walls as we cross the Blue's confluence with the San Francisco. At the turn of the last century, many people homesteaded here in an area called the Boyles settlement. But any trace of the post office, store, saloon and school for up to 40 students disappeared long ago.

As soon as we head north on the Blue, we stumble upon its welcoming committee — another rattlesnake. The rattler's warning steers us away from its shady confines near canyon walls now changing from jagged volcanic tuff into sandstone resembling sand castle spires. A couple of miles upriver, the rising sandstone bluffs of the narrows squeeze the river into deep pools.

Water laps kindly against a deeply etched sandstone wall laced with holes and crevices filled with flood debris. Around the bend, willows peer into the river, tossing their emerald color onto the water's surface. One pool tries to forge a path toward a 300-foot-high sandstone column, only to be pushed along by the river's current like a mother gently prodding her child back to his homework.

North of the narrows, the river lets out a sigh of relief as it temporarily spreads between volcanic tuff walls, skipping on a shallow course over the rocky river bottom. Then the bluffs return.

I'm not eager to leave the cocoonlike atmosphere of the rivers and find myself lingering and staring as we approach our exit point at Juan Miller Road. Yet I am happy to get back to dry ground and make camp. There is something primordially satisfying about warm, dry feet.

Coyotes start yapping as soon as the nearly full moon rises and pours its pale beams into the canyon. Soon an owl's staccato hoot punctuates the song of a cricket choir.

Listening to the owl and crickets' rebuttal to the coyotes, I think about the rivers' earlier inhabitants and their hardships.

“Work, work all the time,” Potter said about her family's self-sufficient life on the Blue. “Mom cooked three meals a day for the men. 'Course, they worked hard and long hours. Us kids had more than enough to do, too.”

Things haven't changed much on these rivers. The waterways still require hard work from those who hike them. Knowing I've traveled up and down two unique rivers in Arizona, I fall asleep confident that I, like their settlers, wouldn't have things any other way. AH