Esperero Canyon Loop; Into the Unknown

I was frankly looking forward to the 2008 edition of Esperero Canyon Loop. Parts of the trail were closed due flooding in 2007, and I hadn’t attempted the loop for several years. Here’s an account with photos (remember the photos are thumbnails–click to see the whole picture).

The weather forecast was concerning–storm was moving in later in the day. With my slug-speed, it would hard to avoid. When I started out there were some clouds over the Santa Catalina Mountains, but we were in sun–

That’s Kandi Karuza, whom I was close to much of the day. This is the section of trail where we ascended through fields of flowers. The lower miles cross a couple small canyons, then climb up a sheer-sided canyon to a box top. Then you trot along the west wall of Esperero itself before crossing a small saddle and dropping to the canyon. Here’s my first view of the Cathedral Rock–

We cross the dip to the east of the top. Looking over my right shoulder was an outcrop of the “hoodoos” that are common in parts of the Catalinas–

The trail drops to the bottom of Esperero, and travels up a canyon with some new erosion, but otherwise untouched by the fires. Here’s a fairly typical view of the canyon’s vegetation–

A short distance up the canyon is a rock face that climbers sometimes hike into–

After close to 2 miles of crisscrossing the boulder strewn creek, the trail veers right up a side canyon at Bridal Veil Falls, pictured here–

This means the serious climbing of Cathedral Rocks itself begins. This was when I started to notice snow drifting down. I had to stare a flake melting on my glove to convince myself it was real. I had been wearing my arm-warmers and gloves most of the run so far, which is unusual for me once I get warmed up. The climb is basically a long slog west up the slope and ridge to the junction with Cathedral Rock trail, then another long slog east to the saddle were we cross over. Once I got up on Cathedral trail, I had a nice view of the canyon and the Tucson Basin–

At the saddle, I looked up the slope toward Cathedral Rock itself–

There, you need to push through a corridor of brush, then look down to your left for the trail. There’s a false trail straight along the ridge where many a runner has missed the turn. Shortly after I started down, I heard Kandi call to me from the other side of the canyon–she had missed the turn. The good thing about the fire was that the forest was largely gone and she could she me coming down. I stayed in one spot until she scrambled up to join me, then we stayed together for quite awhile. The aspect and vista of the area was completely changed and it no longer looked familiar. In years past, I could never have looked down into Sabino West Fork and seen Romero Pass trail, as one can now–

A bit further down, we had views of the inter-mountain valley between and front range and the ridges of Lemmon and Bigelow–

Kandi and I made our way slowly down, partly due to poor footing, mostly due to a hard to follow trail. The general consensus is that this trail has become too hard to follow for many runners; several ended up bushwhacking, a dangerous choice if they had gotten into trouble. Here’s our route as tracked by my GPS–

The red is the track, and the dotted line largely hidden is the trail. Where the track parallels the trail are places where the map isn’t quite right. You can discern a couple of spots where we got off trail and doubled back to find it. We were very relieved when we reached the bottom of the West Fork and found the Romero trail junction–

From there, the trail was easy to find and follow as we made our way east and down to Hutch’s Pool. Near the pool, we got to run on highway-like trail that had been drastically reworked by trial crews. This continued more or less to Sabino Basin. About a half mile below Hutch’s is the major Sabino Creek crossing. I found out the hard way my new shoes don’t have great traction on wet rocks and went in to my waist, soaking my gloves as I caught myself. This was a problem, as it was getting colder, the snow was getting heavy and wet, and a cold wind was chasing me. By this time Kandi had moved on, with my blessing. I was taking layers on and off, trying to get things dry enough to keep me warm. I did stop to take a picture of the poppies, as we were once again down into the flower zone–

At Sabino Basin, I was deciding I would survive the cold and wet, and was noticing some clear sky to the south as I made my way down the Sabino Basin trail to the top of the road. The sun even came out and produced a striking portrait of misty mountains–

The snow and rain had stopped. I tried to shamble down the trail and road as fast as I could to get in before more came down. I made it to just past Milepoint 1 on Sabino Canyon Road. My ear stung as hail started to come down. After about 5 minutes it turned to rain, which was less painful.

At the bottom I checked in with Kandi. We knew Rick Kelley was still on the trail in the wet and cold. He ended up finishing after dark, but did make it in safely. Over that evening and the next day, I learned about the confusion and misadventures of the rest of our adventurers. I’ll collect the accounts in another post.

The was by far the strangest Esperero I’ve done since my first loop in 1979. It’s still extraordinary.