OOO Project: Arizona Trail
With Henley Phillips

If you ever find yourself camped or loitering on a bike tour on questionably private land, there’s a few ways to escape the potential ire of property owners. It’s hard to be upset with someone sipping coffee from a steaming mug on a cold morning, and a cyclist with journal and pen in hand is anything but worth concern. Few people will be upset with someone taking pictures or resting in obvious weariness. On my fourth morning out from Tucson, I woke to find “PRIVATE PROPERTY” and “NO TRESPASSING” signs all around the little pullout I had chosen in the dark the night before. I thought I had made it to public land, but as I hadn’t and cattle trucks were starting to pull through the edge of my camp, I made use of all the tricks above, anonymously going about my morning on the side of Highway 80 in eastern Arizona.

Apart from the private land, I was meant to be somewhere else altogether. On the same morning, fifty other riders were strung out along the Arizona National Scenic Trail racing 800 miles across the state, and I was supposed to be one of them. I had badly wanted to be a part of that dusty, excruciating crawl, but sixty-eight miles was all my stomach and mind and patience could handle. I quit the race after 30 hours and bushwhacked my way through catclaw and mesquite brush to a forgotten dirt road, to the highway, to a gas station porch, to my wife who picked me up and drove me back home too soon.

But home isn’t a place you want to be when you’ve been planning to be so intensely someplace else. I turned around and left three days later, vaguely headed east towards New Mexico, with thoughts of dipping into Mexico, with plans to sleep and eat wherever I pleased.

On average, the Sonoran Desert receives just over an inch of rain in the month of October, and it all came down the day I left town. My route was good and peaceful for a while, but a succession of dead ends, fences, and private property had me caught out as the storm emptied. The scrawny mesquite plain I was in offered little protection, so I huddled up against a tree trunk in thunder and rain, and by and by, I was thoroughly soaked through. A desert storm hardly lasts, though, so within an hour I was back to hopping fences and connecting faint tracks back to the railroad two-track I had been aiming for all afternoon.

Desert broom was in pale yellow bloom along the edges of the railroad bed. A train had been building behind me for quite a while, and as it finally passed, I got a friendly wave from the eastbound conductor who slid a little window open to greet me with papers flapping in his hand.

I passed through Benson at sunset and picked up tortillas, dehydrated beans, wet wipes, and M&Ms to round out my resupply. No matter the hundreds of nights I’ve slept out on a bike tour, packing and placement of things always feels a little chaotic in the first days of a new tour. I fussed with my groceries in a corner of the parking lot for thirty minutes and finally left with a bag of beans sloppily attached to my handlebar harness. At camp that evening, my routine was off, and I went to bed feeling out of sorts, wondering how long before I’d pack up and quit again.

The morning was clear, cold, and clean. Within an hour I hit the San Pedro River Trail, which was neither a trail nor was there a river to be seen. It was an abandoned railway bed made of deep, loose ballast running alongside an ephemeral watercourse marked primarily by sycamores. Before long I was pedaling into Tombstone, a town memorialized by a movie of the same name where one of the most famous gunfights of the American West took place. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and others shot each other up in a 30-second blaze that is now re-created most weekends for tourists. The Tombstone of 150 years ago was a tough place to get to, a hard place to live, and at certain moments in history, it was a truly dangerous place to be. Nowadays, though, the most dangerous thing to happen in Tombstone is too much drinking and a sunburn.

I met a retired truck driver named Dale outside the gas station in town as I had a lunch of roller hot dogs and Doritos. His shirt read “Muskogee County Mule Fair,” and we talked of practical things like whether or not I had the tools to fix a tire, what kinda mileage I covered in a day, and how I had fared in the previous day’s rain. It was truck driver talk, but it was talk of the traveler too, and I immediately liked Dale.

“Weeeelll, I’m gunna go back to the hotel and take me a nap and see what I gitupta’ in the evening.”

IT HAS UNDOUBTEDLY BEEN
ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE
AND EXCRUCIATING FINISHES
OF ANY ULTRARACE IN
THE WORLD

Pedaling out of some of these Arizona towns, you’re struck with just how quickly you can be out and away. The trash thins on the roadsides, the roads turn rough, and before long, you’re back in mountain lion and javelina country. I came across a few wild horses and one other vehicle on my way over the Dragoon Mountains, such was the peace of my afternoon riding. Evening fell, and I found myself in a wide valley with sky island ranges to the east and west, and nothing but private land and fences in between. I was pedaling willy-nilly with no firm plans for camping, so it was looking to be another night of stealth camping in places I shouldn’t be. Dogs were barking in the distance as I unrolled my sleep kit under a near full moon. I warmed myself with beans, tortillas, and an evening cup of coffee as I fell asleep on the side of the road in a little ditch surrounded by fragrant creosote bushes.

My third day riding was a good bike touring day, one of joy that I greatly needed. Easy pedaling in the morning took me 20 miles to the Chiricahua National Monument where I had my first lunch and dried a few things on the side of the road. From the Monument, I climbed to Onion Saddle in changing foliage with a smell of forest and Fall that always leaves me feeling a little melancholy, strangely, like I’d rather be home or someplace else. A dirt road leads off the back side of the range and quickly drops you into incredible views of rock cathedrals, spires, and monoliths. A cold stream ran across the road in a little bend, so I took the opportunity to top up on freshwater and give my socks a rinse.

I zoomed through Turkey Park, Ambush Saddle, Bean Flat, and Peach Tree Springs with my neck craning in awe of a new-to-me landscape. The further down the road, the better it became, culminating at the Portal Peak Cafe and Lodge. Similar to my experiences with Outback roadhouses, places you anticipate for days without knowing what lay in store, everything on offer was exactly what I wanted. The burger, espresso, and Topo Chico hit me so good, and I sat under a big sycamore writing postcards, thoroughly enjoying myself. I was so comfy I could have stayed for dinner, but instead I carried on and covered another 30 miles in the early evening. Very few cars on the road after sunset and the goodness of the burger pumped me along in a state of near total contentment, all the way to my next campsite, another ditch situation on the edge of private ranch property.

The border wall between the United States and Mexico is like a car wreck. It’s obscene and incomprehensible in its scale and damage, but intriguing too, and therefore hard to look away. I pedaled along the wall for an afternoon as I made my way to the border checkpoint in Naco, México. I had brought along some unused currency from a previous trip and spent two hours and 120 pesos on tacos, coffee, pan de muerto, and a bag of chips. Crossing back into the United States that evening, the light was almost gone, and everything was washed in the gray-brown of post-sunset. Something moved across the road ahead of me - two people - and crossing a barbed wire fence, the two figures hid themselves in the tall grass on the edge of the road. A helicopter thwack-thwack-thwacked overhead, and I wondered how many other migrants I had unknowingly passed hidden away in ditches and bushes in the last few days.

The best parts of touring, of bike riding for me, are the stops. I stopped purposefully short that night to have breakfast at a cafe down the road the next morning. I climbed Montezuma Pas and stopped at the overlook to enjoy lunch and other people’s presence. I stopped at a creek, a sunny spot for lunch, and I stopped short on my last evening to set up camp in time for a magnificent moonrise. I stopped in Patagonia to see a friend. It’s always nice to come full circle into surroundings you recognize after being out for a few days, so I stopped again at the top of Box Canyon to enjoy a view I’d seen many times before.

The remaining miles of my ditch tour featured plenty more stops in an effort to regain some of the happiness that I’ve always felt when riding. No pressure of covering distances, just whirrling the pedals round and round to the next unknown thing. My perspective of me on the bike began to feel complicated this year amidst ambitious goals and a slow, unperceived shift in valuing myself solely based on how I interact with my bike. Joy has been missing, and I’m the worse for it.

Earlier this year I quit the Arizona Trail for the first time, and within a week, I was back out on my bike trying to pedal myself towards something that made me feel good. Two days in, after crying in the shade of a juniper tree surrounded by piles of dried cow shit, I turned around and pedaled back home. I came across the Out of Office grant three days later. I applied and won, changed my trip idea twice until I finally landed on the Arizona Trail Race this past October, which as you’ve seen, I quit.

I did finally finish something a few weeks ago - my ditch tour - and in those last couple of days I realized that I need to work on appreciating and valuing myself on terms not related exclusively to physical accomplishments. I’d like to become a more varied person capable of being fulfilled by a variety of things big and small. Finishing this tour reinforced just how good I feel when pedaling my bicycle, but it shouldn’t be the only thing. I’d like to both crush and be crushed on the bike. I’d like to paint a little more and learn the names and calls of backyard birds. I’d like to see my family more often and hang with friends for no good reason. A multitude of things are worth my time and energy. Life on a bike is great, but it’s a full life that matters, not the bike.

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I zoomed through Turkey Park, Ambush Saddle, Bean Flat, and Peach Tree Springs with my neck craning in awe of a new-to-me landscape. The further down the road, the better it became, culminating at the Portal Peak Cafe and Lodge. Similar to my experiences with Outback roadhouses, places you anticipate for days without knowing what lay in store, everything on offer was exactly what I wanted. The burger, espresso, and Topo Chico hit me so good, and I sat under a big sycamore writing postcards, thoroughly enjoying myself. I was so comfy I could have stayed for dinner, but instead I carried on and covered another 30 miles in the early evening. Very few cars on the road after sunset and the goodness of the burger pumped me along in a state of near total contentment, all the way to my next campsite, another ditch situation on the edge of private ranch property.

The border wall between the United States and Mexico is like a car wreck. It’s obscene and incomprehensible in its scale and damage, but intriguing too, and therefore hard to look away. I pedaled along the wall for an afternoon as I made my way to the border checkpoint in Naco, México. I had brought along some unused currency from a previous trip and spent two hours and 120 pesos on tacos, coffee, pan de muerto, and a bag of chips. Crossing back into the United States that evening, the light was almost gone, and everything was washed in the gray-brown of post-sunset. Something moved across the road ahead of me - two people - and crossing a barbed wire fence, the two figures hid themselves in the tall grass on the edge of the road. A helicopter thwack-thwack-thwacked overhead, and I wondered how many other migrants I had unknowingly passed hidden away in ditches and bushes in the last few days.

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