I recently turned over all my old NAU Hiking Club Boots and Blisters to special collections at the Cline Library, there to be digitized and shared with the world.  This got me to thinking about the old club.

I had never hiked before I got to NAU, but my eye was caught by the posters the first week of school: See Arizona, join the Hiking Club.  So I went, and I found out that I was rather good at walking.  In high school we had lived at the edge of the district, so no bus was available, and I walked a mile to school every day.  My mother worked, so she couldn't drive me, and why should she anyway?  It was only a mile.

Back then, we didn't pay much attention to frivolities such as trail drags.  If someone couldn't keep up, it was their problem.  We had a rather steep learning curve.  At that time, there were no size limits on group in the Canyon, so we could show up with 200 people and lose track of some.

As it happened, I rather enjoyed walking by myself.  Once it was discovered that I could fall far, far behind and still find my way out, I was pretty much left on my own.  Consequently I got rather good at following faint trails, or finding good routes.  In the fullness of time, I got stronger, and began to wind up at the front of the pack rather than the back.

I do remember being suckered in to some very questionable routes.  Sitting atop a boulder crying, because, in the immortal words of Edward Abbey, I couldn't go up, couldn't go down, and couldn't stay where I was.  Eventually I learned to ask if we were planning on hiking on a trail, a route, or something which may or may not be a route.  If the latter, I opted out.  If the group tried to change their mind when they got to the rim, I flatly refused to go.

 The "good trail" at Eminence Break. What exactly was the thinking here?  And how did I get suckered into this more than once?

After I became an officer (editor of the newsletter, which did not stop me from putting my three cents in about how to run hikes), I suggested that we tell people exactly how difficult the trail would be, sometimes with pictures.  When the president assured the room that "there is a good trail down Eminence Break", I jumped up and cried, "don't listen to him!".  I began to turn people down for hikes.  On one occasion, we were heading to the Salt Trail, yet another test of one's Darwin skills.  A young man assured me he had lots of experience, so I allowed him to go.  At the start of the route, he put his pack on upside down.  His experience?  Day hiking with the Scouts when he was 12.  I told him he was staying at the car.

Not a place for one's first backpack, yes?

I already had a reputation for being a hard-assed bitch, and this type of thing didn't help.  But neither did I have to drag this guy up and down the Salt Trail.  

A new generation of hikers arrived, and they did not want to be abandoned to their own devices.  They wanted someone to walk with them, show them the way, and teach them our wisdom.  Nah.  When a group was stranded at the Mogollon rim and spent the night by themselves, there was talk of lawsuits.  

One of my standard hikes was the length of West Fork of Oak Creek.  The hike up from the bottom is gentle and crowded.  Hiking down from the Turkey Butte Road involved a thirteen mile day of swimming, climbing, and rock hopping.  At the first pothole we pulled out air mattresses and prepared to swim.  Three people looked confused.  I said, "I told you we would have to swim on this route."  "But we thought that was only if we wanted to."  We splashed through the pothole, waited on the other side (freezing: there was no sunlight yet) and finally told them to catch up. 

By afternoon we were at the cars, and they were not.  Two of us walked back up the bottom four miles, didn't see them, so we left and called Search and Rescue.  They were found the next day walking UPSTREAM.  They apparently reached the end of the lower trail, and the sign said, "four miles".  They thought, oh we have hiked a lot further than 13 miles, and this says we are still four miles from the end, so we must be in the wrong canyon, and they turned around. I got a lot of flack for that, though I still don't think it was my fault.  That was another time there were talks of lawsuits.

The following year, I had slides of this route.  I emphasized the difficulty, the cold swims, the long day.  I scared people so successfully that we had a small, strong group and finished in record time.  Then I got complaints because the hike wasn't as bad as I said it was going to be.  Sometimes you just can't win.