Down the unsung Canadian River Gorge

One of the grandest canyons on the Great Plains

if you know that the horizontal yellow country east of the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico possesses one of the grandest canyons anywhere on the Great Plains, you are among the very few. It is knowledge that requires some effort. Coiling along hundreds of feet below the grassy, undulating surface, out of direct sight and therefore little known, lies one of the remarkable topographical features of the plains. The Canadian River Gorge is rivaled elsewhere in the vast Great Plains landscape only by Palo Duro Canyon (one of Texas’ largest and oldest state parks) and the canyon of the Little Missouri River (part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park) in North Dakota. It is unsung and almost unknown. Thanks to the fine conservation work of Senators Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, the bottom end of the Canadian Gorge has recently become the site of the 16,030-acre Sabinoso Wilderness, administered by the Bureau of Land Management. But perhaps the more intriguing, and certainly more vast, portion of the gorge lies upriver. In 1960, when the federal government established the national grassland system from pieces of failed homesteads, a 25-mile stretch of the Canadian Gorge north of the Wagon Mound Highway became part of Kiowa National Grassland. It was a splendid addition to New Mexico’s public lands.

In the late 1980s I was working on a book on the Southern Plains and got a strong hankering to see this canyon. So two friends and I got a brief but delicious immersion. Katie Dowdy, who was doing graduate work on the rock art of the Raton area, went along so she could spend time there visiting petroglyph sites. I also owed my friend Bill Brown a favor, so our plan was to strap on backpacks and launch an investigation of the gorge. Leaving one vehicle at the Wagon Mound Highway, we drove my old Toyota truck to the Mills campground, site of the old Mills Hotel from bygone decades. After spending an initial day exploring the side canyons there, we started down the gorge the next day. Here is my journal of the rest of that trip from thirty years ago, which appears in fuller form in the 20th anniversary edition of my book, Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains (2010), with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Annie Proulx.

DAY 1

After almost a decade of promising myself this walk, I am sitting alongside my buddy Bill beside a popping juniper fire in the gorge of the Canadian River. We set out after lunch today on an excursion to hike the next 20 miles of the canyon below the campground, and commenced with a leisurely 2 or 3 miles through Mills Canyon this afternoon. It is beautiful, a broad floor carpeted with buffalo grass and miles of smooth sandstone walls striped with the dripping-paint stains of desert varnish. Unfortunately, salt cedar thickets line the river here about as thickly as they do anywhere in the Southwest, a boon to the horrendous mosquito hordes that descended on us at dusk. Tamarix chinensis tends to thrive especially well upstream of reservoirs, and Conchas Reservoir is only about 75 miles downstream.

We noticed as we walked this afternoon that autumn is touching the gorge, more distinctly near the rimrocks, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, than on the warmer canyon floor,

800 feet lower. But the scrubby, wavy leaf oaks that cover the upper slopes are already tinged with purple and red, the big rabbitbrush clumps are a dazzling fall yellow, and even the cottonwood galleries along the river are close to turning.

Our present camp is on a grassy shelf on the east bank, 20 feet above the river, which splashes along pleasantly as white noise. We’re evidently not far below the mouth of Cañon Mesteño and near a cave overhang we’ll explore at first light. I write this with the red punctuation point of Mars in the southern sky, Jupiter hanging just over the canyon wall behind me, and a waning near-full moon about to slide into view. Planes, bound for LA or New York, sweep over but they’re too high to hear above the sound of the river. There’s no bawling livestock, not even a coyote howl. This is an extraordinarily silent canyon. It got to American explorer James Abert, who somewhere in this very stretch in 1845 found the canyon lovely — “a smiling valley” — but was disturbed that the great vastness so utterly ignored him. He fired a shot into the gorge just to break its composure.

Now, just as I scribble this, a coyote babbles eerily off to the southwest and another falsetto-voiced one joins in. It must be a moon serenade. They’re up the canyon wall, in the chill blue glow of the moonrise.

It’s all wildly beautiful, and when the mosquitos swarm, uncomfortable. But I confess to partiality to the unsung places of the world, canyons like this, unknown, unvisited, with the bark still on, a place you can make your own by dint of experiential immersion. We all have to find our own places.

DAY 2

Too conscious of the evolving night to sleep well, I crawl out of the bag two or three times to stoke the fire, sit sleepily beside it as the twigs catch. Once, adjusting my bedroll, I notice in the moonlight a big, furry plains tarantula waltzing across my chest. We’d seen big autumn tarantula migrations crossing the roads yesterday. This one pauses a few inches from my face, scrutinizes me with apparent horror in all 16 compound eyes before scurrying off, no doubt to warn his mates of the monster he’s found.

Around 1 or 2 a.m., according to the Big Dipper, the wind came in hard from down canyon, but by dawn it has died away. When Sirius rises like a Christmas sparkler over the east rim I blow the fire to life and put on a pot of water. It’s warm this morning and the irascible little mosquitos are delighted. They and the coffee smell finally wake Bill, about the time the west wall turns red-gold. In the dawn quiet the sound of rapids downriver fills the aural space. A little plains black-headed snake, no larger than a pencil, crawls across my foot in hot pursuit of a centipede. A good place to be, this. Maybe not so much for the centipede.

While Bill works on his journal I explore the overhang cave in the wall behind us. It is a large cave, 12 feet high, 25-30 feet across at its mouth and maybe 15 feet deep, and as I approach I see on its ceiling characteristic smoke smudges. The next thing I see is a discarded dig screen (a screen used by artifact hunters to sift dirt). Likely an Archaic site. The Canadian Gorge has always looked like prime Anasazi country to me, but I am unaware of any Anasazi sites here.

The sun lifts higher and soon the riverbed is bright with the reflections of wet rock. A mist rises from the river. The gorge is already starting to trap solar radiation and is heating up. So it’s down the canyon, indulging that simplest of lusts

— to know what’s there. What does it look like around that bend we’ve been gazing on since yesterday? Of course we know very well that around that bend it looks very much as it does right here. Nevertheless, there’s no denying the impulse to see. So we shoulder the packs, pick up a deer or aoudad trail (a type of wild sheep native to Africa introduced by the state wildlife agency for hunting) on the east side shelf, and go have a look.

It is indeed more of the same, but somehow different, too. We reach a beautiful open meadow with scattered piñons and junipers. It’s an extraordinary year for piñon nuts, and this spot is a piñon jay’s paradise. Beyond the meadow the river alternates between slow green pools and quick, rippling falls. At this stage the Canadian is not floatable, although it could be traversed by a sort of floating/wading canyoneering technique. Under a big, lone ponderosa swept down from the rim in a rockslide we munch on dried fruit, swig Canadian River water we boiled this morning — drinkable, but with a definite calcium taste — and try to figure out where we are from the topo maps.

It is perhaps 11 a.m. and we step out into a gorge that is beginning to glare. We cross the river, the snowmelt water almost shockingly cold, at the prettiest rapids we’ve seen on the river. Jurassic sandstone encircles the lower walls of a round basin. The entire river is deep here, forces us by its turns against the walls and into a neck-deep crossing, our packs held high overhead. Below are staircase shelves over which the river pours.

A pair of rock pinnacles finally fixes our position and it’s a little unsettling. Here it is noon and we have at least 14 miles left to do. What the hell; the famed 1930s conservationist Bob Marshall used to do such hikes for pre-breakfast warm-ups. Of course Bob Marshall also died at 38.

It grows hot and we quicken our pace. We slip through a last sandstone chute at water level. A faint jeep trail appears and we

welcome it, the brisk, exhilarating walk of the morning turning a little wooden in the hot glare of afternoon. Pines groan and whip in the wind on the rims 800 feet above us, but the deep gorge is still. Black grasshoppers with red wings rise from the grass.

“Be damned, look at this.” Bill, purple bandanna stretched over his head, sweat dripping from that long, splendid nose, is inspecting a rusted sign with white lettering that reads, “Resettlement Administration.” It’s a blast from the past, when the New Deal relocated Exodusters from the blown-out plains above down to the gorge with its river. But stretching away in every direction now is remote, wild country, collapsed rock ruins the only evidence of this desperate move on behalf of homesteaders to mitigate the Dust Bowl.

We’re now into the last haul, about 3 miles, and it is late afternoon, the wind up, temperature over 80, our metabolisms down and dying. We’ve reached the stage where the telling will be more fun than the doing. Now we’re at the last swing in the gorge before the Roy/wagon Mound Highway. To the southeast is a large stream flowing out of Beaver Canyon. Where it joins the Canadian we strip down and perform the old trapper ritual of rinsing off in the crick before hitting the settlements.

Rendezvous in Roy

The folks in Ricardo’s Bar in Roy that evening are satisfyingly daunted at the ambition of our hike, maybe because by the time we get there many of them lack the ambition to change barstools. Katie arrives soon after we do, and between ingestions of tequila and other uncontrolled substances the locals regale us with local stories. Bill gets lured into an escalating world championship eight ball tournament. Lewis, a quiet cowboy, keeps buying drinks and asking Katie, “What’s anthropophagy mean, anyhow?” Texas Tech and the University of New Mexico are playing one another and a radio is on. No one seems to be listening. When Mike, the bartender, mentions that Tech has won, someone belches. There are shouts from the poolroom, but it turns out they’re for an awesome eight ball shot.

Next morning Katie and I drive in from our camp outside town to look for Bill, who had taken his chances in town. A small crowd is gathered in a residential yard across from the city park where we are to rendezvous. As we walk up the gathering parts and there is Bill, sound asleep, the contents of his bag strewn around him. The gathering sharpens. It includes the mayor, the local constable and the overwrought citizen who had awakened to find this strange personage asleep on his lawn. While we reluctantly acknowledge our connection to this disturbance of the local peace, Bill opens an eye, staggers to his feet, almost succeeds in shaking hands with the mayor. In the dark of night he had taken the citizen’s rather weedy yard for the park, and no harm intended.

The mayor, an understanding fellow and up for reelection, is all for smoothing things over. He allows the possibility to the group that Bill, after all, could certainly have hiked the Canadian Gorge but gotten lost in downtown Roy.

Dan Flores, a “New York Times” best-selling author, lives in the Galisteo Valley south of Santa Fe. A 20th-anniversary edition of his book on the plains, “Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains,” appeared in 2010. His other books include “Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest,” “American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains” and “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History.”