Big Dry Wash: marker (on FR300 at turn to General Springs Cabin): It’s a quiet place now, but in 1882, a few decades before the cabins were built, the area was the site of the last major battle between the U.S. Army and the Apaches. In all, more than 20 Apache warriors died, along with two U.S. soldiers. You’ll pass this memorial to the Battle of Big Dry Wash, erected in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, as you approach the trailhead.

     The AZT, Arizona National Scenic Trail: Flagstaff's own Dale Shelwalter, a fifth-grade schoolteacher, walked what would become the AZT in 1985, after spending several years piloting trail sections. The first section of the AZT was dedicated in 1988, starting from the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park and running for 54 miles toward Utah. Other segments followed, and the AZT was officially completed in 2011, 26 years after Dale pioneered the route and one year after he died. Numerous public land agencies (e.g., the NPS, FS, BLM) and volunteer groups and individuals made the AZT a reality, starting with Dale's vision. The need for trail and easement work are continuous along the 800 mile AZT, which travels through almost all C. Hart Merriam's life zones as it rambles from the Mexico border to Utah.

For more about the AZT (see this trip report series, click here)

     C. Hart Merriam: As scientists and area nature lovers know, Dr. Clinton Hart Merriam, America's first bio-ecologist, established the Life Zone concept in 1889 on the San Francisco Mountain of Arizona. When he was sixteen years old, Merriam accompanied the 1872 Hayden Survey to Yellowstone, and was the founder and first chief of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, now the Fish and Wildlife Service. Merriam was the first to advance and define the Life Zone concept in scientific terms. In his report on the San Francisco Mountain region (1890) he concluded that forms of life are dependent upon altitude zones, and the designation of a region or zone by the presence of animals and plants not found in other zones. Because temperatures on North slopes differ from those with Southern exposure, life zones do not run on arbitrary contours. Latitude, the distance from the equator, is also important in determining climate. This combination of altitude, exposure, and latitude (climate) is basic in the ecology that governs the existing distribution of plants and animal indigenous to the various regions.
     Merriam's concept was fundamental in the development of the science of ecology, and is one of the most important modern generalizations in biology. As America's first bio-ecologist, Merriam ranks in the top tier of American scientists. His "laws of temperature" establishing life zones and life distribution were fundamental to the Life Zone concept.
     Merriam divided the region into seven "life zones" because of differences in their biology (resident plants and animals). Merriam's premise was that temperature was the largest controlling factor in these life zones. Starting from the top of San Francisco Mountain to the lower Painted Desert, he named these zones: (1) Alpine, (2) Sub-alpine, (3) Hudsonian or Spruce, (4) Canadian, (5) Neutral or Pine, (6) Piñon, and (7) Desert.
     The Merriam (wild) Turkey and the Merriam Elk (now extinct - due to livestock overgrazing and market hunting) were named for him, Clinton Hart Merriam. Rocky Mountain Elk were introduced in Northern Arizona in 1913 from Yellowstone National Park and are the Elk you see today when hiking the AZT high plateau South of the Grand Canyon (there are no Elk on the North Rim).

More about Merriam and his base camp near San Francisco Mountain (see this trip report, click here)

     Fred Haught: was a relative of Anderson Lee Haught, who was better known as "Babe," a longtime hunting guide for Zane Grey. All three men (Fred, Zane, Babe) are featured in names on the Mogollon Rim. Although Grey fled Arizona in a stressful situation, the Haughts stayed in the area and had a couple of trails named in their honor. A chimney and parts of a foundation are all that remains of the Fred Haught Cabin.

     Gifford Pinchot: Who was Pinchót and how come many FS features are named for him?
     Pinchót (1865-1946) was the 4th Chief of the Division of Forestry, 1898-1905, and the 1st Chief of the Forest Service, 1905-1910. Gifford Pinchot is generally regarded as the "father" of American conservation because of his actions to protect American forests. He served as chief with great distinction, motivating and providing leadership in the management of natural resources and protection of the national forests. He traveled through the West during the summer of 1896 investigating forest areas for possible forest reserves. Two years later, he was named chief of the Division of Forestry. Pinchot worked with his friend Theodore Roosevelt to protect many public lands we enjoy today.
     He continued as forester until 1910, when he was fired by President Taft in a controversy over coal claims in Alaska.

     Aspen Springs Cabin: is one of the earliest fire guard cabins on the Mogollon Rim. The cabins on the cabin loop trail were part of the Bly Ranger District, which is now the Blue Ridge Office of the Mogollon Rim Ranger District of the Coconiño National Forest.

     Dane Cabin: is said to be a hunting cabin of author Zane Grey's, is a decaying log structure of wall segments yet no roof set amongst towering Douglas Firs. Adjacent to the cabin, the superb cold waters of Dane Spring flow from a cave in the Kaibab Limestone, and form the headwaters of a little creek.

     Buck Cabins: The present day Buck Springs Fire Guard Station consists of two cabins. The smaller cabin was built in 1923, and the larger was built in 1946 by Forest Service employees, Louie Pyle and Frank Holder. They are still occasionally used by FS personnel, primarily fire crew members. There is a cement dam impoundment East of the cabins. This often serves as a water source, yet the use of alum to settle/clarify the water may be needed prior to treating it.

     The Barbershop Trail: gets its name from a local sheepherder who had a talent for shearing sheep, as well as for cutting the hair of his fellow herders and local cowboys . Buck Springs Cabins, where this trail intersects, originally consisted of three cabins, built by the Forest Service as housing for fire crews. Currently, there are two cabins at Buck Springs.
     The waters of Buck Springs are impounded by a concrete dam, a short distance downstream from the cabins.

     General Crook Trail: This trail was constructed during the 1870's by the U.S. Army. The General Crook Trail once connected Camp Verde and Fort Apache. The route passed near General Springs because it was a water source. General Springs Cabin (constructed about 1918) and Pinchot Cabin (constructed in the early 1930's) were used as housing for fire crews during the early days of the U.S. Forest Service. They have been (somewhat) preserved because of their historic value.
     For 22 years the trail was used by Crook's men to patrol the Northern border of the Apache Reservation. Sporadic use by locals continued for another 24 years until the Rim Road was built in 1929.
     This trail is the first trail designated as an Arizona State Historic Trail.
     The trail was marked for distances from Ft Verde. Markers to the west of Fort Verde were indicated with a "P" (for the Prescott side) and the number of miles from Ft Verde (e.g., P7 was 7 miles west of Ft Verde).
     On the East side, markers were indicated with a "V". V10 would indicate 10 miles from Ft Verde on the way to Ft Apache. Only a few of the original blazes or mileage posts remain. On the Cabin Loop, you are, of course, East of Ft Verde, so you'll see a few remaining "V" posts.

Scenic Toilets (trump towers) of the Cabin Loop

Click thumbnail to see full size image

cabin-loop-2020-toilet1 Pinchót w.jpg

cabin-loop-2020-toilet2 Pinchót w.jpg

cabin-loop-2020-toilet3 Buck Sp w.jpg

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     *ERM: Energy Required Miles, are there data to support this mileage adjustment?
     Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education and Leadership
     Petzoldt first proposed his theory in his 1976 book ?Teton Trails? to help backpackers plan trips and calculate their energy needs on mountain trails. ?Petzoldt defined one energy mile as the energy required to walk one mile on the flat. He recommended adding two energy miles for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain, so a person hiking one mile and 1,000 feet upward would use the equivalent of three energy miles,? Phipps said.
     Petzoldt?s energy mile theory was just a reflection of the mountaineer?s ?gut feeling,? Phipps said. The theory had never been tested in a laboratory before the study began in WCU?s Exercise Physiology Laboratory in the spring of 2010, Phipps said.
     To determine the validity of the theory, the study measured the energy cost and perceived exertion for walking on flat ground, with and without a 44.5-pound backpack, and up an elevation gain of 1,000 feet, with and without the backpack, through the collection of metabolic data, Phipps said.
     Twenty-four student, faculty and staff volunteers, including 12 males and 12 females, went through four testing sessions as the research continued into fall semester of 2010. The study results showed that the additional energy cost for ascending 1,000 feet ranged from 1.34 to 2.02 energy mile equivalents, for an average of about 1.6 miles, compared to Petzoldt?s use of two energy miles for each 1,000 feet. The range revealed by the study was due to the ?hikers? personal weight differences, Phipps said. ?It is remarkable that Petzoldt?s energy mile theory is so close to the actual energy cost measured during our study,? Phipps said. ?In the field of outdoor education, it?s important for leaders to include an estimation of energy requirements during the planning of hiking trips.?
     Phipps said the energy required for hiking up steep mountain trails would vary for individuals and groups, and the variables of the trail would also factor in, but he recommends that backpackers stick with Petzoldt?s idea of adding two energy miles for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain when planning trips.
     The Validity of Petzoldt's Energy Mile Theory, 2010
Authors: Maridy McNeff Troy, Maurice L. Phipps
Publication: Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership

A footnote to Aspen Cabin (Click the image for the full-size image)

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     How come have the repulsicans done so little to help ease our national health crisis, MAGAvirus, the EtV (Evil trump Virus)?

    Reality is disrupting the ideology of today’s Republican Party

     by Heather Cox Richardson, July 26, 2020

     For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure. From the beginning, that government was enormously popular. Both Republicans and Democrats believed that the principle behind it—that the country worked best when government protected and defended ordinary Americans—was permanent.
     But the ideologues who now control the Republican Party have always wanted to get rid of this New Deal state and go back to the world of the 1920s, when businessmen ran the government. They believe that government regulation and taxation is an assault on their liberty, because it restricts their ability to make money.
     They have won office not by convincing Americans to give up their own government benefits—most Americans actually like clean water and Social Security and safe bridges—but by selling a narrative in which “Liberals” are trying to undermine the country by stealing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans—quietly understood to be white men—and redistributing them to lazy people who want handouts, not-so-quietly understood to be people of color and feminist women. According to this narrative, legislation that protects ordinary Americans simply redistributes wealth. It is “socialism,” or “communism.”
     Meanwhile, Republican policies have actually redistributed wealth upward. When voters began to turn against those policies, Republicans upped the ante, saying that “Liberals” were simply buying Black votes with handouts, or, as Carly Fiorina said in a 2016 debate, planning to butcher babies and sell their body parts. To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.
     This system rewarded those who moved to the right, not to the middle. It gave them Donald Trump as a 2016 candidate, who talked of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and treated women not as equals but as objects either for sex or derision.
     And, although as a candidate Trump talked about making taxes fairer, improving health care, and helping those struggling economically, in fact as president he has done more to bring about the destruction of the New Deal state than most of his predecessors. He has slashed regulations, given a huge tax cut to the wealthy, and gutted the government.
     If the end of the New Deal state is going to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, it should be now.
     Instead, the gutting of our government destroyed our carefully constructed pandemic response teams and plans, leaving America vulnerable to the coronavirus. Pressed to take the lead on combatting the virus, the administration refused to use federal power, and instead relied on “public-private partnerships” which meant states were largely on their own. When governors tried to take over, the Republican objection to government regulation, cultivated over a generation , had people refusing to wear masks or follow government instructions.
     As the rest of the world watches in horror, we have suffered more than 4 million infections, and are approaching 150,000 deaths.
     The pandemic also crashed the economy as businesses shut down to avoid infections. It threw more than 20 million Americans out of work. Republican ideology says the government has no business supporting ordinary Americans: they should work to survive, even if that means they have to take the risk of contracting Covid-19. Schools should open, businesses should get up and going, and the economy should rebuild. As Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson in March, grandparents should be willing to contract coronavirus for the U.S. to “get back to work.”
     The coronavirus has brought the Republican narrative up against reality. Just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and only 38% of the country think the economy is good. Americans believe that the government should have done a better job managing the pandemic, and they do not believe they should risk their lives for the economy.
     To try to deflect attention from the failure of his approach to the coronavirus, Trump is once, again, escalating the narrative. He has launched an offensive against Democratic cities, trying to convince voters he is protecting them from "violent anarchists" coddled by Democrats. He is using federal law enforcement officers in unprecedented ways, not to quell protests, but to escalate them. In Portland, Oregon, as officers have used tear gas, less-than-lethal munitions (which nonetheless fractured a man’s skull), and batons to attack protesters, the events, which had fallen to a few hundred attendees, grew again into the thousands. And now the administration is planning to send in more officers, to escalate further.
     The Republicans’ ideology is also making it impossible for them to deal with the economy. We are on the verge of a catastrophe as the $600 weekly federal bonus attached to state unemployment benefits runs out this week just as the moratorium on evictions for an inability to pay rent ends. At the same time, state and local budgets, hammered by the pandemic, will mean more layoffs.
     The House passed a $3 trillion bill in May to address these issues, along with providing more money to combat the coronavirus, but Republicans in the Senate rejected it out of hand. Today on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) went back to his ideological roots. “The only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump, and they've cynically decided the best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America," he said. House Speaker "Nancy Pelosi talks about working men and women. What she's proposing is keeping working men and women from working." "Her objectives are shoveling cash at the problem and shutting America down.”
     Instead, both Trump and Cruz want a payroll tax cut, which will do little to stimulate the economy since the tens of millions who have lost their jobs would not see any money, and this late in the year much of the tax has already been paid. But the payroll tax cut is popular among Republican ideologues because it funds Social Security and Medicare. Cut it, and those programs take a hit.
     Today Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took to the Sunday talk shows to try to reassure people that the Republicans would, in fact, manage to cobble together a relief bill in the next few days (after not writing one in the last two months). They are talking about passing piecemeal measures, but, recognizing that this means Republicans will call all the shots, Pelosi says no.
     Meadows and Mnuchin say they want liability protection for businesses and schools if they open and people get Covid-19. They were also clear they would not agree to extending the $600 federal addition to state unemployment benefits, arguing that it simply “paid people to stay home.” They say they want to guarantee people 70% of their wages, but the reason the earlier bill had a flat $600 payment was because it appeared impossible for states to administer a complicated program based on a percentage, so this might well just be a straw argument.
     The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine. What will end the pandemic is “not masks. It’s not shutting down the economy," Meadows said. “Hopefully it is American ingenuity that will allow for therapies and vaccines to ultimately conquer this.”

    Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts. She has authored six books, so far.

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     Notes:
     https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-u-s-map-where-virus-has-been-confirmed-across-n1124546
     https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-suggests-he-other-seniors-willing-n1167341
     https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-safely-reopening-americas-schools/
     https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/26/support-for-trumps-coronavirus-strategy-dips-381509
     https://www.opb.org/news/article/more-federal-officers-deploying-portland/#.Xx4eCETiZdo.twitter
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/20/payroll-tax-cut-stimulus-trump/
     https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/how-a-payroll-tax-cut-could-impact-social-security-and-medicare.html
     https://www.newsday.com/news/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-relief-bill-mnuchin-pelosi-1.47381175
     https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-chief-staff-details-plan-unemployment-benefits/story
     https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/26/shoveling-cash-problem-coronavirus-cruz-381673
     https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/generations-americans-unemployed-covid-19/

     My summary: Flush the turds on November 3rd.

Related Links:

How to use alum to clarify water (get out the mud and silt) prior to treating it

For more about the AZT - Quest to Hike the AZT - reports

More about Merriam and his base camp near San Francisco Mountain

Backpacking the Haughty Highline Trail

USFS info about loop (MS Word file)

Scenic Toilets of Inner Earth

Falter - we've used up our chances, Earth is now Eaarth; we'll be moving on, but where? by Bill McKibben .

More Truth Than Joke, notes about failed leadership in the time of the MAGAvirus/EtV (Evil trump Virus, COVID-19):

winning-winning-winning, so much winning (Click the image for the full-size image)

guns and freedumb over health (Click the image for the full-size image)

Disappearing EtV (Click the image for the full-size image)

MAGAvirus loyalist (Click the image for the full-size image)

The grim tweeter - economy over lives (Click the image for the full-size image)

someone is winning - hint, it's not you (Click the image for the full-size image)

you're an orphan (Click the image for the full-size image)

justice (Click the image for the full-size image)

trumpish, a definition (Click the image for the full-size image)

Science - true whether you like it or not (Click the image for the full-size image)

A good day (Click the image for the full-size image)

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Wild Vagabond Main	Trip Report Index	Caveat

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