On a beautiful late fall morning in November, ten Arizona Trailblazers converge on the Yaeger Canyon Trailhead near the top of Mingus Mountain. We prepare our gear for the hike, do a quick round of introductions, and gather for a group picture.

Under clear blue skies, with a long thin band of white clouds on the horizon, we strike out from the trailhead at 10:20 AM and start descending on Yaeger Canyon Trail #28.

Li pauses along the trail. [photo by Tom]

We continue to slowly and carefully pick our way around, through and across rocks and boulders of all sizes and shapes that continue to choke the rough and challenging Yaeger Canyon Trail. As we keep putting more and more of the trail behind us, Prescott Valley and Highway 89A both come into closer view and we know that we’re gradually getting closer to the canyon floor. At some point along the trail, we begin to encounter increasing numbers of larger and larger alligator junipers, some that have to rank among the largest in Arizona.

Junipers belong to the cypress family of evergreen trees, and alligator junipers (named after their distinctive checkered bark suggesting an alligator’s back) are among the largest of all junipers, ranging to 50 feet in height and up to 5 feet in diameter. Some of these larger junipers can live to 250 years or more.

Just as a side note:
On our May 24, 2014, Yaeger Canyon hike there was some concern over the Slide Fire burning in Oak Creek Canyon, just north of Slide Rock State Park, and whether the smoke from that fire could possibly impact us on the hike. The Slide Fire had just started several days earlier and was still raging out of control about 30 miles to the northeast. But it wasn’t until we finally stopped for a quick rest and snack break at the junction with Trail #533 at the bottom of Yaeger Canyon that we caught our first whiff of smoke drifting in from the fire.

Thankfully it didn’t last too long, but the fire ultimately torched over 21,000 acres in and around Oak Creek Canyon before it was fully contained on June 4, 2014.

After two miles of hiking mostly downward on Trail #28, with knees taking a beating and one of our hiker’s bunions barking loudly, we finally reach the floor of Yaeger Canyon. Starting in ponderosa pine forests at the top, below the rim, most of the trail descends through a mix of pinyon pine, juniper, and scrub oak, before depositing us on the canyon floor into a dry creek riparian environment of mostly deciduous hardwood trees, including several species of oak.

We soon come to an old abandoned roadbed, with a large cattle guard to our right and eventually hit a gate, where we make a left turn and follow a path parallel to Highway 89A for several hundred yards.

By now it’s already 11:40 AM and several hikers, including yours truly, are beginning to get a little hungry. So we all stop for a well-deserved rest and lunch/snack break in a shady grove of trees just beyond the junction with Little Yeager Canyon Trail #533, the second leg of today’s journey from Mingus Mountain down into Yaeger Canyon and back up the mountain.

Clearly marked with a Trail #533 sign today, in 2014 there was no trail sign at all, so we had to take our best collective educated guess and luckily made the correct choice.

Break time over all too soon, now it’s time to pay the piper, since we need to make up that 1,300 feet of lost elevation getting back to the trailhead. I suppose one could easily cheat at this point by walking out to the nearby highway and possibly thumbing a ride back to the trailhead. But we are, after all, the Arizona Trailblazers and not the Arizona Hitchhikers.

The Little Yaeger Canyon Trail wastes no time, as it bends southeast and right out of the starting gate soon begins to switchback steeply up the western rim of Mingus Mountain. Up, up, and away we go—puff, puff, puff—through a seemingly endless series of switchbacks, as the pinyon-juniper covered slopes of the west rim gradually transition to towering ponderosa pine forests and we steadily gain elevation on this mountain—puff, puff, puff. But the trail does eventually start climbing more gradually through a small saddle area before finally joining Allen Spring Road, two miles from the trailhead.

Unfortunately, this is always the downside to canyon hiking. On a typical mountain hike, such as Mt. Humphreys in the San Francisco Peaks of northern Arizona, you do all your hard climbing at the beginning of the hike while you’re still fresh and eager to get started. Then on the second half of the hike, after you’ve expended all that energy getting to the top and are tiring out, it’s all mostly downhill, where your knees and not your heart take a beating.

Canyon hiking is just the opposite. You do the relatively easy portion of the hike at the beginning by hiking downhill into the canyon. But on the second half of the hike, after you’re already starting to tire out from the day’s adventure, you have to start expending maximum energy climbing back to the top.

We make a left turn onto Allen Spring Road and follow that for 0.2 miles and then make another left turn, heading north, onto Yaeger Cabin Trail #111. This turn is very easy to miss, since the Trail #111 sign is set back a short distance from the left side of the road.

Had we completely missed this turn, Plan B, as outlined by John, was to continue heading east on Allen Spring Road to Trail #132 and then Trail #413, running parallel with Trail #111, back to the trailhead. Thankfully, we manage to link up with Trail #111, as originally planned.