Long time readers may recall my series of banned Amazon reviews from 2021, and I’m happy to share with you AllTrails reviews from five hikes that I went on in 2023. Here’s hoping that we can go a hike together in 2024.
Thanks for reading,
— Grif
This is a very short hike, and one that is best combined with an errand that you have to run in north Phoenix. I haven’t come up this way so much recently because the two errands that I have historically paired with it, a six month checkup at Desert Smiles dentistry and picking up takeout from Cafe Chenar, a Bukharan Jewish restaurant on Bell Road, are no longer part of my routine. Our dental insurance plan changed in January 2023 and Desert Smiles was no longer an eligible provider, so we didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to our wonderful dental hygienist who moved to the Valley from Kansas City in 2021 and learned the hard way that Desert Smiles does not grant paid maternity leave to staff who have worked there for less than a year. She insisted that this was a policy of Desert Smiles corporate and completely out of the hands of the head dentist at our practice, but I often felt that, as he came by at the end of each visit to quickly peak into my mouth and poke around between my second and third molars that, had he wanted to, he could have done something about it.
Cafe Chenar shut its doors in late 2022, and this was a real blow to our special occasion takeout routine. The food was outstanding, and it filled a void that has remained largely open since I left Central Asia in 2013. Bukharan cuisine is one of those special cuisines that can make the world seem smaller, drawing as it does from Arab, Persian, Russian, Caucasian, Korean, South Asian, Chinese, and Ashkenazi influence, wrapped together in a Judeo-Iranian culture that has been in diaspora for the better part of two millennia. It was an honor to chat with the owners while waiting for shashlik to come off the grill, and they are dearly missed.
All of this is to say that if you have some business up north that hasn’t been canceled on you, Lookout Peak is a great way to gain a little elevation in the middle of the day. 5/5 stars.
Piestewa Peak rises 1,200 feet from the undulating rocky hills of north central Phoenix to an altitude of 2,610 feet, making it the second highest point within city limits. The mountain was known for much of the 20th century as Squaw Peak, until Arizona State Representative Jack Jackson, a member of the Navajo Nation, began submitting bills to the state legislature annually in 1992 requesting that the name be changed. His efforts were bolstered in 1997 by a petition from a local youth wing of the American Indian Movement to adopt the name Iron Peak, a translation of the Pima name for the mountain, Vainom Do’ag. The Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names ultimately rejected this petition, claiming after a year of research that it was inconclusive as to whether the name Vainom Do’ag referred explicitly to the mountain in question or to one of several nearby peaks which featured a similar geomorphic profile.
The name Squaw Peak was finally retired on April 17, 2003 after Janet Napolitano, just two month into her governorship in Arizona, petitioned the State Board to rename the mountain Piestewa Peak in honor of Army Specialist Lori Ann Piestewa, a Hispanic-Hopi mother of two from Tuba City on the Navajo Reservation, who on March 23rd of that same year became the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. military following an attack on her convoy in southern Iraq in the opening days of the Iraq War.
Napolitano’s petition undermined a long held practice of waiting five years after somebody’s death before naming a geographic feature after them, a regulation which is the official policy of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names and which emerged, at least in part, to disincentive politically expedient decision making in the wake of somebody’s death. After one member of the State Board resigned in protest and another (the Director) was asked to resign for initially refusing to hear the petition, the remaining members voted 5-1 to approve the name change just 25 days after Specialist Piestewa’s death. The federal Board insisted on waiting five years and approved the change by an 11-2 vote on April 10, 2008.
I think about this history often when hiking up and down Piestewa Peak, in part because of the tragedy of the death of any young mother and in part because of how perfectly it encapsulates the governing logic of the Democratic Party for much of the 21st century, which relies so heavily on opportunistic identity politics as a moral counterweight to an insatiable thirst for war. 5/5 stars.
I was very impressed with both the trail and the swimming hole at the bottom and I’m surprised this isn’t a more popular route. Bring goggles to see all the fish! It was tricky to prepare for this hike, as previous reviewers have characterized this hike across a wider-than-normal range of difficulty, which I think comes down to the fact that people on this trail are bringing with them a stupendous range of expectations, some expecting a mini Grand Canyon hike (in which case it will be easy) and others, cooler of Whiteclaw in tow, expecting a walk to a swimming hole (in which case it will be hard). In order to help manage others’ expectations I can share that it took me one and a half hours to go down and two hours to go up, though I’m never sure how helpful it is to share that information without further context. But what more can I say? I am six foot and ½ inch tall. I mention this extra half an inch because it sets me vertically apart from my father and I believe that this knowledge that—while I can not see over him—I have a slight command over the horizon line, allowing me to take in a wider range of perspectives, does provide me with some motivating energy when I need it. I consider myself to be strong but not muscular. I weigh about 215 pounds which means that according to the BMI chart I am overweight, and while I feel down about this sometimes I can usually shrug this off as I have at least passing familiarity with limitations of this model, both statistically (small, non-representative sample size) and morally (designed to advance eugenics).
I hike a lot but I do not run. I used to be able to deadlift more than 300 pounds, which I enjoyed in part because I would occasionally catch an envious glance from men in the gym who were undoubtedly more fit than I but also a good deal smaller and unable to achieve such a milestone. This was my first time doing this hike but I came back two weeks later. I was not running, but I do have a general tendency to rush. I may say, or even think, that in this case the rushing stemmed from a desire to return to the trailhead before 2PM in order to reach the 101 I-10 interchange before 3:30PM and thus beat the traffic home, but more centrally my rushing comes from an overwhelming sense that death is all around me and a misguided instinct that living in a state of flight will somehow secure me immortality. I was breaking in new hiking boots. I had eight pounds of water, snacks, and supplies in my backpack. The weather was perfect. I took Full Advantage of the toilet at the trailhead and did not need to pause for any bio breaks once I began, though I did stop at one point to take in the scent of a juniper tree and another time to investigate a potential camping spot.
I don’t know if any of this is helpful, it feels like I’m shouting into a void. What more can I tell you? Would it help if you knew my Social Security Number? Could you better dial in your expectations for this hike if I told you what keeps me up at night? Perhaps we should meet, go for a hike, and you can draw your own conclusions? We could hike this exact trail, together, and compare notes afterwards. Or perhaps you could climb up my leg and crawl into my chest pocket (I would wear a shirt with a chest pocket for you, dear reader), and there you could rest, my heart beating against your back, as we face the world together, particles of dust rising from beneath my boots into the air before us, suspended in a ray of sun. 5/5 stars.
This trail is a little strenuous under foot—it’s basically a very steep gravelly path for the first half—but once you reach the ridge it’s a beautiful and fairly easy stroll and all things considered I felt great out there. But of course I felt great; I had with me almond butter, my family, and a keffiyeh. And how much easier challenges are to overcome when you are propelled forward by heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, belief in one’s self as reflected back to you through the kind eyes of loved ones, and knowledge deep in one’s heart that Palestinian liberation is never a question of if but only a matter of when. 5/5 stars.
Hiking this trail requires a fair amount of planning due to the rapidly changing weather, seasonal changes to National Park policies and shuttle bus schedules, and permits required if sleeping below the rim. We spent the night before the hike at one of the Park Lodges, arriving well after dark and bumbling out to the rim to face a drop into a vast void which gave the effect of standing at the shores of a drained ocean. The earliest shuttle to the South Kaibab trailhead left at 7am the next morning, and the Bright Angel Fountain, just a five minute walk from the bus stop, opened for breakfast at 6. I arrived at the Fountain at 6:15 only to be met by text scrawled onto a white board which read “burritos available at 6:50-7”. So I settled for drinking a cup of coffee as daylight broke over the singular most incredible landscape I’ve ever viewed, anxious all the while that the burritos might not be ready in time. At 6:48, a gentleman in a white chef’s tunic emerged from exactly where I can’t say, rolling a cart of aluminum-clad cylinders in through the front door of the Fountain. I followed him inside and purchased two burritos, which we then took across the street to the shuttle stop just as the bus arrived.
“No eating on the bus,” the driver pronounced, just as I began to eat on the bus. I re-wrapped my burrito and looked out the window as we drove for thirty minutes past groves of piñon and ponderosa pine situated alongside scraggly juniper. When driving through national parks and passing uniformed rangers, “staff only” roads, and unique, non-DOT signage, I often have the feeling that I am on the compound of a well-funded cult. It was 36 degrees outside at 7,000 feet elevation, and we would spend the next few hours hiking down nearly a vertical mile, giving back most of the rise that we had achieved when driving up to the Colorado Plateau the night before. In this sense, reaching the bottom of the canyon would be an arrival of sorts, as we would be greeted by much of the flora and fauna and comfortable temperatures that we had left behind in Phoenix the day before.
The bus arrived at the trailhead just after 7:30, and we quietly walked towards the edge with our packs to sit for a minute and eat our burritos which, luckily, had retained a fair deal of warmth during the bus ride. The 10” flour tortilla was better than average and the scrambled eggs were well-beaten, if a little under-seasoned. The chopped bacon was perfectly crisp, subtly smoked, and never stringy. The sautéed onion and roasted green chiles were a welcome addition and while the chiles were significantly undercooked, given the time crunch I wouldn’t have wanted the chef to have kept the peppers over the fire any longer. My hiking companion remarked that, like the view into the canyon the night before had been characterized by the absence of earth more than by any positive formation of rock, this burrito seemed to her a vessel which brought to mind the absence of cheese more than it tasted uniquely of any constituent ingredient, and while I vocally cheered her on in this critique, in truth this feeling was only partial, as I also held within me a great relief at this omission of dairy, knowing as I did that I had failed to bring any Lactaid with me on the trip. An accompanying salsa would have been nice, though I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t available to us at the Fountain given the rush that I was in to make my purchase and get to the bus. We finished our burritos as the sun began nicking the upper cliffs of the south rim, and began our descent. 5/5 stars.