Photos & text 

by Allanna Lea Jackson

When you’ve lived in an area for more than 40 years it’s easy to think you’ve seen it all, but have you? Last month at work I found file folders that had been stashed in a cupboard and forgotten. I took them to my desk to inspect more closely and found descriptions of ATV trails in the Apache Forest that offered tantalizing clues about places I didn’t know about. My brother, Ian, has explored these mountains more extensively than I have so on my day off I texted him to ask if he’d been to Harris Cave somewhere around Greens Peak. He’d heard of a cave in that vicinity but didn’t know its name or where it was. We made plans to hunt for Harris Cave the next day.

I called the Springerville office of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest to ask their recreation specialist about Harris Cave. She’d been there. After telling me about it she gave me approximate GPS coordinates along with the warning that the USFS does not want people caving in Harris Cave because it’s usually muddy and people have gotten stuck in it. I promised her we would be careful.

Ian picked me up and we stopped by Subway to buy a picnic lunch before heading to Greens Peak. As I expected, he’d done his own research on Harris Cave and had found directions and GPS coordinates for it. We compared notes as he drove.

The aspen trees were arrayed in yellow with a few orange, red, and green accents. It was warm and sunny with a light breeze – perfect weather for exploring. We took Forest roads 117 and 61 through the aspens, fir, and spruce, then down, down into the ponderosa pines to the Y junction with FR64. This seemed closer to Vernon than Green’s Peak, but we followed the directions I’d been given. The monsoons left puddles on the road so we parked as soon as we found a suitable spot. Ian checked his GPS and discovered he’d stopped exactly on top of the coordinates he’d found for Harris Cave! We looked around for a few minutes but didn’t find any lava tubes so we sat on the tailgate of his truck to eat lunch.

After stashing our trash in the truck, we wandered up the road and very quickly found a hole in the ground. Since we’d been warned to go no further than the entrance, we went in only far enough to verify that we’d found the cave. Ian smelled bat guano but we didn’t see any bats. Something in the underground air made us cough so we decided we were done with Harris Cave.

We walked up the road beyond the parking area about 100 yards where it stopped at a barbed wire fence. From there we saw riparian vegetation. Curious, we climbed over the fence and found water. At first, we couldn’t tell if it was an old irrigation ditch or a stream. We went upstream, picking our way through the rocks and downed logs. We found several melted plastic pipes that had been used to divert water into a metal trough outside the fence.

A short distance upstream from the water tank the canyon walls narrowed and the vegetation abruptly changed from ponderosa pine, Gambel oak, and their riparian companions to spruce, fir, and aspen. We thought we’d found the headwaters of the stream when we found a spring of water flowing into it with nothing but mud upstream. To our surprise, only 10 feet upstream the flow of water resumed at the same volume it has been below the spring. Intrigued, we continued upstream. We found another spring and above it another short stretch of just mud with another flow of water above that. We found at least four springs feeding that stream within one mile.

The canyon floor and the stream itself were covered with a crisscrossed thicket of fallen trees that made travel extremely slow. Some of the trees had fallen naturally, but we found one place with remnants of very old-growth trees that had obviously been cut by loggers decades ago and then abandoned where they had fallen. Perhaps the terrain was so rugged they couldn’t get the trees out of the canyon? If so, why had someone gone to all the work and risk of cutting them down?

The canyon was so rugged we had gone less than 2 miles in the hour or so we’d been hiking, but it was getting late enough in the afternoon that we decided to turn back. Going downstream by the same route wasn’t going to be any faster. However, we noticed there were fences quite close to both sides of the canyon, apparently fencing cattle out of the riparian area. The GPS agreed with our observation that we could follow the fence line back to the water trough. We found a place to climb over the fence and as quickly as that we were back in the Ponderosa Pine forest with no hint of the drastically different vegetation in the canyon. Following the fence line was much faster and easier than walking in the canyon and did take us back to the metal trough.

We spotted a herd of elk, including one bull, wandering through an opening in the forest. They stopped when they sensed us, then spooked and ran off.



We got back to the truck so much quicker than we’d spent going up the canyon that we had time to take the scenic route around Greens Peak. The maps we had said we hiked up Mineral Creek and turned around within half a mile of its headwaters at Mineral Spring. We drove by Mineral Spring and noted that it appeared to be east and across a ridge from the canyon we were in. If we weren’t in Mineral Creek Canyon, what stream was it? We admired and photographed the aspens 

on the way home as the sun 

began to set.