Ecdemomania  

Jaxon McCanlies  

As someone who was born and raised in the flats, the mountains of Lincoln County aren’t exactly somewhere I’d say I feel at home.  I feel like the locals to places like this gain more elevation walking to their mailbox every day than I get in a calendar year.  Despite this, the mountains and their sea of constantly changing conditions bring about an appreciation for the outdoors that one can only truly understand by braving their wilds.  

Once you bike down the highway from Ruidoso and ride through the Downs — where there is a particularly elegant statue of horses running on the side of the road — you’ll slowly pull off the pavement and onto the white, hot gravel of a mountain trail.  Behind curtains of prairie grasses and ponderosa pines that, if you’re not careful, will disguise the trails behind you and leave you enveloped in their interior of windy nights and rocky trailways.  My dad used to tell me that in Lubbock, you could watch your dog run away on the horizon for three weeks. Here, it’s closer to three minutes.  

What it means to experience these backcountry trails is something gained step by step through exploring their intricacies.  During nights spent stargazing outside of your tent as you try and number the stars, only to lose count after a few hundred or so.  A place that holds so little comfort is one that forces you to find it yourself, in the discomfort of miles walked or ran or pedaled.  Days without a shower or sink, but never too far away from precious civilization to feel without possible connection or hope.  A place wherein trails may reside behind a blanket of canyon sides and mountain ridges and an ocean of hundred-foot-tall pine trees, but where the trails themselves offer a hand to hold for newcomers, as for every technical turn and descent, there is another pleasant trail for folks like me who hadn’t ridden a bike since I was most likely still in the single digits.  

For those who choose the daring, seemingly impossible climbs and overnighters and river crossings, there is a place at the top of the mountain to sit and rest and scream with the pride of knowing you’ve accomplished something truly miraculous.  For just as the amateur cyclist struggles to push each pedal forward up countless switchbacks through icy and muddy trailways, there is a reward that comes in the vast expanse opening come the time you reach the peak — and you see how far away the horizon suddenly lies. After a couple of breaths taken, you hop upon your now well-used bicycle, or lace up your all of a sudden broken in hiking boots and begin your descent as you admire the crow that intertwines the sky and tree branches before disappearing behind a large piñon, and resting beneath a brisk New Mexico sunset.  

There comes a certain point when you’re deep within the heart of the rolling hills, beneath the gentle shade of the canopy, a realization will bite at you like a horse fly, that the environment you are travelling through holds tales and memories so far beyond your understanding that the only logical thing to do is to stop and marvel at it a while.  That this journey you have embarked on, one that you brought upon entirely by yourself, has spiraled into something much bigger than one person could ever be.  That the grave importance of this expanse holds to it a meaning that cannot be written down in pen or ink, but one that settles into the very nest of the soul, to harbor for the entirety of your experience.  That when you struggle up the switchbacks of Nogal or bike through the ashes left behind in Cedar Creek, you’ll feel a sense of reverence due to where you are and what the place has seen.  That as you look to your right and witness the city of trees cascading down the mountain, their edges black and burnt and peeling, you’ll too feel the recovery of a place torn down and forced to start anew.  The mountainsides shedding their skin as they breathe in a brisk and pine-scented morning, serenaded by the pitter-patter of dancing dewdrops collecting on their caverns and valleys.

If you do decide to go cycling through the backcountry of Lincoln National Forest, you might find that the folks you run into, however few and far between they may be, are some of the kindest people you’d ever have the pleasure of talking to.  Whether they’re fishing at the green-and-blue sparkling Bonito Lake, wherein the pines cast reflections onto the shimmering stillness of the water, or waving at you genuinely while on a hike or a trail run, they all have the same smile on their face that only the outdoor community can bring. The type of companionship that can be gained just by being in the same place and time — that is, a place not everyone will have the initiative to explore and relish.

There was once a man that pulled his blue Volkswagen Bug to the side of the highway to chat with us as we rested on an offshoot.  I was sitting on a guardrail writing in my journal at the time, but apparently the man was once a U.S Olympic cyclist and was so excited to see a large group like us enjoying the outdoors, that he had to stop his car and tell us himself.  This welcoming attitude was something I had never encountered, especially with cyclists. I was always used to hostility and had been guilty of it myself.  Yet it seems up in the mountains, the locals hold a certain majesty toward the wilderness and those with the chutzpah to explore trails that aren’t identifiable from someone’s dusty passenger-side window.  

Despite the great deal of hardships and how often the landscape demands you grit your teeth, there is peace to be found here in the shadows of Lincoln County, peace that grows more appreciated due to what it took to achieve it.  For after every day of climbing up mountainsides in a current of winds and dust, where dirt lines your gums and your tent fights violently in sixty mile per hour winds, there is a meal enjoyed by stove light.  In which you and those you chose to travel with can sit in the dirt on the steep decline of a mountainside, behind the brush and wind block where you can manage to get your camp stove to light.  Where a freeze-dried meal can emerge from your pack and the smell of instant coffee can weave in between the scent of fresh pine and cool air.  A moment in which the wind finally begins to cease and you can look back out at the horizon and point out where you woke up this morning, suddenly seeming so far away.  As you shovel a gob of warm food into your mouth with a broken plastic spoon you’ve been keeping next to your field journal, and chuckle with your companions as you reflect on the miles traveled and the memories shared.  Of the matchboxes you’ve biked through and of the descents you’ve flown down, the wind in your face, the cold biting at your fingertips, the sound of loose gravel navigating around the tread of your tires.  Your feet sore, eyes bloodshot, and breathing sporadic, yet the moments now moving slowly, the cotton candy clouds dancing in a glistening pink sunset.

Struggle here is not to be bogged down by the larger-than-life aspects of everything around you, but to embrace the hardships and find peace in the awayness of it all. To do something difficult — something other people just might not understand — and to stand on the other side of adversity and look back at where you started.  Beyond canyons and mountainsides, up the shoulders of busy highways and through small villages wherein good people share good food and good laughs, behind the pine curtain where cones litter the ground and the wind howls like a lion through the trees.  Where a boy from the flats can hop on a bike for the first time in ten years and conquer a mountain.  Where the wind blows cold and hard, and tents are staked into the soil with the hope they remain through the twilight of evening. Where the cold, golden sunrise wakes you gently from your slumber, and despite the fact that your face is dirty and your eyes hold seven-day-old bags, you arise anyway, to look out at the wilds of Lincoln County and dare to traverse them yourself.  

“Nothing truly meaningful comes from complacency.”   

-Ruidoso Field Journal  

March 17,2025  

Lincoln National Forest