The standing-up rocks of the Apache

01 · The drive

Across the valley, straight at the wall

From the interstate the road runs for half an hour across the Sulphur Springs Valley at a mountain range that looks, from a distance, like every other range in southern Arizona. The difference arrives in the last ten minutes: the lower slopes are made of columns. Thousands of them, grey and orange, standing in rows up every ravine like a crowd that stopped to watch you arrive.

Carry your lunch and your water. There is nothing to buy past Willcox.

02 · The rocks

A volcano, twenty-seven million years late

Twenty-seven million years ago a volcano here put down a layer of ash six hundred metres thick. The ash welded into rhyolite, the rhyolite cracked along neat lines as it cooled, and rain has been working the cracks ever since. What is left is a mountainside of pinnacles, some a hundred metres tall, some balanced on a neck of rock no wider than a dinner plate, in a forest of oak and pine that has no business growing in the desert.

The Chiricahua Apache called this the land of standing-up rocks and held the range against the US Army for twenty-five years; Cochise and Geronimo both knew these canyons. The rest of America mostly does not. The Grand Canyon takes six million visitors a year; this takes a hundredth of that, and most of those come for a single afternoon.

03 · Why this week

The heat has broken and the oaks are turning

October is the month the Chiricahuas were made for. The summer storms are over, the days at the top of the road sit in the low twenties, the nights are cold enough to want the campfire, and the oaks along Bonita Creek go yellow against the grey columns. The monument charges no entrance fee, and on a weekday you will share the Echo Canyon car park with half a dozen cars.

04 · Things to do

Two days among the columns

• 09:00The visitor centre at the bottom, for the map and the trail conditions, then Bonita Canyon Drive: thirteen kilometres climbing through the oaks to Massai Point at 2,090 metres.
• 10:00Massai Point. The whole monument is below you — the valley you drove across, the pinnacles, and Cochise Head on the skyline, a mountain shaped like a face looking up.
• 11:00The Echo Canyon loop, five and a half kilometres from the car park near the top: through the Grottoes, along Wall Street, down into Echo Park and back up the Ed Riggs trail. Three hours with stops.
• 16:30Sugarloaf Mountain, an easy hour up to the old fire lookout for the last light on the rocks.
• Day 2Heart of Rocks: the long loop to Big Balanced Rock, Punch and Judy, and the Duck on a Rock — twelve kilometres and most of a day, the best walk in the place.
• Day 2Faraway Ranch at the entrance, the Swedish homestead that became a guest ranch and talked the government into protecting the rocks in 1924.

05 · Eat and stay

A campground under the oaks, a town of motels

The campground at Bonita Canyon has a couple of dozen sites under the oaks and sycamores, booked ahead online, and is the only bed inside the monument. Otherwise it is Willcox, fifty minutes away: a row of plain motels along the interstate, a couple of steakhouses, and — unexpectedly — a dozen wineries in the valley around the town that have made this high desert one of Arizona's wine regions. Bisbee, an hour and a half south-west, is the more charming night: an old copper town stacked up a canyon, with a grand 1902 hotel and bars that have not closed since.

Food is what you carried. The nearest meal is in Willcox, and in October the farm stands outside town sell apples, pies and cider by the bag.

06 · Know before you go

Water, cold mornings, and the border

Carry more water than you think; the trails are dry and the air is thin. Mornings at Massai Point can be near freezing by late October while the valley floor is warm — dress in layers. Phone signal is poor in the canyons and absent on most trails. Pets are not allowed on the trails. The monument is under a hundred kilometres from the Mexican border, so expect a routine Border Patrol checkpoint on the highways around it; have your papers in the car. Fill the tank in Willcox or Lordsburg: there is no fuel for sixty kilometres in any direction.

Twenty-seven million years to make, and you have it to yourself on a Tuesday.