The Cave Creek South/Crosses Canyon route is not an official Coronado National Forest trail, therefore, it has no number or official designation. The hike is an easy 2.5-mile round-trip walk that begins on an abandoned mine road in a shallow canyon. There is no actual trail. The hike begins where the Cave Creek South Mine Road leaves the Gardner Canyon Road (FR-92) approximately eight miles west of route 83. The unnumbered road heads south up a side canyon, where the entrance is marked with two large boulders. The road is not marked on the USGS Mount Wrightson topo map, but Rita Mountains.
The first half mile of the trail has an almost imperceptible elevation gain, and the last three-quarters of a mile gains 425 feet up a moderate grade directly in or along a creekbed. The entire hike is in a pristine canyon where the upper section more closely resembles a glen.
The road begins along the west side of the unnamed creek in an oak and juniper woodland and begins winding up the secluded canyon. After a quarter mile and a couple of creek crossings, the road passes between two steel posts. Beyond the poles where the roadbed deteriorates significantly, start looking on the left side for a low-profile stone and mortar building about 30 feet from the road. The structure is only about 3 feet high, 5 feet long, and 4 feet wide. I suspect it was a storage cellar or tool locker.
Approximately a half mile from FR-92, the creekbed passes a very large boulder on the left and an alligator juniper on the right, making it impossible for anything other than a very narrow vehicle to continue. Look for a large, flat excavated area on a small terrace above the creek on the right bank that appears to have been the site of a building. There is a 75-foot-long drift tunnel directly across the creek that ends at the entrance to a four-foot-high adit. The mine was called the Cave Creek South Mine and was worked prior to 1902, although there does not appear to be any record of what was extracted from it.
Beyond the entrance to the tunnel, the shaft opens into a small room-sized cavern with one shaft extending a short distance to the left and another up a slope to the right. The most interesting item in the mine is a narrow-gauge track on the floor. I did not venture beyond the entrance so I do not know how far the tunnel or the track goes or what equipment might still be in the tunnel.
A clear footpath continues up a stone-lined path on the right side of the drift tunnel to the bottom of a very steep slope covered with tailings. About 50 feet up the slope, a small area of the hillside has been scraped flat in front of two more adits. One entrance is a vertical shaft about 15 feet deep that is partially filled with debris. The second opening is a horizontal stoop directly behind the first. The entrance is encased in a wood enclosure with a small, screened window and a five-foot high wooden door with the name ‘TOM’ inscribed into the surface. I was disappointed when I went inside and discovered it did not go anywhere beyond a small tomb-like room.
Beyond the mine, with a little imagination you can see where the road continues about 150 feet along the west side of the rocky creek where it ends, and a faded path continues past two man-made placers. The first on the left side of the creekbed and the second directly in the middle of the creek. The placers indicate someone once found or at least panned for gold in the creek. They are both constructed from juniper logs placed between two large rocks with a shallow basin scoured out of the middle on the downstream side. I couldn’t resist sifting through the fine sand on the bottom of the basins looking for gold flakes but had no luck.
There is another 60-foot-long drift tunnel on the left about 100 yards up the drainage with no shaft or adit. I found a fourth dig site about 100 yards farther up the canyon with a small crawlspace for an opening to a small, gloomy room. The path continues meandering along the creek, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, and sometimes directly up the bed. There are two places where downed trees, rockfalls, and other debris necessitate bypassing the creekbed on one side or the other, but I found it amazingly easy to walk up the canyon. Just when you least suspect it, you come to a very contemporary-looking barbed wire fence across the creek in a narrow, steep-sided section of the canyon. If you wish to continue, your only choice is to carefully climb over the fence.
I found an occasional cairn along the route, but the path and route are both obvious – simply continue heading up the drainage. A short distance upstream from a steep incline, start looking on the east side of the creek for two crude wooden crosses sticking out of the ground (hence the name Crosses Canyon). Each cross is made from small tree limbs held in place with zinc-plated bolts. One bolt is shiny and appears to be relatively new, whereas the other is weathered and rusted. Only your imagination can reveal the story behind the crosses.
Beyond the crosses, the drainage veers to the right and abruptly ends in a shallow basin at the end of the canyon within a five-minute walk of FR-785.