The animals were rapidly giving out, and it was the opinion of the packers that they could not last longer than a week; but what little corn we could spare for them each day worked wonders, and in this way we enabled them to carry us through.
The most noticeable among the plants in the valleys was the madrona or strawberry tree (_Ardutus Texana_) growing singly here and there.

Its beautiful stem and branches, ash-grey and blood-red, are oddly twisted from the root to the top.

Now and then, in this world of pine trees, we came upon patches of grama grass.

We also observed pinon trees, a variety of pine with edible seeds.
Apache monuments were plentiful in this part of the sierra, and after four days of travel, on January 5, 1891, we arrived at an old Apache camping place, called by the Mexicans "Rancheria de los Apaches." It was a sheltered place, and we decided to stop again and rest, as now we could not be very far from the Mormon colonies in the eastern part of the sierra.

We had, on the day before, heard a shot, which had not been fired by anyone of our party, and we had met some short-horn cattle that must have belonged to some settlers.
We halted on a bare conglomerate scalp near a little creek, which we called "Bonito," and which shortly below our camp joins the Gabilan, an affluent of the Bavispe River which probably has its origin near Chuhuichupa.