An easier hike today

This morning we again left early for a 6 mile fairly flat hike that only managed to stretch itself to a little over 7 miles by the time we were finished and stayed fairly flat as advertised. It began just outside of the town of Superior, about 20 minutes away from out RV park. There was another hike scheduled for today that was actually shorter than the one we decided to take, but it also included almost a 2000 ft. elevation gain. We decided we weren’t up to the challenging hike as we have had a busy week, and also hope to have some energy left to take a longer hike on Friday.

Our route took us along a small stream bed that had a bit of water in it in some places, but was mostly dry. In fact most of this area is quite dry, and not nearly as green and lush as other sites we’ve seen lately. It must be in some sort rain shadow, and any grass we saw was pretty stunted if not completely brown. It made for a bit of a mix of dust and mud along most of the trail, but there were also lots of cow pies to dodge which kept us looking down when we should have been looking up at the scenery.

You can see that the terrain is pretty gray compared to other recent hikes. The trees have also lost all their leaves in this area. We are at a higher elevation than Gold Canyon, and the trees in the park are in the midst of losing their leaves. They’ll be back before we leave here in early April.

 

 

 

The Saguaro in the area are pretty healthy looking right now. They will swell and shrink quite a bit over the rainy and dry seasons.

 

We had a great time on this hike, and were back at the park shortly after 1:00. 7 miles in less than 4 hours isn’t too bad a pace, but quicker than we usually keep. I don’t think we’ll be as quick on Friday as there’s quite a bit of elevation involved in that hike.

We had a couple of hours of pickleball instruction in the late afternoon, and then headed back to the trailer for dinner. We had a nice talk with our son Jason in the evening, and then got a chance to sit in our chairs for a bit. It was very welcome.

Tomorrow we plan on playing a couple of hours of pickleball in the morning, and then we’re off to the west side to see the Vancouver Canucks play the Phoenix Coyotes in Glendale. We received the tickets as a Christmas present from our son Bryan and Jocelyn. We really appreciate the chance to go to the game, and I’ll be bringing along my Canucks jersey to wear. They’ll probably be about 10,000 other fans dressed in Canucks colours at the game so it should be fun.