Another clear sunny day...never tire of all the blue sky and sunshine! We were going to do our resistance exercises this morning but decided that the hike we were planning on would be enough exercise! It was about 10:15 when we headed out...getting pretty hot out, we should probably have tried getting out a little earlier...oh well!
We started by walking down to the camp host to get a trail map. Dave was great, very knowledgeable and gave us a good description of all the trails. McDowell Mountain Regional Park offers over 40 miles of hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding trails...they range in length from 0.5 miles to 15.3 miles and range in difficulty from easy to strenuous.
That's our rig back there...
...and again, as we walk to connect to the trail...
Horseback riders and hikers...we also came across lots of mountain bikers. Thankfully the Ragnar runners aren't in this part of the park.
There is a string of geocaches hidden along the trails we took...Steve found the first one. It took a few minutes but once we knew what to look for, the rest were pretty easy.
You can see the fountain spouting in Fountain Hills...
Granite Wash...
We had to go off the trail and into the wash to look for a geocache that wasn't part of the other string...
It's way back in there and you have to get through some pretty prickly bushes! But Steve found it.
Another geocache...
These flew over...
We took the beautiful Bluff Trail...
There's the fountain again...(it spouts every hour on the hour)
There I am in the distance in search of another geocache...
Found it!
And another cache...they are placed about every 0.1 mile...
That's the campground in the distance...
Gun-sight Mountain has a slot on the right side...
Ocotillo....
We had to walk down another wash (off the trail we were on) to bag this cache. Like the other one, it wasn't part of the string we had been finding...
Bluff Trail met up with Granite Trail again, and then we took the trail back to the campground. There is a shaded playground between the north and south loops...
Our rig is behind the stop sign...we're almost there!
About 3 hours, 8.3 km/5.2 miles and 22 geocaches we were back home. Steve had put on the air-conditioner before we left...ahh...it was a hot day out there and it was great going into a cool trailer.
The forecast was for 30C/85F but reached 32C/90F...you gotta like it!
After cooling down, we had lunch and then Steve went out to take the bikes off the back of the trailer. They needed a good cleaning as we haven't used them since last spring. While he was doing that, I logged our geocache finds on geocaching.com and then worked on the blog. We had showers...and then it was time to walk over to Eric and Linda's for cocktails!
We enjoyed a lovely time visiting and chatting about our travels. A couple of hours later, Eric drove us back to our site...it's a bit of a walk because they are in the south loop and we are in the north loop. They are working tomorrow but we'll see them tomorrow for happy hour, one final time before we leave on Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment