🏷️ hiking

Before we dropped @terry off to go home, we went for one real hike up Papago Park, in the middle of Scottsdale near the airport. It juts up in the middle of the flat sprawl, with a zoo and golf course nearby.

It's pretty easy to get up and has a 360 view of endless Phoenix.

Afterwards we ate Filiberto's and dropped @terry off for his flight home. I really missed him, and wished he could have come along ;(

A few hikes and walks from Phoenix.

Saturday @terry and I went on a walk for Mexican Señor Taco. @paul and others were eating a fancy meat dinner. It was about an hour walk each way from where the party was, and it was the first commercial building. Mindblowing how long it takes. You could see the lights from Phoenix going on forever from the top of fountain hills. It was a good temperature.



The next day we went up on another hill nearby in Fountain Hills. @lilho was not having it.

It was a short hike through some cacti and crusty old bushes. At the top you could see all the mountains around. To make it a little gayer for us, a rainbow appeared over in a freak rainstorm.

We went down to Zoar Valley this weekend.

It must have been raining down south because the creek and the hills are a mudbath. I still swam in it. It felt so good.


We attempted to go down Point Peter but the water was too high at the bottom. So it was a climb right back up.





Lookin' skeptical
Our new pet Philip



The best part of Zoar to me is the way the water flows over and fractures the shale. A mix of engineered looking edges and channels with worn and cracked stone. I could watch the water run all day.
Jungle boys

Today we scampered down to Zoar Valley with Emily and Mike. It was their first time there, somehow we weren't able to convince them to stumblerun down Point Peter. But we had a good time anyway. I'm ready for summer after this.

It was so hot down in the gorge. I wanted to do some FKK schwimmen but there were a ton of people around. The rocks were too mossy to cross in barefeet so we stuck mostly to the part where the creeks fork, having a beers while building a river rock chateau.







Here's a 360 photo I took. I haven't VR'ed in a while but I want to see how it looks.






Said chateau


Rock skipping contests with @terry

We took advantage of the warm Sunday to go hiking down at Chestnut Ridge. From the look of the parking lot we thought it was going it was going to be packed - but they all must have been on the eternal flame trail because we didn't see too many people. The shale-y creek beds remind me of Hunter's Creek.



I hadn't been to hike at Chesnut Ridge since elementary school, when a bunch of hippies showed us what weeds we could eat, and we had lean-to building contests. During @paul's time Ken-Ton elementary schools had camp outs - but at some point that became too risky for schools, and it turned into county park day trips.

My favorite part about the weather was the watching the snow melt run off into increasingly bigger streams. We walked through a path that basically became a creek.




At some point we came across this old chimney backing up to a creek. Nothing else was around it - I wonder what it was for. I climbed the top and looked down - it was full of garbage.


My photos for the day came out pretty good. I wish I could post a bunch of the time lapse pictures I took because I felt they get the streams the best, but they're in mp4 format and I don't feel like uploading them to youtube. Maybe estrip should support small file-size HTML5 video.












On the way home we stopped at Curly's for late lunch. It was expensive but amazing - I had the jerk tofu with sliced grilles vegetables and Terry had a mushroom mac and cheese. I need to figure out how to cook tofu that way.

A swampy wetland full of gators, turtles, and otters (didn't get to see any of those though :(). It did have a short wooden tower and bridge you could climb up and see forever from.

Just walking down a paved path in the palm woods made me wonder how people managed to live in Florida before they drained the Everglades. I read a little bit about the Seminoles in the area and their wars that led to their displacement/genocide. Maybe I'll post about that sometime.

We went down to Zoar with @uchina and @YesThatCasey so we could float down the river. The rapids were crazy fun and weather was pretty good.

Masumi flipped once but other than that no casualties don't the rocks.

@paul and I headed down on Sunday to hike at Zoar. The weather was freaking perfect.

We walked down and swam a bit in the creek. The water was ridiculously high - not sure if it rained or was the snow melt still. On the way back from swimming past the flats we couldn't even walk along the creek back to climb up at point peter.

Instead, we went on this crazy non-path through the woods. I had no idea where we were going but we were hoping to find the trail. The sun was going down and the mosquitos were out.

The creepiest part was where we found two other car wrecks in the woods. Next to them were purses and shows. Real weird.

Finally we got to one of the brooks that flows over the main trail. We were able to climb right up and ended right near the parking lot.












We thought this was an emerald ash borer. I squished him. Turns out he's just a native six spotted tiger beetle. Sorry guy :(
On the plus side Paul took a gypsy moth nest and sank it in the river, mafia style.












There weren't many people down in the flats. Just one cruiser, a couple of bros, and us.

Last Saturday we went hiking at the gorge with @YesThatCasey. I don't know if I've ever seen the water so crazy and high. I wish you could get in some sort of hamster bubble and get tossed around in it.

Of course an hour hike also meant we bought a weeks worth of snacks before we got there.

Last Friday, @paul and I took a trip down to 18 Mile Creek. It wasn't as thawed as we thought it was going to be but it was still a good one.

I never had been down there so the fact that there are some hills so close to the city surprised me. The water and waterfalls might actually would have been nice if it wasn't clearly sewer overflow from melting snow ;(.

Luckily they're turning the headwaters into a new county park.


So foggy on the skyway down. You couldn't see anything. Glad I wasn't driving.





Shale scrambling!




The foxhole we found.

Deerhole we found.