January 12, 2013

Desert Sky

We didn’t get up until almost 10am and then had a big bacon and egg breakfast.  We had plans to meet up with my mom & dad and my daughter and her partner at Applebee’s for dinner and knowing how we tend to overeat when we dine out, I convinced Monte that we should go for a hike.  We drove over to just past the entrance to the Lost Dutchman’s State Park entrance and turned in at a dirt road that leads to trailheads.  We had discovered this road when we first arrived in Apache Junction after hiking at Lost Dutchman State Park.  We had planned on returning to hike but hadn’t been able to between the holidays and being sick.

 

 

After our little relapse into the slugfest of the past week we felt ready to take on the mountain.  The only problem was that by the time we decided to go and actually drove over to the trailhead it was already noon.  And since we were expected at Applebee’s by 4pm we had to be conscious of the time. 

After parking and gearing up, we passed through the break in the fence.

 

 

 

 

There are two signed trailheads. 

 

 

 The Crosscut trail is on the right, while the Massacre grounds trail starts at the left.  We followed the Crosscut trail through the desert until we came to a fork and went left. 

 

 

This brought us to a fence that had a section missing.  We passed through and continued climbing.  The trail, that is not too strenuous, is not clearly marked at this point but someone had thoughtfully erected cairns that acted as markers.  It was a little chilly but once we got going we warmed up pretty quickly. 

 

 

The destination of our hike was the rumored site of an ambush of Spanish miners by Apache Indians.  But because we were concerned about the time, we only went about two miles before retracing our steps.  We definitely want to try to do the complete hike another day when we do not have any other plans and get an earlier start.

 

 

We got back to the car at 3:15 and since we still had to drive back home and take showers,  we knew there was no way we could meet at the restaurant by 4pm, so I called my daughter and pushed the meet time to 5pm.

When we got to the restaurant we discovered there was a 40 minute wait-time for a table.  It actually turned out to be just around 25 minutes. 

 

Mom & Dad

Renee & Rose

 

 We had a great dinner, after which we went to Renee’s house where my family patiently sat through a couple of the photo slide shows I put together.  Between Monte and I we took 5000 pictures our first month on the road.  I painstakingly sifted through all the photos and even after discarding some really great ones I still had 800 that I thought had to be included in my slide show.   Not wanting to torture anyone with having to sit through that many photos at one time I created a disc 1 & disc 2 for August 2012 with 400 pictures each.  I guess we didn’t take as many pictures in September because I could fit most of them on one disc but I had to create two separate discs for the months of October and November.  I can already imagine the groans I know I am going to hear the next time we are together and I ask if anyone is ready to see September’s disc.    

It had been a great day and because we had hiked 4 miles I didn’t feel so guilty about eating so much at dinner.  The temperature is expected to go below freezing tonight.  As much as I am enjoying visiting with family I kind of wish I was back in Florida right now!