Arizona Trail: Passage 15

I partially hiked this passage twice in 2005, with Richard, Sarah, Chris, and our dog Ranger.  The first hike occurred on February 13, from Kelvin, south of the Gila River, toward Ripsey wash, an out-and-back of about 2 1/2 miles.  Though we took no pictures of this stretch, and the stretch at the time was not GPS waypointed, I did make a few notes (all the photos are from the second expedition, which was sunny).

First, I noted that (for us at the time) the stretch was not good for mountain biking, being steep and not well-marked.  This was high, relatively open, Sonoran desert, with lots of cholla.  There were cattle grazing on the open range.  The best thing about the trip was the weather--there was water running after two days of rain.  We began under cloudy skies, which then moved to partly cloudy at mid-day, back to cloudy in the afternoon.  Not many days like that in Arizona.

Also--mud puddles.  Ranger became a two-toned Lab after lying down in one, a mile from the trailhead.  Also--water running over over rocks down a wash absolutely disappears (like going down a hole) into the sandy wash bottom below the rock stratum (granite and intrusive basalt).

For the second trip (with the same contingent), on December 11, 2005, we dropped a vehicle at the river, to pick up later.  This time, we got about 3 1/2 miles up the trail to the river.

The biggest problem was finding the turnoff for Ripsey Wash.  We'd meant to get closer to the trail, but the road was so bad that we stopped at the fenced, posted area that marked the beginning of some state trust land.  We hiked on the remaining road to the trail junction.

Lots of fine sand on the roads and in the wash. There was significantly different vegetation in the wash canyons than on the tableland above.  I think the canyon vegetation was Lower Sonoran desertscrub.

Anyway, the day was cloudy and cold, and we saw two vehicles on the trip, one in Ripsey Wash.  The driver of the truck in the wash had a Queensland Heeler, and called Ranger "fat."

Something itched in that wash.  Chris and I both picked up  some irritation.

Here's the passage map:  https://aztrail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/15_TortillaMountains.pdf

Arizona Trail: Passage 14

March 21-23, 2014, with Richard (day-hiking and car camping.)

We planned this as a day-hiking and car camping trip.  On the first day, we had driven to the Tiger Mine Trailhead, where the passage begins, and left my car there.  We then parked Richard's car at the  Camp Grant Wash intersection with the trail, to be picked up the evening of the next day, and hiked south.  Interestingly, this is one of the more remote long stretches of the trail, with no paved road crossings until Kelvin, almost 50 miles away (Freeman Road is dirt at the midpoint).

The route was dry, though there were a couple of tanks.  We saw one through-hiker, and one bicyclist that day (another bicyclist the next day).  Antelope mountain is the picture above; to the side is a point near the Tiger Mine Trailhead.

 We ate at a pizza place in San Manuel, then camped out at the Freeman Road trail access (about 300 yards off the road itself.  We were disturbed all night with people target shooting about a mile away, with automatic weapons.  Just before we were about to break camp, they stopped, at full dark.

The next day, we hiked to Richard's car in Camp Grant Wash.  It was a beautiful day, though also hot, with few water spots.  We felt lucky to have dayhiked these areas with plenty of water.

It turns out that I had driven into Camp Grant Wash with Chris, in the red truck, with my bike in the back, to ride the trail.  I don't think I did, however.  But the photographic evidence is clear--Richard and Sarah drove their car as well (see below left--that's Richard, and my truck with the bike).

Here's the passage map:  https://aztrail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/14_BlackHills.pdf

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Arizona Trail: Passage 12

 On March 19th and 20th, 2016, Richard, Maxie and I hiked Oracle Ridge, most of Passage 12 of the Arizona Trail.  We started from the intersection of the "back way" up Mount Lemmon and the paved road through Summerhaven.  Though there was snow on the top of the mountain, the weather was temperate all the way to the top.

We may have made a mistake, since we traveled from Phoenix to the top of Mount Lemmon on the first day.  Going from about 1000 feet above sea level to approximately 10,000 in one day might have been too much; it would probably have been better to sleep a day at altitude before doing a 12-mile hike to American Flag Trailhead, where we had left the second car.  I also, perhaps, shouldn't have bought that spicy trail mix.

Anyhow, the trail down from near the summit was mostly clear, but at times steep and rocky.  The panoramas show the majestic views.  On Oracle Ridge, we had a view of Biosphere 2.

The way was simply long, and when we reached the American Flag trailhead, I know that at least I was exhausted--too exhausted to really eat.  We were all so tired that instead of camping on the back way up to Mount Lemmon, we instead opted for a motel.

On the next day, we took the Mount Lemmon Highway to the top, hiked around a bit near the summit, saw Summerhaven, and did not complete the trail down Pusch Ridge, as we'd intended to do.  So, we were not quite done with Passage 12, but got most of it.  This summer (2020), the stretch we hiked burned.  The last picture is the fire damage from a previous fire on Pusch Ridge.  I'm sure more of the route looks like that now.

Here's the passage map:  https://aztrail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/12_OracleRidge.pdf

Arizona Trail: Passage 7

On November 22, 2016, Richard and I hiked Passage 7 from the Twin Tanks Trailhead to the Gabe Zimmerman Trailhead.  As the panorama shows, it was a perfect day:  temperatures from the 60s to low 70s.


Some of the trail was on State Trust land, but passed close to private property, clearly visible from the trail (1/8-1/2 mile away) for the first hour and a half.  The ecosystem was primarily High Sonoran desertscrub dominated by occotillo and mesquite.

There was one directional hitch at the crossing of AZ SR 83--after the culvert is not signed, but it's the singletrack route, not the 4x4 trail.  On the trail, we met a thru-biker who had had started from Utah on October 29th.

We crossed under the freeway to end at the Gabe Zimmerman Trailhead.  Here is the passage map:  https://aztrail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/07_LasCienegas.pdf

2018 Annus Mirabilis

Sorrow and joy describe 2018 best, for me at least.  This really begins with Christmas 2017, which Chris and I spent in Arkansas.  Here's the last picture I took of my dad in reasonably good health. 
The whole trip was great family time. Around mid-January, dad began to experience health problems, which led to his hospitalization and diagnosis with bladder cancer.

 He chose the hospice solution, which allowed him to stay at home.  I made two visits over the course of the Spring, during Spring Break in March, and then at the end of April.  Dad passed on April 28th, and I feel fortunate to have been there.  But it was a difficult time, made easier by my children's presence at the funeral.  Mom has made it through these difficult times, and has had some health issues of her own.

But, Joy!  Just before Easter, my second grand-daughter, Eliza, was born.  We traveled over the Easter weekend to see the family in California.

We've actually made several trips to California over the course of the year, both to see the children and vacation. But over the summer, we actually made a wine country bicycle tour of Sonoma, complete with a 3-day VRBO rental with Nate's family on the banks of the Russian River, in the redwoods near its mouth. 

We also spent several days camping on our own in Schoolhouse Canyon, a great and scenic campground on the Russian River.  The river's a great place to cool off after a warm day riding the back roads of Sonoma.  On the way back, after spending a day on the 15-mile drive in Carmel (on bikes), we went down the coast through Big Sur, down Highway 1, just reopened after long-term road closures. 

It's impossible to describe the beauty and the dangerous excitement of those curves, that scenery, the fog--I'm an experienced bicyclist, but even I would not attempt what I saw some bicyclists doing on that road.  A car was frightening enough.  The night we camped at the town of Big Sur, Chris began to experience some gastric pain, which she felt was unfair, since her appendix is gone, a casualty that occurred soon after our Alaska cruise last year.

Anyway, there is no good cell service in the Big Sur (as well as, surprisingly, around the Russian River), so she waited until we got out to the coast near Hearst Castle to call the medical hotline.  They suggested watching the symptoms until we got to the L.A. area, where the problems were so bad that she had to be hospitalized.  This time, it was her gall bladder.  The surgeon joked that she had few easily removable body parts left, so next year, we could vacation with confidence.

This has slowed Chris's learning curve on the toy car we got last spring, a 2012 red Corvette C6.  What's the learning curve?  It's a manual.  But we have taken it around the state, and to California (perhaps a big mistake on the 405 at rush hour).  It is pretty, though.

In the fall, we had a great time in Rhode Island, doing a family celebration of Beth and Steve's marriage.  Chris arranged the outdoor ceremony, I got to celebrate their vows, and Tom, Steve's dad, did the music.  Then we adjourned to the Bristol Oyster House to celebrate.  It was a wonderful time.

This brings us to this Christmas, which was spent in Mesa.  We had eight people sleeping at the house, and more who came to do a family celebration of Beth and Steve's wedding, along with Beth's and Tana's birthdays.

And so the year comes around, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy.

Those who sow in tears

will reap with shouts of joy!

He who goes out weeping,

bearing the seed for sowing,

shall come home with shouts of joy,

bringing his sheaves with him. Psalm 126:5-6

Link to Sheep Bridge Video

Here is the link to a revised video I created for a Grand Canyon University class--ENG 365--Multimedia Journalism for the 21st Century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdj7AY_mQ2M&t=71s

I would have loaded this into the blog, but it's too big for Blogger.

Review of C.S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

I had written this review for Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, but it turns out they had already published one. So . . .

Robert Boenig, C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent, OH, 2012).  Viii + 181 pages.  ISBN: 9781606351147.

Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), takes an outsider perspective on the careers of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, painting them as nostalgic for the zenith of the British Empire, and seeing their primary importance to medieval studies as their fiction.  Robert Boening, by contrast, takes an engaging insider’s view of C. S. Lewis’s personal and professional relationship to the medieval world.

Boenig’s introductory overview attempts in miniature what Cantor attempts in a mid-length volume, and does an excellent job of explaining the milieu of medieval studies from the mid-sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, to contextualize Lewis’s career.  His description of the initial interest in the Middle Ages by the early English Reformers (resulting in the preservation of many Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) connects Lewis’s religious concerns to the field of medieval studies itself.  His explanation of the roots of the current academic discipline—its origin in Victorian cultural and literary fashion, and the political appropriation of the Middle Ages by some of the authors Lewis appreciates (especially William Morris)—contextualizes not only Lewis, but also the vogue for medievalism that animated Lewis’s early reading.

Chapter one, “Lewis the Medievalist,” focuses on Lewis’s academic career and activities relating to the Middle Ages.  The point of the chapter can be summed up by saying that Lewis’s scholarship attempted to colonize the Renaissance with the Middle Ages.  Boenig makes the case that Lewis found a great worldview affinity with the Middle Ages, and took as his scholarly project the contemporary explanation of the worldview itself for his contemporary audience, showing the interpenetration of the Renaissance with medieval modes of thought and literary expression.

The subsequent chapters connect Lewis’s understanding of the medieval worldview with his notion of Joy, and with both the images and structures of his fiction.  One of the most fruitful insights of these chapters is that Lewis conceived of medieval creativity as dialogic, in which an author appropriates and remakes prior texts.  One sees this most easily in such works by Lewis as The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce, but Boenig makes the case that medieval modes of creativity permeate Lewis’s creative writing in a variety of ways, which he describes in detail.

The comprehensive discussion of this mode of medieval creativity provides the reader with an important support for the arguments of Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia; one problematic element of Ward’s argument involves his assertion that the medieval cosmological pattern that he sees was intended by Lewis.  Since Ward himself makes the point that Lewis never explicitly mentioned such a pattern, one might ask whether the pattern resides in the mind of the reader only, rather than the author’s intention.  Boenig’s discussion provides a context to argue that Lewis’s mode of creativity could easily accommodate an implicit “dialogue” between Lewis and medieval cosmology in terms of his Narnian fantasy world.

The book is well-structured and written, engaging to both the layperson and the academic with an interest in Lewis.  It paints an excellent portrait of Lewis as a medievalist and an appreciator of the period.  Boenig’s conclusions and analyses are fruitful to further scholarship on Lewis’s relationship to the medieval period and are interesting in themselves, making this volume well worth reading.