Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 37

 

South Kaibab starting point

We began at the South Kaibab Trailhead, SOBO on September 17, 2023. Within the National Park, the AZT is not clearly marked until it becomes the Tusayan Connector Trail. The first 6-8 miles are mostly paved, though there is one AZT stretch in the national park that follows a power line maintenance road, rocky and rough. This early stretch gave us the unwarranted hope that we might be able to complete the ride in less than six hours.

One of the Arizona Trail underpasses

At the Tusayan turnoff, the AZT becomes two-track and single track to Grandview Lookout. Though designated "easy in the AZT bicycling guide, the two-track is actually quite rocky and rutted. This meant two things: a generally slower pace, because of having to walk bikes around obstacles (and because of the change in altitude from home), and the destruction of my (admittedly 40-year-old) touring shoes [pictured]. but the woods were open an often beautiful.

So, what we thought would be about a 6-hour tops ride ended up being about an eight-hour trip. Shuttling is an issue, since no shuttles travel between Grandview Point Overlook (near the Grandview Fire Tower). The AZT Trail Angel for this section has said that shuttles might be possible.

Our Lunch Spot outside Tusayan

But at the time, I had not thought about calling on a trail angel since I had had difficulties arranging things with other trail angels in other places, and because I (mistakenly) thought that 10 miles on Highway 64 back to the South Kaibab Trailhead (where we had left the car), would be safe and easily done. Between the shoe destruction, the onset of dusk, the tourist traffic, a lack of bike lights and general exhaustion, I ended up hitching a ride back to the car from a group of tourists at Grandview Point (thank you so much!) The trip, however, was a success, because if Emergency Services don't have to be called, how bad can it be?

Here is my RouteScout track from hikearizona.com: https://hikearizona.com/x.php?x=209797.

Grandview Fire Tower-End of the Passage

The Maricopa Trail--Granite Reef Dam to Usery Mountain

 At long last comes an attempt to finish off one leg of the Maricopa Trail, this time from Granite Reef Dam to Usery Mountain Park. I had hesitated to do this section for a variety of reasons: first, much of it is mountain biking, and though I am a road biker, and use my mountain bike for the canal paths, this would have been the first time in several years that I'd been on single-track, and a decade since my last serious mountain biking. Here is the county map of this leg:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11pM_YsR5eF68XoOSP5vr_tw84vFqUEvf/view?usp=share_link.

Below is my actual route, from a Google Earth map with a GPS track (in blue):

As you can see if you compare the recorded track to the map, I have skipped about a 2-mile section of the Wild Horse Trail. The small tail on the northeast edge of the first loop, before my return to the Bush Highway represents my start on the trail. At the point I turned back, there was a one-way (downhill) sign on the trail that I was attempting to go up. Believing I had made a mistake, I went the other way on the Wild Horse Trail and ended up on the Bush Highway. I took the road up the Usery Pass hill, to the egress of the trail, and followed it west a little over a mile, then turned around, having already done 11 miles to that point. Getting back to the road, I still had about 13 miles to go to get home. I consider that I've now bicycled the route, to the Bulldog Trailhead (the green dot at the bottom right corner of the Google Earth route).

From the Bush Highway, the route turns off onto the Saguaro trail, which climbs to the Granite Ridge Trail. The Saguaro sections are moderately difficult to difficult, as is the section marked in the wilderness as "Twisted Sister." The Granite Ridge section is nice, moderate cycling. There are great views of Red Mountain on this route, and during my ride, the wildflowers were out.

My ride was a bit of a clown show--I biffed twice on easy sections, collected assorted bruises and one cut, and got both slightly bewildered and lost. I walked significant portions of the first single-track section.

The Wild Horse Trail going west, however, was generally easily rideable. A 10-minute video with views and commentary can be found here: https://youtu.be/VQ27vXvz5g4.

As of January 9, I've completed the Usery Spur of the Maricopa trail from the Bulldog trailhead through Usery Park. Some of it has been mountain-biked, but most has been walked.

Going from the Bulldog Trailhead, the trail (for mountain bikes) is easy to moderate until the trail meets the Pass Mountain Trail and the Talon Trail. Until the Wind Cave Trailhead, the mountain biking would be mostly moderate (to me) with some more advanced and difficult sections. We did meet a number of mountain bikers on this stretch, most traveling from Bulldog to the Wind Cave Trailhead.

On November 26, 2024, and again on Thursday, January 26, 2025, we hiked the short section between the Wind Cave Trailhead and the point where the Maricopa Trail intersects the Pass Mountain Trailhead to go west to the west edge of the park.

The map is not clear how the Maricopa Trail gets to the west edge of the park, but on November 13, 2024, I did mountain bike the western leg of the trail beyond the Pass Mountain Trailhead. All of these trails: the Lost Sheep, Moon Rock, Blevins, and Chainfruit (?) are easy rides. What is clear is that the Maricopa Trail follows the Lost Sheep Trail to the park visitor center.

The Fibonacci Moons Project

 

This project was conceived just after I had finished the "Month of Moons" project, about the time I was teaching HUM 201HN, a Grand Canyon University course on intersections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. The main student project in this course was to present a project that described some kind of intersection between art and science, using some artistic medium.

The scientific concept I was trying to describe was the Fibonacci sequence, which is connected to the Golden Ratio. It happens that the Fibonacci sequence, in which succeeding numbers are the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), describes a spiral which can be seen in many natural structures (do a Google Images search on the Fibonacci sequence, and you'll see what I mean).

I'd intended to finish this project in a month (since I only needed 14 images), but in practice, it took me over a year.

I had several issues:

1. The lens I was using (the M.Zuiko 14-150mm f4.0-5.6) proved difficult to focus in the dark. Since it didn't have a scale on the manual focus ring, I attempted to focus manually on the moon using the magnifying viewfinder, as suggested by sources. That method sometimes did not produce focused images. So, I used auto-focus whenever I could, but the autofocus was constrained by the position of the moon in the frame (if the moon were too close to the edge of the frame, it was impossible to get the AF to target the area). I didn't understand the magnitude of this problem until I began the compositing process.
2. To get the images to composite correctly (using the Olympus Workspace feature), I shot at two focal lengths (150mm and 100mm), so that I could resize in Workspace. That issue, plus the limit on the number of photos that could be composited in Workspace, limited my options unacceptably.
3. A few days per month, even in Arizona, were cloudy, plus, using my ephemeris program to plot the position of the moon in the sky sometimes made me miss the optimum dark time for shooting. Therefore, even the initial phase of the project took more than a month.

I discovered these issues in full during the compositing process, which I unwisely left until after the shooting process. Because of that, I spent a couple of months compositing in Workspace, then reshooting the out-of-focus images. Over the next several months, I continued to have problems 1 and 3 during the reshoots.

I finally was able to composite a complete image in GIMP, using the RAW files generated by my shooting process. Using GIMP gave me more control over image enlargement and placement. So, the end result is not optimal--I'd prefer to have the phases of the moon show more consistently throughout the spiral, and I would like to shoot these images in sequential order as well. So, let's call this project a first draft.

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 4

Well, I finally hiked the section of Passage 4 from Patagonia to the Temporal Gulch Trailhead (about half of the passage) on October 29, 2022 (my birthday present). We dayhiked from the Temporal Gulch Trailhead, where we were dropped off by Ken of Ken's Shuttle Service (a very nice person). We got the information from Ken that this portion of the trail is in the process of a reroute, to avoid the dirt roads it is currently following, and to avoid the Mount Wrightson wilderness. In the process, it will also avoid going directly through Patagonia. In my opinion it would be a loss to stay out of the wilderness area, and Patagonia is a very nice town.

At the Temporal Gulch Trailhead, they've installed a number of informational signs--

you can see from the picture that there's a triptych of information about the trail itself, then to the right of the picture is a standalone sign commemorating the Native American heritage of the area; in this case, these are the ancestral lands of the Tohono O'odham people. What was interesting was that this sign was in Spanish, with some O'odham words. I looked around for an English translation, but didn't find one (I didn't look at the other side of the sign). I've been told that there should be both a Spanish and English version there, but I did find it odd that one colonial language should be represented, and not the other. Again, maybe I just missed the English side.

This section, as currently routed, is all on Forest Road 72, which becomes 1st Avenue going into Patagonia. The day was perfectly clear, around 65 degrees, with sweeping landscapes and great bits of small nature. About half way through the hike, we could see the town of Patagonia in the distance. To the north is Mount Wrightson. Though it's not wilderness, we did have a day in which we saw few other people before re-entering town. It's clear, as well, that the people of Patagonia appreciate hikers on the AZT. The town is a great mix of cowboy and mining history, with plenty of young families and (apparently) a growing gravel bike scene. Also, some great food and coffee.

Mount Wrightson

The town of Patagonia in the distance

Some small nature . . .

Signs of history . . .

Interesting mesquite . . .

Vista

\

Nice charity from townspeople . . .

"Downtown" Patagonia, across from the Stage Stop Inn.

Here's the passage map:  https://aztrail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/04_TemporalGulch.pdf

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 1

And so it begins . . . Again. This iteration of my writing about my experience of the Arizona Trail starts, appropriately enough, on my 67^th birthday, and with two grandchildren. So, it’s now “Grandpa does the Arizona Trail;” this is a far cry, and 23 years, from my first hike on the trail (Passages 23 and 24) in 1999, with Richard Duerden. It’s taken until retirement for me to redefine my basic goal of hiking the entire trail; I’d originally conceived this as something that I’d do in passage order, all the way through. Wiser heads have convinced me that Gramps is probably not up for that, and that I ought to, instead, fill in the gaps that are left from my 23 years of travel on it so far. I will still probably retrace some steps, as well as filling in the gaps, and I may not walk all the way, since some of these passages are bikeable.

I’ve got other goals as well this time around. First, I want to give back something—I plan to participate in trail management and restoration activities as I have the opportunity. Second, I want to acknowledge: the Arizona Trail Association has begun to highlight the fact that we walk on Native lands, and I want to learn about the Indigenous perspectives about the land, as well as meditating on what has been my academic specialty for the past forty years or so—non-fictional European travel narratives of the Early Modern Period (approximately 1500-1700). Though my focus has been on British narratives and collections, I’ve also examined the Iberian exploration and conquest narratives that dominate this region. I’ve looked at the ways that the Spanish and British conceived of their colonial projects, and considered their perspectives on new landscapes.

It’s no surprise that my academic specialty has become politically incorrect, but that’s the problem with history—it often fails to correspond to ideals of historical progress. It’s also the case that, for better or for worse, there is a syncretism between various perspectives on the land and its meaning. We do need to deal with what is, rather than recast history into what we would ideally like it to be. I would like to think more deeply about this troubled relationship.

Wow. That was philosophical/pedantic. To get back to goals—I’ve gotten interested once again in photography. In its digital incarnation, photography has become much more versatile, and I’d like to document my travel in photographs and video, as well as words. With new digital equipment, I can do that now. I can also be more connected, using social media. Let’s see how much all this purpose modifies itself as I go.

So, here we go, with Passage 1. In September 2013, in the course of another trip, Chris and I had driven to the Montezuma Pass Trailhead, which is the nearest vehicle approach one can make to the Mexican border (unless, of course, one is a contractor working on the Trump-era border fence). I began to hike down the trail from the roadside overlook, toward the Coronado Monument on the border. I was smart enough to notice that it would take too much time to get there.

 On October 28 of 2022, just as before, Chris and I had planned a trip to southern Arizona wine country, this time staying in Patagonia. On our way there, we stopped, as planned, at the pass, intending to hike to the border and back, a total distance of just under 4 miles (thus, the two initial miles of the trail).

 The day itself was perfect (as the panorama above shows). A temperature in the high 60s made hiking bearable; the trail was just rough and vertical enough to be moderately difficult. The crystalline beauty of the sky and the brightness of the sun obscured the fact that it was quite chilly in the shade. The desert scrub plant community characteristic of this this altitude featured piñons, scrub oak, yucca and cholla, as well as desert grasses (some of which may have been introduced or invasive). The cholla had either yellow tips or yellow fruits. A few wildflowers remained in bloom.

We saw a total of two groups, both at the trailhead parking area. The rest of the trip, we were alone. The trail winds down to the border, losing just under 1000 feet in altitude, providing panoramic views all the way to the end. Surprisingly, the trail (which may have been rerouted by fence construction) approaches the border from the northeast, so that many of the loops of the descent give a view of a broad swath of Mexico. Some small buildings seen from above are actually on the Mexican side of the border. In the absence of the high border fence, the border is essentially invisible. At the small obelisk monument that anchors the southern end of the trail, the ironies of the border become most apparent. The border fence has been built from what looks like the memorial boundary to just west of the small monument itself. The area immediately north of the border seems to have been graded (strangely, there is a bench at the top of a grade cut opposite the actual obelisk, suggesting that at one time there was a 30-foot or so descent by the trail from the viewpoint bench.) Now it is about a 15-foot bank.

The segment of fence lends a surreal air to the landscape. The wind hums through the bars of the fence, and the scale of the construction suggests a scene from “2001: a Space Odyssey.” This surreal air is not dissipated by the sight, about a mile to the west, outside the memorial boundary, of the interim double-high “wall of containers” currently being built by the state of Arizona. But the whole situation is incongruous. One warning sign at the entrance to the memorial warns individuals: “Do Not Flee from Law Enforcement.” A volunteer at the memorial office said that travel in the memorial was “very safe in the daylight.” The volunteer also mentioned that the Arizona Trail is at this point relatively highly monitored by state authorities and the Border Patrol. (I’m not sure what I think of hiking under surveillance when I do the rest of the passage.)

As I explore more fully, I'll enter more.

Here's the map of the hike from that day: https://hikearizona.com/dex2/profile.php?I=3&u=146&ID=46&start=15&MI=T200563#T__200563_______1

10.30.2023

View from Parker Canyon Trailhead, Looking east.

 Another birthday trip, this time southbound from the Parker Canyon Lake trailhead toward the border. The trip itself was about 3.2 trail miles total (so, 6.4 out and back). We went southbound from the Parker Canyon Lake Trailhead. The trailhead is one of the most scenic I've been to (outside of places like Yaki Point at the end of the South Kaibab trail through the Grand Canyon). It was great hiking for about 2 miles south (clear skies and temps in the low 70s), but about .84 miles southbound from the Scotia Canyon Trailhead, the trail is torn up (they seem to be decommissioning a two-track road with some small bulldozer), and sections are obstructed by deep ravines and downed timber. It is clear that there's construction going on, because the new AZT gates and construction concrete are cached at two spots where there are currently crude gates through barbed wire fences.

Past these fences we began to see bear sign/scat on the trail. As we walked the scat became more and more common and fresher. There was a significant crosswind and a fair amount of brush; we did have bear spray, but still felt a little exposed, as we wouldn't have in a larger party. So, at mile 3.2, still seeing scat, we turned around.

There is a windmill with solar panels, shown but not labeled on the Route Scout map. However, the official Arizona Trail map (the 2023 official PDF mapbook) places the windmill at Mile 17.1, about 3 miles from the Parker Canyon Lake Trailhead. It is actually at mile 18.1 (about 2 miles from the trailhead), if one is using the miles marked on the official trail map.

The trail itself winds from some Sonoran grassland upland that looks somewhat like California, down through a set of canyons, climbing up toward Miller Peak and the Miller Peak Wilderness north of the Coronado National Memorial. The land around the trail from Parker Canyon Lake looks a lot like historic ranch country, given the grasslands and the water-bearing canyons that bisect it. The cow skull we saw, carefully set on a cut stump, indicates that cattle have been run here in the recent past, and the bear sign suggests wildness. The piñons, junipers, and live oak woods in the canyon bottoms parallel the creek, and the trail is bisected by downed timber and washouts. The windmill, an mixture of old (the windmill) and new (solar panels, which now apparently run the water pump for the tank), make it feel as though the 19^th century has met and married the 21^st.

 Here’s the Route Scout map and triplog from that day: https://hikearizona.com/map.php?TL=210578

 As of October 30, 2023, I’ve now done approximately 5 miles of this 20-mile passage.

Maricopa Trail: Gilbert-Queen Creek-San Tan

Here's the Maricopa Trail online map for this section.  The first part of this ride is documented in the Mesa Canals 14 post (a ride to Bergie's Coffee Shop in downtown Gilbert).  The map above goes from the turnoff point to Bergies on the Consolidated Canal, to where the Trail crosses the Loop 202 South.

Most of this part of the trail winds with the canal through new subdivisions.  The road crossings are generally safe, though there is at least one complicated crossing, I believe at Chandler/Williams Field Road, where it is necessary to wait for two stoplights.

Gilbert has landscaped and graded these canal paths well, and it is possible to ride on either side most of the way.  North of Elliot Road to the Bergies turnoff, however, riders will want to be on the West Bank of the canal; the east bank is blocked by some SRP structures.

At one time, much of this section must have looked like the section on the Pima-Maricopa Indian Community:  mostly farm fields and wide vistas.  Now, however, it is far more closed-in with surrounding subdivisions.  It is well-used, but not to the overly-trafficked point.

Click here for a short video on You Tube that gives a quick sense of this section of the trail (my action cam videos are still in test/learning mode).

Maricopa Trail: Scottsdale-Granite Reef-Mesa and Filling Blanks

Finally, the second installment:  this one covers most of the Scottsdale-Granite Reef-Mesa map (for which I'm now embedding links in the appropriate posts), though the Prelude post has more of it, and I still need to do the bit from Granite Reef at Bush Highway-Power Road to Usery Mountain Park (that will be added when the weather cools).

The two maps above show my routes on April 9, 2021 when I finally rode again the section of the South Canal from its intersection with the Eastern Canal at McDowell Road to the intersection point with the Consolidated Canal, and a new (to me) section from Hayden Road to the Mesa Landfill (on tribal land near SR 87).   Both of these routes were done with Chris; if I can ever get my action cam to work right, I'll have pictures and video, which I'll post. 

The top section is one that I've done before in the Mesa Canals series (posts 7 and 12), but it was good to do again.  The The South Canal is the north side of the fork intersection with the Consolidated Canal, and immediately goes down a steep slope.  Once down the slope, there is an underpass at Gilbert Road, before the canal grade goes through Lehi.  There's a surface crossing at McKellips Road, as there is again at Horne street (watch the traffic).  The trail skirts Mesa's Park of the Canals, before connecting with the Consolidated Canal just north of Brown Road.

The bottom map is a ride done May 31, 2021.  Most of this stretch is over the Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and skirts farm fields, where we saw much wildlife, including a rattlesnake and some burrowing owls.  As with the South Canal stretch between McDowell and Granite Reef, this route feels like the country, though roads cross and there are other travelers (including riders of gravel bikes, who are apparently using the Maricopa Trail as a shortcut from Scottsdale to SR 87 (the Beeline Highway).  We stopped just before riding past the landfill, which was not aesthetically pleasing.  According to the map, the Arizona Canal skirts the northern edge of the landfill before curving back down to a surface crossing (!) of the Beeline Highway.  See the Prelude post for the Maricopa Trail section southeast of the Beeline.

So, this fills in one blank of this section (the big curve to the Consolidated Canal).  The next blank is the trail (near Hawes Loop) that leads to Usery Mountain Park.