Four Peaks

Normally, I would let the pictures speak for themselves, but this was such an adventure in itself, I must tell you how the day went. Sabrina, Walter, Geo and I set out for this after taking care of family business first in the morning. We gathered supplies we thought we needed (food and drinks) for a short hike. Our plan was made the night before and we had a description of the trail - moderate, 4 mile loop - and we had directions and had looked at the map on googlemaps. Off to a good start. We set off sometime around 11ish from the west side of town. It took 45 minutes to get to the far east side of the valley. Then we drove off towards the turn off from the highway. We spent about an hour looking for our turn, before we finally called in help from my mom and dad. First, I amazed I had signal in the middle of nowhere (near Sunflower, AZ). We talked for about 15 minutes, trying to find out where we went wrong. Finally, my mom sleuthed the answer by googling for other hikers' journals. That worked well. We found our turn and set off for 19 miles of dirt. That took an hour and a half. It was only then I saw the words high-clearance on the sheet of paper we had. The Vibe is a great car, but high-clearance is really a stretch. Oh well, like we could turn back now?
We set off on a lovely road featuring great camp sites and tons of off-wheel recreation vehicles of the 2 and 3 wheel sort. Most of them were quite friendly as they must have laughed at our imposing size. We finally reached the parking area and decided we were underdressed. It was cold on Saturday. Never got over 60. And very windy. It was good we had an odd collection of long sleeves to wear on the hike. And our 4 mile plan quickly doubled when we decided to hike the extra 1.3 miles each way to the trailhead instead of drive. With all the commotion about the cold, I actually forgot to bring snacks along with us from the car. Oops. At least we all had water. So, I did about 8 miles without snacks. No fun. It was 3 hours of walking, in all. I was very happy to get back to the car, where there was plenty of food. We celebrated our very cold hike with a Green Machine, an Odwalla juice. Then we drove back the 19 miles of dirt (another hour and a half) while we studied our Spanish knowledge as a group. Good fun (mucha divertida?)! Who knew Sabrina speaks Spanish too. That makes something like 6 languages she can get by in ;)
We arrived in Fountain Hills and all I could think about was pizza and beer. We thought we'd show our "tourists" the fountain while we were there, and there was a place called Euro Pizza with great pizza, cold beer and a view of the fountain to eat outside while propane heaters kept us toasty! Doesn't get any better than that. I think we got home around 9:30 pm. Not a bad day. No, in fact, a great day!

Four Peaks