Big rock candy mountain, part II

Saturday, 5:30 AM: The alarm goes of in the Eagar Best Western. We both drag ourselves out of bed. My brother-in-law Tim had a crazy idea that the two of us should go hike Mt. Baldy this weekend. The second highest peak in Arizona, at 11,420 feet. Tim has fond memories of climbing this mountain at summer camp when he was about 18. Neither of us are 18 anymore. Neither of us have done virtually anything to prepare ourselves for this hike. Could be interesting.

I showered, donned my fancy hi-tech underwear (purchased for this trip), and my lightweight convertible pants (also new for this trip), and we load up the car.

7:15 AM: After a heart breakfast of egg McMuffins (let's hope that doesn't come back to haunt us) and a drive through the scenic White mountains, we arrive at the trail head. The trail head is at ~9,280 feet, and roughly 8.5 miles from the peak. We start hiking, hoping that our 30 something year old legs and lungs will hold out.

The first part of the trail has some incredible scenery, following along the west fork of the Little Colorado River. We just kept commenting that it was hard to believe that a short drive from Phoenix and we were in some beautiful country.

There were trees down everywhere, and every couple of hundred feet we were jumping over them or going around. Several spots had sections of the trail completely covered in trees. At one of these, we got diverted onto some side trail, which quickly became no trail. We kept moving, figuring we would pick it up again. But not before sloshing through a giant marsh. We walked back and forth across that thing, in up to 6 inches of water, looking for the trail. My boots stayed pretty dry, but Tim was now hiking in waterlogged shoes. The GPS we borrowed from Phil said the trail was on the left of the marsh. We couldn't find it. Finally some guys hiking behind us yelled across the marsh that the trail was over there. Apparently they had managed to follow it. On the right of the marsh.

Dumb GPS...

We were already regretting not bringing the topo maps, and relying on that newfangled technology instead. Getting lost was apparently going to be a theme of the trip.

After the marsh, we started the actual climbing.

Now we were in stands full of dead trees. My assumption is that the bark beetle has pretty much destroyed the forest here, because it was hard to find a live tree in this section.

And approximately 93% of those dead trees have managed to fall directly across the path...

Then we hit the switchbacks, and those legs and lungs started to protest. We also discovered just how little air there is at 10,000 feet. Not enough for my out of shape lungs.

But the views made up for it...

Tim even discovered he had cell service during one of our breathers and texted Gina. Notice what he is sitting on, laying directly across the trail. We were growing to hate those things...

10:00 AM: Approximately 6 miles in and 10,000 feet up, we start to hear thunder and catch glimpses of dark clouds through the trees. Not a good sign.

We also spotted the peak through the trees. Hmmm, lots of snow! That proved to be a bad thing...

Somewhere around here, we started to run into the snow on the trail.

Add the snow to the trees, and we managed to lose the trail yet again. We wandered around the forest for a while, heading in what we thought was the direction of the trail, with the GPS telling us the whole time that we were nowhere near it.

Dumb GPS...

We finally popped out of a stand of trees and snow...

and saw this headed uphill and to the right (away from the peak)...

and this going downhill to the left (towards the peak)...

Figuring that uphill was probably better, we turned right, into more snow banks...

A short distance later, we ran into some posts. The trail continued to the left and right, with a post in each trail.

This also happened to be exactly where the GPS showed the boundary of the Indian reservation. It appeared there used to be a sign on the post, which was now missing. Having heard that you couldn't get all the way to the peak because it was on the Indian res, we figured this was once a sign warning not to proceed further down the trail, at risk of being scalped or buried up to your neck in dirt. So we turned around and headed back the direction we had come from.

Dumb GPS...

In hindsight, we figured out that we were exactly where we wanted to be. The trail headed to the right was the trail we had been on, but had lost about an hour back. Had we taken the trail to the left, we would have had an easy 3/4 mile walk with a 100 foot climb along the ridge to the peak. And my guess is that the posts weren't warning about Indian raiding parties, but once indicated which trail went where.

The green line shows roughly the actual trail, the orange line is where we went when we lost the trail, and the red shows the trail we missed right to the peak. That trail (red line) doesn't appear on the topo maps, and certainly wasn't on the GPS, but is clear as day on Google earth. Grrrrrrr..... so close!

We figured the trail headed back down would eventually get us to the peak, since that is roughly what the GPS and topo map showed. Instead, we ran into more snow and got lost again.

12:15 PM: We popped back onto the trail just before finding the plane wreckage. Tim had seen the plane wreck 10+ years earlier, so we knew we were at least back on the right trail. Seemed as good a time as any to have lunch. We'd been hiking for 4.75 hours, covered about 8.5 miles, and were now at 11,040 feet (according to the GPS.)

As we sat and enjoyed our beef jerky, dried fruit, Gatorade, and protein bars, the dark clouds continued to roll in, accompanied by thunder. Not wanting to get stuck in it, we decided to head back down the other trail, making the loop hike.

Luckily, as we were leaving, we met a couple coming up the trail. So we figured at least we would have some tracks to follow through the snow. We just didn't anticipate so much snow. The next mile or so took forever, as we were hiking almost continuously in snow. Or more like slush. With a frozen top crust. That you occasionally broke through. At a 30 degree side angle. It was not kind to our ankles. Tim, especially, not having any support from hiking boots, was getting beat up. And his feet were again soaking wet.

Once we finally got out of the snow, we made much better time...

Of course, we did run into a few more of these...

Yes, the trail runs through there. Can you spot the stacked rocks on the other side indicating the trail?

But we were rewarded once again with some spectacular views on the way down.

We also both noticed that our hands had swelled up like sausages. We were hoping this wasn't some sign of an immanent heart attack or something. Neither of our wedding rings would even budge (not that we would ever even consider taking them off for any reason!)

There was this freakishly green rock...

And then we were back into the meadows.

3:37 PM: After reaching the other trail head, we hitched a ride with the nice couple whose snow tracks we had followed back to our car (they had caught up to us on the way down.)

Just as we both sat down in the car, it started to rain.

By the time we were back to the highway about 10 minutes later, the entire peak was getting drenched. So it was probably a good thing we didn't take the time to get to the peak, or we would have hiked the last hour or so in the rain.

Here's the final map of the hike. Green is the way up, red is the way down, and orange is us having no clue where we were...

The post hike analysis?

Things in my backpack I actually used? Water, food, camera, advil, cell phone, and GPS (sort of.)

Things in my backpack I didn't use? One extra bottle of gatorade, water filter bottle, first aid kit, lighter, fire starter, compass with signal mirror, whistle, rain coat, long sleeve shirt, extra pair of socks, toilet paper, flashlight, pepper spray, pocket knife, leatherman, handgun. I can't help packing like a freakin' Boy Scout...

How my out of shape engineer body survived? Much better than I expected. My right ankle is sore, as are the muscles on the front of my shins that lift my toes (they don't right now.) Other than that, feeling pretty good.

Effectiveness of the high tech undies? Awesome! No "Havasupai shuffle" that was experienced on the long distance hikes of my childhood. Wish I would have discovered those long ago!

The hike itself? Couldn't have been better. Scenery was awesome, weather was perfect, had a great time with my brother-in-law, and we made it as close to the top as we could figure out (Yes, Gina... it counts.) And we made it all 14.7 miles, 2000 foot climb, and 8.5 hours of hiking without dying!

Am I going back sometime this summer to actually get to the peak? You betcha. I am way to perfectionist to let that one slide...

Oh yeah, and on the drive back, we followed Tim's GPS without paying attention... down the wrong highway. Ended up taking the long way through Payson.

Dumb GPS...