Week ending Dec 27, 2018 Tucson

We had a fairly quiet, although busy week.
  
We spent most of the week cleaning up the outside of the trailer, and cooking some of the food for an enjoyable Christmas breakfast and dinner with Rupert, Helen and Keri.  

On Saturday, we did make an attempt to find a hiking trail up Miller Creek on the east side of Saguaro NP.  However, we must need to figure out how to enter latitude and longitude co-ordinates into the new GPS since it took us to a spot that turned out to be about 3 miles south of the trailhead.  We found a place to pull off the narrow gravel Mescal Road / Happy Valley Road, which had crossed 3 or 4 streams.  We followed a faint trail for a few hundred yards before concluding this wasn't our route.  After returning to the road we walked north for a while before returning to the truck to take out our camp chairs to have lunch in the sun.   This area is open range, but instead of seeing cattle on the road, we saw 3 horses on the way back.

 

On Thursday, we looked up another trail, as it had rained off and on for the last few days, and we weren't keen to see if the streams we had crossed were deeper.  We chose Tanque Verde Falls trail.  We downloaded the GPS route for the trail from www.hikingproject.com.  This trail is different than most of our trails in the area.  On the way to the trailhead, we crossed Tanque Verde Wash at about 800 m elevation.  Then we drove west, and climbed up Reddington Rd, to a water rutted parking lot at the the trailhead at about 950 m. 

 Tanque Verde Wash

From there, we went down the hill on switchbacks to the wash at 850 m.  Lots of desert plants along the way.

purple staghorn cholla

The trail then works it way gradually up the wash, past some pools

 

 until we got to a nice little falls,

 

that we couldn't get past without scrambling over boulders.  The trail does go about a sixth of mile past this to the falls that are its destination.  We encountered lots of people on the trail.  School is out, so there were a few groups of over half a dozen people.

By the time we got back to the trailhead, the clouds were starting to gather over what we think is Mica Mountain.