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Picacho Peak Trail
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Today we hiked up the Picacho Peak Trail that is between Tucson and Phoenix. This is a fantastic little trail that switchbacks up what looks like a huge slab of rock, but the trail was actually not that bad. Don't get me wrong, it has it's steep parts and there are places where they have steel cables in the rock to help pull yourself up some of the rock faces. That's what made the trail so interesting. There were unbelievable views at the top. You could see Tucson on one end and Phoenix on the other end with a 360 degree view of everything in between. The peak itself had some interesting geologic features. There was one area that looked like it had blobs of mud dripping down the face and puddles of something that looked like the beginnings of stalagmites on the ground. I don't know if it is limestone, but it appeared as though a similar process was going on in this part of the rock wall. I saw two new cacti on this trail, a hedgehog cactus and what Cline thought was a pancake prickly pear cactus, but he wasn't sure if that was the proper name. The "leaves" were round and flat, about the size of a pancake, not pear shaped. The hedgehog cactus grew low to the ground and had clusters of small curled hedgehog shaped cacti.
The weather was great today. It got above seventy degrees and we were in shorts and T-shirts. It was a perfect day for a hike. Clear skies and warm sun, but not too hot.
My legs feel a little tired from the hike and I suspect I will be feeling sore just about the time we get to Belize. After our hike we stopped at a Dairy Queen and I saw another new cactus called an Agave or Century plant. It looks a little bit like an aloe plant in that it has pointed leaves that come up like a giant aloe, but the consistency of the leaves is really different. It's more fibrous. Apparently, it has a huge shoot come up that looks like a giant asparagus stock only once and then it dies. I'm not sure how many years it gets before it produces the stock. The name suggests a hundred years, but I don't think that is true. The one I saw had a stock about fifteen or twenty feet high and about ten inches in diameter. It looked like one very big asparagus.
That night Dave and I cooked dinner at the apartment where we are staying and hauled it over to the Sweets' RV. Then we sat around a fire roasting marshmallows and making smores. A wonderful way to end the evening. More thumbnails ...
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