There's a ton of history around the area as it's part of the American frontier, and the remains of buildings, settlements, graveyards, and entire towns are there to be discovered. My grandparents shared all sorts of local lore with us and it was great to get a good overview of the roots of Cochise county while we were there. We also had the chance to do some off-road exploring before left the neighborhood and set out for the mountains.
On our way out of Cochise county we took the time to stop to see Americas roadside attractions at its finest. I saw "The Thing!" more than 20 years ago as a child back when it was a dusty giftshop with some back hallways. Now it's a busy stop with a full museum dedicated to the story. I was not expecting the dinosaurs. Anyone who knows me well knows that I'm not a fan of them, and that my close friends delight in gifting me with dino related goods. Imagine my surprise and dismay when we paid our admission, and walked in to this.
Knowing that I was missing two training days while we were gone, I chose to make up for one of them by going up to the Superstition Mountains to hike. It's a really interesting part of Arizona with more legends and facts mixed together than most places can boast. There are tales of a lost gold mine, true stories of bodies of those who went searching for that mine found separated from their heads, more stories about the families who owned the land a hundred years ago, and facts about all of the hikers who go missing there every year.
It's a beautiful place, and after signing in at the trailhead (in case you're lost or reported missing) we set our for what was supposed to be a roughly 9 mile loop. We had gotten started a little late, and knowing that we didn't want to be caught in a desert known for missing hikers, mountain lions, and rough trails, we chose what was supposed to be a moderate trail that we should have been able to knock out quickly.
We decided to take it counter-clockwise and it started well with nice, clear paths and meeting a few people who were finishing up as we got started. It was cool out with a breeze and it felt good after the hours that we spent in the jeep throughout the past few days. It's the strangest thing out there, but every direction you looked, the clouds appear to be racing away from you. I tried to capture it on video, but nothing caught the effect as your eyes saw it.
This was my first trail navigating entirely by cairns, the stacks of rocks that you see piled one on top of the other. I've heard for some time how frustrating it is that people take it upon themselves to build cairns for decoration on trails as personal monuments, natural graffiti to demonstrate that they were there in what they feel is an artistic way. It always felt obnoxious as it goes against the leave no trace principal when hiking. Building yourself something is definitely not leaving no trace, but on this hike I learned why it's not only rude, it's dangerous. There were several places where the trail became completely indistinguishable from the landscape around it, or turned at odd junctions where the whole ground was rocky and a path couldn't be picked out. That's when you would rely on the cairn build by a ranger or volunteer to show you where to go, except that so many times people had built their own. This meant that there were cairns that were built for fun that looked like trail markers in a desert that is known to confuse and even kill people with it's remote expanse and flash flooded washes. Can you imagine following a decorative cairn built for someones amusement only to go off trail for miles?
At some point we realized that it was getting dark, we had reached 9 miles and the sun was sinking below the mountains and my phone with the map was dying. The nights storm clouds were rolling in fast as I looked to see that we were on the right trail, but we were miles from the end of the loop and the temperature was dropping quickly toward the 29 degrees that it was supposed to reach that night. Not wanting to alarm eachother we both calmly kept walking as my phone, and our trail map died. We stuck to the path as closely as possible, and hadn't seen another hiker for more than 2 hours.
Finally we saw the same signpost that marked the split that we had seen when we came in, and relieved we made the last mile out to the car. All told it was nearly 12 miles and took us about 4 hours to complete. It was a near thing getting back to the Jeep before dark.
And after all of that we found out that the snowstorm came one day after we left, another near miss. Someday we'll get that white Christmas.
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