First Water Creek via Black Canyon

Saturday was a beautiful, cloudless day. I had to do some shopping that day, though. I was at the computer Sunday morning thinking about where to go hiking and thinking that it seemed unusually dark outside when I heard rain on the windows. It looked like I would be driving around looking for waterfalls instead of hiking, though it didn't seem to be raining hard enough to get any waterfalls flowing. It did clear up some, though. After lunch I decided to hike down to First Water Creek near Canyon Lake to see if there was any water flowing.

Black Canyon descends to First Water Creek.

As I drove towards Canyon Lake, I couldn't see Four Peaks. It was shrouded in clouds. There was a break in the clouds for a couple of minutes and I could see a little snow up there. Sweetums was just saying on Saturday that there would be snow up there soon. Maybe she had read the weather forecast.

All my pictures taken on the way down to First Water Creek look pretty much the same.

The nice thing about being in a canyon was that it blocked most of the wind. It was about 50 and I'm a fully acclimated resident of the valley of the sun so I would have been cold out in the wind.

There were puddles in First Water Creek, but no flowing water.

I walked down the creek bed to the lake, which is a very short walk. I also tried going upstream but There was a large (garage size) boulder and a puddle in the way. I could have gotten around the puddle, but one slip and I would be in the puddle, which wouldn't be fun on a cool day. Or even worse, falling between a smaller boulder and the canyon wall could have broken bones. You have to keep these things in mind when you hike alone and you are in a canyon where your SPOT may not have visibility of a communication satellite and you don't like the pain caused by broken bones.

Canyon Lake. Well, a small piece of it.

An obstacle. I turned around.

Often when driving along Apache Trail, I see people standing on the cliffs overlooking Black Canyon and I wonder if you would be able to see them from the trail down to First Water Creek. I had never seen them from down there, but that's probably because I'm always looking for places to put my feet, and for things to not step on. On this hike I looked up and saw several people standing on the cliff.

Tourists. You can tell by the fancy clothes.

I waved to them but I don't think they could see me. I was far away and was wearing clothes that didn't stand out. When I got pretty close to them I waved again. No response. Well, they were probably looking at the scenery behind me. If I had a choice between looking at me or the scenery, I wouldn't see me, either. In fact, I can't remember ever seeing me while on a hike in the desert. So there ya go.

This isn't as close as it seems. They still couldn't see me. Either that or they don't wave to strangers in the desert.

I created an EveryTrail map of this hike. I scaled the pictures down for upload to EveryTrail. The transfer from Picasa web albums still wasn't working for me the last time I checked.

Hike to First Water Creek via Black Canyon

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Click below to see all of the pictures.

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