Last attempt for this area

I decided to make one more attempt to get to the top of the Goldfield Mountains in this one area. For once the sun was shining. It was in the upper 60s and there was just a light breeze. I packed food, lots of water, extra clothes, and got an early start. My only concern was that I have a cold. If it had been a work day, I would have had to stay home from work. The company is concerned about swine flu. They always tell people to stay home when they're sick, but they've really been emphasizing that this year. My cold seems to be mild, but I would be the only person at work with a cold if I went in. I would have felt guilty going for a hike instead of going to work. Didn't have to worry about that, though. I had planned to head home as soon as I felt like the cold was making me feel drained, but except for a few sneezes there wasn't any problem.

Ah, it's nice to have sunshine for a hike.

The sneezes were kind of cool. My family tells me I sneeze too loud, but I'm trying to keep it down. When I'm hiking, though, I don't hold back. I heard some cool echos from the mountains and in the canyons.

I'm going to try going up over there.

It turns out that I couldn't get very far where I had planned to climb. When I'm on a steep slope hundreds of feet above the desert floor, I kind of loose my nerve. That's probably a good thing, though. The view was nice from where I was. I found a flat rock and sat down to have a snack and enjoy the view. I probably would have stayed there a long time, but a honey bee kept bumping me. Then another one joined him, and they started bumping more. I decided to leave before more showed up or somebody got trigger happy. I don't want to be trying to outrun killer bees on a steep slope.

Too risky to cross this, and I might not be able to go far beyond it.

On the way downhill, I saw something large and shiny off to my left. Naturally, I went to investigate. It was just a rock, but while I was there I noticed a canyon that also needed investigation.

There's a canyon back there. I need to check it out.

I saw no sign of people in that canyon, except for one balloon and that doesn't count. I'm sure somebody has been back there, but people don't go there very often. I was hoping to find some undiscovered native American ruins or something, but of course I didn't. The canyon quickly got steep and I couldn't follow it very far.

Looks like it turns right and gets narrow.

This turned out to be less impressive than the Wind Cave on Pass Mountain.

Looking up the canyon. It gets pretty steep.

I sometimes find water in the desert, but I haven't found anything I'd like to drink.

I couldn't go far beyond the pool of water. I meandered back to the truck along a different route. I saw footprints (other than mine) and horse hoof prints when I got closer to the road. Whoever was back there didn't seem to go far, though.

Click here to see the map, or below to see all of the pictures.

BC_2010_01_01

Wandering around

I wanted to go someplace I hadn't gone before, but didn't want to drive much. I guess I wound up going someplace I haven't been too close to before. It was just before Apache Trail turns into a mountain road on the way to Canyon Lake. Bulldog Canyon OHV area is to the northwest. I went southeast. There is a small peak there that I thought I might climb.

My destination is back there.

I also wanted to take a look at the old road back here. The peak I'm aiming for is on the right

The weather was great and there were wonderful views all around. I think people used to drive out on that old section of road until the forest service fenced it off. There are a lot of cans, bottles, and shot up saguaros out there.

I thought I would be able to climb up the far side of that hill, but it isn't looking very promising from here.

I tried going up the side of the hill nearest me, but it quickly got too steep. I got out of the breeze and sat taking pictures for a while.

Weaver's Needle.

The Superstition Mountains.

Around the other side of the hill, there were some nice views of Bulldog Canyon.

Willow Basin.

I found another arch.

The other day I played around with editing the GPX file for a couple of hikes. I thought I had a way to get rid of the ridiculous spikes in speed that were showing up, but it wouldn't work with the GPX file for this hike. I decided that I need to write a Perl program to make the edits and installed it this morning. Then I discovered that I've forgotten a lot about programming in Perl. I'm sure it'll come back soon. In the mean time, I made hand edits to the GPX file. That took about 20 minutes. The speed graph looks reasonable, though. The data in the file indicates that my data logger wasn't able to navigate for about 84% of the time. I thought I had pretty good visibility of the sky, too. I'm starting to wonder if the data logger just doesn't work worth a hoot in cool weather. I'm going to move it back to the camera strap. Maybe my neck will keep it warm.

Map and pictures are below. Oh, I tried to turn off the picture slide show on the map because computers get bogged down if too many of those are running, but it didn't work. You can pause it, though.

Off trail 102

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2009_12_26

A view of Hackberry Mesa

While I was on Hackberry Mesa about 3 weeks ago, I was looking at a mountain ridge to the WNW and thinking that I had probably been up there before. I decided then to climb back up there and take a look at Hackberry Mesa from over there, since I would know more about what I was looking at now.

The ridge I was looking at on November 27.

Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day (after a dark and rainy Tuesday) and I was able to get away from the house in time to climb the ridge. I had already planned my route a couple of weeks ago. It was an easy hike, but I moved pretty slowly. It was about 50 when I left the truck, with a very light breeze from the west. I was wearing a T-shirt because I knew I'd be warm going uphill. I didn't want to get sweaty, though, because then I'd be cold. I tried to move slow and made lots of stops, but sweat was dripping from my temples as I neared a saddle on the ridge. The view was wonderful and I stood on the ridge snapping pictures for a couple of minutes, but I was quickly getting chilled in the light breeze. I found a sheltered spot in the sun and put on my flannel shirt. Ahh, toasty!

Hackberry Mesa is on the left. If you look closely, you can see a little bit of Garden Valley.

First Water Creek is visible here. I had to stand in the shade to take this. Brr.

Weaver's Needle is on the left and the Superstition Mountains are on the right. I glanced at some pictures and thought I was holding the camera crooked, then checked the view and everything does seem to slope to the left.

You can probably tell from the pictures that it was a little hazy. I think that's moisture in the air from the rain the day before. The ground was soggy and there were puddles around. Also, the moss and resurrection plans were green.

Some very green moss.

I've been making EveryTrail maps of my hikes lately. One reason I've been doing that is because you can add pictures to an EveryTrail trip directly from a Picasa web album. In looking at the trips, though, there's something annoying. You can view a graph of altitude and speed versus distance. The graphs usually indicate that I sometimes move at 30+ mph for short bursts. I do walk fast sometimes, but I doubt that I exceed 4 mph. I decided that my GPS data logger is sometimes losing visibility of enough satellites to navigate for short periods of time. When it does get another fix, the sudden change in position makes it look like I moved very quickly. I had the logger on my camera strap, so it was normally positioned at my neck, over my left shoulder. I thought that maybe my head was blocking satellite signals and if a mountain blocks signals on the other side, the logger wouldn't be able to navigate. So I tried putting the logger on top of my hat. The first hike I tried that on showed I was moving in excess of 300 mph. Well, I was in some narrow canyons then. I should have had pretty good satellite visibility yesterday, though, and there are still several places where my speed is indicated as being over 20 mph. I think it's the mountains blocking signals. The graph for a walk I took around Brazos Bend State Park (flat as a pancake) has a much more believable speed graph. The map for this hike is below. I also included the Brazos Bend map, in case you want to compare.

Off trail 101

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Brazos Bend State Park

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Maybe I'll write a program to smooth out the data, some day when I'm feeling ambitious. Click below to see all of the pictures.

OT_101_2009_12_23