Uvas Canyon

On Saturday, February 12, Mom and I invited john and Becky to go for a hike in Uvas Canyon County Park. Uvas means grapes, but I did not see any grapes. There are lots of hiking trails to choose in the park. Since one of our hiking goals is to prepare to hike to the top of Half Dome, I picked one that had some good uphill hiking and also some nice scenery. Of course, there were geocaches along the way. Becky posted some great photos and recorded the Ten Commandments of Geocaching in California Crapos.

We hiked up the trail along the stream. Here is hiker Mom looking good. This was her first hike with her new Camelbak and trekking poles.

We came to this fun tree. Mom was the first to climb up on the tree.
We also found a few geocaches along the way. This is an ammo box cache that we found.

When we got back to the car, John and I decided to go look for one more geocache that was close to the car. It is called the Waterfall Cache for good reason. The cache was close to this waterfall.

The total hike was about 4 miles. We will be doing several other hikes with increasing difficulty to prepare for the big hike. And to answer Mom’s comment/question on Half Dome: Of course, there are geocaches to find while hiking up Half Dome. We found some of them in 2008, but most of them are virtual caches where you just log information without actually finding a container.

Baby Blessing

Before we started taking baby blessing pictures, this cute young man was talking to Grandma on the walki-talki.

We had various group photos.

The following photos were cropped from other photos in order to see how cute Charlotte is. Neil just came along for the ride.

Sabino Canyon

While in Arizona for Charlotte's blessing, we decided to go to Sabino Canyon on Saturday. Sabino Canyon is north of Tucson and is around 3000 feet elevation. There is a stream coming down the canyon but the low elevation still makes it somewhat desert like. There is an abundance of Saguaro cacti. There is a tram/shuttle that takes people 3.8 miles up the canyon an then returns. There are 9 stops along the way and the trams run every 30 minutes so you can ride or walk whatever portions you want. We needed two benches for our group.

Right next to the tram was a roadrunner. I did not see the cayote, but I am sure he was not too far away. The roadrunner did not seem to be very afraid of people.

We took the tram all the way to the end of the road at the back of the canyon and got off at stop 9.

At the back of the canyon, there is an alternate adventurous route down to stop 7. John, Becky, Neil and I decided to take the long trail (2 miles of trail to get to where it was less than a mile by road). This trail had some great views.

We stopped at the back of the canyon for this group shot of the four of us using the 10 second timer on our camera. Neil expertly pressed the buton and quickly made it to where we were just in time for the photo. Good job Neil.

We made it back down to the road and met up with the rest of the group. They were waiting for us where the road crossed the stream and where the stream formed lots of small pools. What happens when there are bodies of water and lots of rocks and kids under 100 years old arrive? The rocks get thrown in the water, of course. Neil is teaching the young ones how to find and throw rocks in the water.

John and Neil got on opposite sides of a 20 foot diameter pool and threw rocks in the water in order to splash each other. I did not see how wet Neil got, but John had some good splash marks on him.

We road the tram back down the canyon from stop 7.

After we got back to the cars, we drove a short distance to Coldstone for ice cream. Below, you can see blue ice cream (cotton candy flavor) going down the hatch.

After we got back to the house, we had amazingly good fettuccine alfredo for dinner. It was a really fun day.