Sunday October 22, 38.1km/23.7mi

Near road FS123 (308.9/7120ft) to Red Rock Spring (332.6/6020ft) (AZ)

I left camp at 6:30 just before sunrise, and it was surprisingly not that cold.

I hiked along a ridge line for a little while, and just as I was leaving the ridge I saw this weird pipe.

Right after that I dropped down into a small valley next to a stream, where it was very cold. I tried to get water from the stagnant little stream but it smelled like motor oil, so I dumped it out. TopShelf showed up 15 minutes later, and we hiked together out of the cold little valley. Once we were back up on the plateau again it was reasonably warm.

I noticed the geology had changed from volcanic rock to sandstone, and then these little flowers started appearing everywhere.

We came to the edge of the Colorado Plateau, which in this area is called the Mogollon Rim.

The rest of the trail will be at lower elevations with a warmer climate and different flora. We visited this little cabin at the edge of the rim, I think it was called the General Springs cabin.

Right after the cabin, the trail started dropping down, down, down in elevation.

After a little while I noticed the plants had started to change, and now we were seeing scrub oak and manzanita everywhere.

And we started seeing more lizards too.

After a couple of hours we had dropped down almost 2,000 ft, and the view back up to the rim was pretty spectacular.

By late morning we were down in a different climate zone, and plants definitely looked different here.

The geology had changed too, and there were even some slickrock benches to walk on.

We stopped for lunch and a shady spot by a dried up creek, and I experimented with my solar panel to see how well it would charge in this stronger sun at these lower elevations. We didn’t stay long as we still had quite a few miles to cover, though we did stop briefly to check out this handmade seat next to the trail.

The afternoon flew by, and we hiked on some nice new rebuilt sections of trail as we weaved through the canyons.

I came across another snake, this one was exceptionally stubborn and did not move from the trail.

Occasionally we passed by a cool rock formation like this one.

When we hiked down into one of the small canyons, we were surprised to hear the sound of water. Apparently a pipe had sprung a leak and was spraying high pressure water all over the little gully.

I stood under the water, it felt good to take a cold shower in the hot weather. Feeling refreshed, we continued on the trail which was uneventful the rest of the day.

As the sun started going down, the shadows on the rim behind us looked pretty cool.

One of the little gullies we passed through was full of maples that were turning bright red colors.

About 10 minutes before we arrived to camp, the sun went behind the mountains and it got dark.

We camped at a nice little spot at a dried-up spring, and listened to the crickets and other warm weather insects around us. It was one of my favorite campsites so far.