Tuesday October 24, 35.7km/22.2mi

Pine Ridge (341.9/5860ft) to Brush Spring (364.1/5190ft) (AZ)

We woke up before dawn to start hiking at 6am, and we hiked with headlamps for about 15 minutes in the darkness.

Slowly getting lighter…

And half an hour later we saw the sunrise!

The day warmed up quickly, and an hour after we started we entered the Mazatzal Wilderness. I love seeing these signs.

It definitely felt like a lower elevation desert, now that I have been seeing prickly pear cactus all the time.

Around mid-morning a few puffy clouds moved in, and kept the temperatures nice and cool.

The clouds also made the photos look a lot more interesting too.

This was one of the biggest specimens of prickly pair cacti that I had ever seen.

We stopped for lunch at a spring, where three other hikers were also taking a break. They soon took off, and the three of us enjoyed a quiet lunch by the trickling spring. We stayed less than an hour since all of us were looking forward to the river, just over 3 miles away. After lunch I spent an hour walking across a grassy plateau before descending to the river.

As soon as I arrived at the East Verde River, I promptly took a swim.

It had been over a week since I had a shower, and it felt really good to swim in the cool water and rinse off all the sweat. TopShelf and Beer Goddess joined a few minutes later.

After spending almost an hour enjoying the river, we packed up and started the long steady climb. We spent the rest of the afternoon slowly making our way up a 3,000 ft climb to a ridge.

As the sun’s angle got lower in the sky, it made really neat patterns of shade and sun on the rippled hillsides.

As usual we hiked until sunset, spending the last few minutes of our day hiking in twilight amongst the Manzanita bushes.

We quickly set up our tents before going to get water, to take advantage of the quickly waning daylight.

I haven’t been able to get many photos of our campsites on this trail, since it’s usually dark by the time we get our tents setup. Our next task was to find the spring, which was a few hundred meters down a rough trail. There were some nice pools of water hidden amongst the rocks, and it was a little tricky to get down into.

A few minutes later, I was back at camp and making dinner while watching the waxing moon rise above our campsite.

We were all pretty tired from today, as this section of trail in the Mazatzal mountains has quite a bit more elevation gain.