Thursday October 26, 39.1km/24.3mi

Unnamed Saddle (386.6/6950ft) to Sycamore Creek (410.9/3320ft) (AZ)

The wind had died down overnight, but we woke up to a cold foggy ridge. I had never seen fog in the desert before and I think it’s quite unusual to experience. We left camp at 6am and took tons of sunrise photos.

As the orb of the sun rose above the distant mountains, it was also being shrouded by a low cloud layer, which gave it a really unique appearance.

It kinda looked like Mt Doom and Mordor from the Lord of the Rings movies.

Later in the morning the cloud layer lifted and we descended down….

And even further down…

We stopped at a spring, and this sign at the junction indicated we were almost halfway done with this trail.

We took a long break at the spring, and then spent the rest of the morning following dry washes up and down different canyons.

At one point I stopped to deal with a blister that was starting to develop on my foot, and Beer Goddess caught up and helped me tape it. Hiking friends are great! We stopped for lunch an hour later at a nice little spot on an old dirt road, and I took advantage of the sun to charge my battery. Pretty soon after lunch, we crossed the 400 mile mark which is also the halfway point of this trail.

I got one more photo of the mountains before the final part of our descent into the valley.

Once we had descended all the way down to the valley, some clouds moved in and kept the temperatures nice and cool for us.

Down at these low elevations of 3,500 ft, barrel cactuses seem to grow everywhere.

I managed to catch a neat sunset photo, when the mountains to our west started glowing orange.

Just before dark we came up to highway 87 which is one of the only paved roads in this entire region.

We crossed under the highway in a massive box culvert.

It took a full minute to walk through since it was pretty long, and it felt a little eerie inside.

The spot we had crossed the highway was labeled on the map as “Sunflower”, which apparently is a defunct tiny little town.

We walked another mile to our planned campsite next to a creek, and it was dark for the last 15 minutes of the hike. Fortunately the moon is 2 days away from being full, and there was plenty of moonlight so we didn’t really need headlamps.

We got to camp at 6:30 and quickly setup and got some water from nearby Sycamore Creek, which was really more like stagnant pools at this point in the season. The three of us setup our tents close together on a small sandy beach, and had some fun conversation during dinner. It was not a difficult day, but with the long descent all of us were feeling a little beat up.