Friday October 27, 36.2km/22.5mi

Sycamore Creek (410.9/3320ft) to Black Bear Saddle (433.4/5570ft) (AZ)

We left camp at the usual time, just after 6am. It was a long gradual uphill all morning, hiking up the Boulder Creek drainage.

At these elevations there’s very little shade, but fortunately it was quite cool in the early morning.

After a couple of hours, I reached the top of the ridge and took a break at a trail junction.

For the next 11 miles the trail followed a rough dirt road. It was easy walking and it was nice to be able to look around at the views.

In the far distance I could see Roosevelt Lake, which will be our destination tomorrow night.

I stopped to refill my water at a spring, where I also took a break. TopShelf caught up and we hiked together until lunch, where we had an amazing spot under a shade tree at the top of a hill. After lunch there was another hour of walking on the dirt road and we could see our upcoming objective, the Four Peaks.

From every angle that I saw, it looked like there were only three peaks but I’m told there’s a fourth one hiding somewhere. It was a nice relaxing walk on the dirt road.

Roosevelt Lake was getting ever closer, and I was daydreaming of taking a swim tomorrow.

In mid-afternoon we reached the Pigeon trailhead, where we left the road and stopped at a spring a few minutes later.

At the spring we caught up to a hiking duo of two older gentlemen, who were doing a long section of the trail together. They were fun to talk to, and were also locals in Tucson, so they knew quite a bit about the area.

After we left the spring, I was excited to enter another wilderness. Four Peaks Wilderness!

As the sun got lower in the sky, the hillsides revealed all their bumpy little ridges.

We traversed along the hillside for a few miles, where we had pretty sweet views of the four peaks area.

And of course the lake too.

TopShelf and I caught up to Beer Goddess, who was originally planning on going further tonight, but she decided to join us camping, and so we hiked the last mile together.

There is very limited camping in this area because of the steep rocky terrain, so we all crammed our tents in a small area at Black Bear saddle.

We actually arrived to camp before sunset today, but it was complicated to figure out how to set up the tents in such a small space, so it was after dark by the time we were able to get photos of camp.