Saturday November 4, 39.8km/24.7mi
Best Gate in Arizona (553.6/3720ft) to Camp Desperation (578.3/3940ft) (AZ)
The three of us slept great in our little camp spot amongst the boulders, and we left at our usual time of 6:15. Usually I don’t get that many pre-dawn photos, but on this hike there isn’t much daylight so we are always awake before the sun.
I hiked along on easy trail for a couple hours before we came to our first water source for the day, which was another one of those modern rainwater collector tanks.
By the time we left the water tank at 9am, the day had grown pretty hot and there wasn’t any shade. There were plenty of teddy bear cholla cacti, though!
We descended a short ways into a wash, sometimes these are easy walking but in this case it was soft sand. It was quite hot, so I put up my silver umbrella to shield me from some of the heat.
And as usual for this section, we also followed along on some old Jeep roads for an hour.
TopShelf and I took a break under a nice big shady juniper tree, and a curious cow peeked her head around the corner to see what the noise was.
From the break we had an hour of uphill hiking, and from the top of that climb we had a pretty nice view back to what we had just traveled through these last few days.
Near the end of the day we came to another water source. This one was a large metal tank, which required a ladder to climb up and scoop the water from the top.
And as usual we hiked past sunset, getting some glorious photos along the way.
The sun went behind the horizon, and the sky turned very pink.
We hiked a little faster to take advantage of the rapidly waning daylight, as the trail weaved among the hilltops.
When we got to our planned campsite, it was just after dark. Unfortunately the campsite was nowhere near as big or nice as described in our trail guide….so we continued hiking. Darn.
After 45 minutes of hiking by headlamps, we came to a spot next to the trail that looked like it could serve as a mediocre camping spot. After clearing away some brush and sharp things from the ground, we were able to squeeze in our tents between some large scrub oak bushes. Not ideal, but it worked!