Monday November 13, 35.6km/22.1mi

Base of West Silver Bell Mountain (67.8/1980ft) to Santa Cruz Flats (89.9/1540ft) (AZ)

It was surprisingly windy last night, so neither of us slept very well with the random errant gusts of wind that would occasionally try to flatten our tents. But we were still hiking by 6:15am, across a flat desert plain.

I don’t like that there isn’t much daylight this time of year, but it is amazing to get to watch the sunrise every single morning.

Eventually the day got pretty hot, and we walked on various old dirt roads and some cross-country terrain.

After a slight climb up into the Sawtooth mountains, we re-entered the Saguaro elevation. They were everywhere!

There was a very short and very steep climb over the top of a little pass, from where we had pretty good views down to our next valley.

The trail passed between a couple of rocky cliffs, which radiated the heat back onto us and it was very hot.

From the top of the climb, we also had a cool view down to this little rocky butte.

After a short but steep descent we stopped at our only water source for the rest of the day, and unfortunately it looked a little green. It filtered clear, but I felt bad for my poor filter. After our break at the water source, we had a fun little cross country section to do which involved scrambling up and over another little pass.

The Sawtooth mountains are very rugged! The xc section was only a mile long, but it took almost an hour, so I was glad to be back on an easy flat hiking surface again.

We continued for a couple hours on another old road, until we got to a place where we could legally camp. Of course we hiked right until dark, so I got to watch another sunset. There were some clouds that had moved in today, so the sunset looked especially unique.

We walked for a mile along some farm fields, where they were strangely burning the brush. Seems like an awfully dangerous and pollute-y way just to remove some brush.

The view back south to the Sawtooth mountains, which we had just climbed over.

Once we entered state land, we started looking for camping spots.

A little after sunset, the sky turned ridiculously deep red, and I just stared at it for a minute.

A few minutes later we found a place to camp, just as it was getting really dark. Perfect!