Tuesday November 14, 31.4km/19.7mi

Santa Cruz Flats (89.9/1540ft) to Santa Rosa Canal at Greene Wash (105.4/1400ft) (AZ) +4.2mi on I-10 spur

We were excited to be getting town food today, so we were up pretty early and hiked out by headlamp at 6am. Within a mile we came across a very strange sight, a set of four concrete pads set in a very distinct pattern in the ground. Apparently they are historical satellite calibration targets.

We walked across a sandy playa for about an hour, before we joined up with the main road that heads into the town of Arizona City.

We arrived at Nico’s Mexican restaurant at 8am, and had some amazing breakfast burritos.

From there, it was another hour of road walking through Arizona City up to the interstate where there were some more restaurants.

We stopped at the Love’s truck stop for a couple hours, where I got a shower and we had a meal at Arby’s. It was nice to be in the air conditioning and out of the hot sun for a while. After lunch we hiked out into the afternoon, and it felt pretty warm. On our way out of civilization we passed by this interesting little house with some strange mailboxes. Ha!

We connected with the casa grande Trail Network for a couple miles, it was actually quite scenic.

And then for the rest of the afternoon, we walked along with some dirt ranching roads.

Some of the fields had cotton growing, which was shocking to see since that’s a wet climate crop.

Thankfully the clouds had built up throughout the day, and kept us shady and cool on the long road walk.

For the last hour of the day, we hiked along the Santa Rosa canal, which is part of the controversial CAP (Central Arizona Project).

It was neat to get to view a civil engineering marvel up close, but also it was sad to see so much water being wasted in the desert.

After watching a pretty impressive sunset, we started looking for a place to camp and eventually found one amongst some creosote bushes.

Even with 3 hours worth of stops today in various restaurants and shops, we still managed to cover almost a full day’s worth of mileage!