Friday December 1, 29.1km/18.1mi

Rawhide Mountains (365.6/2160ft) to Rawhide Mountains Wilderness (382.4/1760ft) (AZ) +1.3mi Ives Canyon shenanigans

We were hiking at 6:15am and spent most of the morning traveling thru washes and burro trails. It started off pretty cold (40F/4C), but warmed quickly once the sunlight hit the area.

The washes were wide and easy to follow.

The burro trails were the best I had seen so far!

We saw lots of evidence of burros, including poop, hoofprints, and even their noises. And finally today, we saw the actual burros themselves!

We followed Spenser wash all the way to Alamo Lake State Park. Towards the end, it started to get pretty narrow, which was fun.

And eventually, it ended at a road culvert, where I exited the wash.

We stopped at Lake Alamo State Park, where there was a campground, a store, and a boat launch.

I got some snacks and a pop from the store, and we had a nice break on a nearby picnic table while I dried out my tent.

After 30 minutes we left, knowing there was some slow terrain to cover this afternoon. First we climbed up a small hill, where there were great views of the lake.

From the highpoint, Lake Alamo reflected all the colors of the surrounding mountains. Cool.

From there we descended into Ives Canyon, which was a half-mile long slot canyon. It had a few scrambly obstacles and pools of water, so we expected it to take maybe 30 minutes.

After we scrambled around the first dryfall obstacle, there was a nice vegetated wash for a minute.

The lower obstacles were shorter, but also much wetter. There was some butt-sliding down slimy rock chutes, which was interesting.

Sometimes there were pools of water, most of which we walked thru.

One of the pools was neck-deep, so we skirted around it to the right on some rock ledges.

TopShelf coming down a small pouroff.

The final obstacle was a rock chute, which required climbing around it on rock. It should have been a simple downclimb with maybe a 3ft jump down to the ground. The only problem was the ground was now 5ft down, as the gravel streambed had been scoured away by spring floods. After 15 minutes of trying a bunch of ideas, we gave up and turned around, heading back up Ives Canyon. We cut over to the bypass route, using a shortcut I had devised, and we were happy to have our feet on a dry road. We had lost probably 90 minutes with the canyon shenanigans. The view from the road below the dam was impressive.

Our next section was hiking for in the Bill Williams river for two miles. It was fun at first, but it was slow and tedious having to wade across the knee-deep stream so many times to avoid thick brush on either bank.

TopShelf coming across the river, in the deepest crossing we had.

Eventually, we gave up on the brushy banks, and just walked in the water along the shallow edge.

We exited the river at 5:15pm, just a few minutes before sunset. It felt so good to be out of the water, and let our feet start to dry before it got cold tonight. We hiked another hour up to a pass, which generated some body heat and we dried quickly. After hiking by headlamps for 30 minutes, we setup camp at 6:30 in a nice sheltered spot near a pass. What a wild day!