Getting Winded

Two very steep trails today in Oak Creek Canyon - Telephone Trail and Harding Springs Trail.  Tough on the lungs going up, tough on the nerves coming down!  Telephone was steeper and longer, but it provided views like the above, and the really cool spot was The Peepholes - a wall of rock eroded into a series of windows.  Harding Springs went through the forest and it smelled wonderful.

Some of my friends have voiced concerns over my hiking excursions, and that I often hike alone.  What you should be concerned about...is geocaching!  If you don't know what this is, it's sort of a treasure hunt using hand-held GPS units to find "treasures" placed by other cachers.  I am amazed at where I will go to look for a cache!  If a hiking expert told me to go these places, I'd say "no way."  But, I will walk along wet creek shorelines, climb up rock slides, hike steep trails and look into crevices and hollow trees and under boulders.  Why?  Because my GPS told me to!  It is great fun when you have success, great frustration when you don't.  I searched for 5 today and found only 2.

I picked up a lot of trash today, mostly on the parking aprons along the highway in the canyon.  So sad.  I hate that people come to such a beautiful place (or any place, for that matter) and leave such ugliness behind.  And here it is - anyone who leaves a dirty diaper any place other than a trash can, deserves to be rolled in honey, left in the hot sun in a red ant pile, with a dirty diaper taped over their nose and mouth.