apAdventures

Lucky for us, we are surrounded by mountains here in Tucson. From our home the Santa Catalina Mountains are to our north, the Tucson Mountains to our west, the Santa Rita Mountains to our south, and the Rincon Mountains to our immediate east/southeast, “immediate” as in, if you jumped in the car you can be at my all-time favorite trailhead in less than 10 minutes. The problem / blessing about the Rincons though compared to the other three ranges is that one has to really work to get to any of it’s three peaks, work from both an elevation gain point of view AND a mileage point of view. No roads go up into the Rincons. And the trails that do exist are pretty sparse, seeing very little foot traffic once you get past the 5 mile mark. This lovely combination has been tantalizing us for years. I can’t even count the times I’ve longingly started up at these three untouchable beauties from our home, or from most places in Tucson if you just look east. Rincon Peak, 15 miles and 5k feet elevation gain if approached from the east. Mica Mountain, 20 miles and 4.6k feet gain if approached from the north. Tanque Verde Peak, 20 miles and 4.3k feet gain if approached from the south.

Well, now that we are an official 20-miler family, we got ‘em all as of today. Rincon we did back in January, Mica two Sundays ago and Tanque Verde Peak today. The Rincon Triple Crown! Complete!

The Rincon Peak hike in January:

Mica Mountain, 2 weeks ago:

Tanque Verde Peak, today:

posted by ARR

It’s winter. Which means it’s gymnastics competition season. This is the time of year that I find myself getting grumpy with all the running around to competitions (which are never in Tucson) and all the sitting inside gyms or sitting in the car driving to and from gyms on perfectly beautiful winter bouldering days. Inside sports should be a summertime activity! Says this Arizona mama, haha. But then I watch the kids do their thing on rings, pommel, floor, vault, parallel bars and the cringe-worthy high bar (high bar scares me) and I’m over it.

Winter also means it’s Science Fair season. And Ivan has been hard at work with what has become the most wildly successful science fair project of all science fair projects ever attempted in this household. Yes, we’ve had some real doozies over the years. Ivan’s project this year is “Can I design, build and fly a 3D-printed rocket better than the store-bought ones?” The answer is yes. Yes he can.

Ah our beloved mountain trails, which is another wonderful activity to partake in during the winter months. A trail day is grand when one doesn’t need to wake up at 4am to beat the heat!

Which brings me alas to bouldering. Like many winters of late, we don’t quite get outside on real rock as much as we (read: I) would prefer. But what matters most (and what I keep telling myself when I get grumpy) is this: when the opportunity presents itself, we go! We’re still going people! LET’S GO! 🤪

And that about sums up this year’s adventures thus far!

posted by ARR

It’s been 15 days since I last showered. I have dirt under my fingernails that even the lengthiest wilderness lake swim can’t clean out. And every couple of hours I find three new mosquito bites beckoning a good scratch with urgency. I abandoned the concept of backpacking the day I discovered trail running. Why bother hauling that massive pack on my back over the course of a few days to cover the same terrain I can run before dinner time? No more sore hips and feet from carrying all that weight, with the bonus luxury of a cold beer and shower at the end of the day after all that hard work. Trail running was a brilliant alternative to backpacking. And my super fancy expensive massively huge pack with all the tech-y backcountry gear essentials in it lay dormant out back in the hot shed, baking and forgotten.

Well, fast forward 20 years later to today. It seems I’ve happened to have produced a son that really has a thing for trekking long distances, distances that he picks out on trail maps that are way further than we can family-speed-hike or run in a day, distances that really get you out there, away from the hubbub. “Dude, we can’t hike there. Do the math. That’s 50 miles round trip!” And so this is how backpacking returned to my life.

While our trip here in the Yosemite high country this summer is over two weeks long, the backpacking portion of it spanned five days. Five days and four nights covering over 40 miles of trail and off-trail terrain, up and over near 10,000 foot passes, down into deep narrow valleys carved from streams raging with snowmelt runoff, past impressively large hidden mountain lakes, through meadows filled with wildflowers of every shape and color and as fragrant as a flower shop, and across vibrant green swampy mucky marshes swarming with mosquitoes. 

I’ve backpacked, trail run, and family-speed-hiked some pretty amazing adventures. But wow. These five days of backpacking were absolutely incredible. All boxes were checked. Rugged and scenic trail that you really gotta work for: check. Wild water to swim in after a long hot day: check. Delicious and healthy camp food: check (dang has dehydrated food improved over the last 20 years!). Greeting card perfect spots to pitch a tent, look at the stars from bed and sip a morning cup of brew: check. And last but certainly not least, no whining from my adventure compadres: check.  No, seriously, CHECK! No one complained even for a second on this adventure.  There was of course the ever-present standard bickering between siblings, like who knows best how to start a fire, who gathered the right length of wood, or the better way to light the stove (why is it ALWAYS about fire?! Must be a boy thing). Bickering, fine. Complaining, no thank you. I used to have a big sticker on the glove compartment box in front of the passenger seat of my old Subaru with the word Whining and one of those circles with the cross through it. No whining!

And oh yes was there plenty that could have been whined about. Mosquitos for one. They were quite bad at times. Black humming clouds of them that swarmed our ears and eyes and mouth and bit us through our clothes. Those little @!#ers absolutely adored my meaty behind. We quickly learned the exact time of day they like to come out around dawn and dusk and aptly named it Witching Hour. Quick! It’s 6:50! Get those dishes washed! Witching Hour starts in 10 minutes!!! 

The heat was another fair game complaint possibility. Last I checked my phone before we left cell signal range and headed back into the high country, Yosemite had heat warning alerts with lots of explanation points plastered on every forecast. Genius Ivan started using his camp towel as a cooling rag around his neck while hiking, wetting it at every stream crossing. We all soon followed suit.

The heavy packs of course are always something worth complaining about, both the exertion required to hump them way down into that valley and then up and over that mountain way over yonder, as well as the resultant sore hips, shoulders and feet. There is not much remedy to this one. This is a fact that one chooses to accept the moment that beast of a pack is hoisted onto one’s back at the trail head. Unless of course you are someone like our badass friend Linda and opt to “fastpack” it instead. (Go ahead and Google that one).

And how about that grueling 16 mile day? Which included the mid-day trek in the afternoon heat across that mosquito infested bog where we had to near-run with heavy packs for one mile to keep 25% of those infuriating creatures from sucking our tasty blood? Nope. No complaints. Not a one. If anything, I think the shitiness of that situation made us all the more giddy. Paul actually tried snapping photos while the rest of us yelled “they’re eating me alive!!!!”

So why or how were we all so inclined not to complain on this adventure? Maybe because when there is no alternative, there really is nothing to complain about. In all of my examples above there were zero alternatives. It’s not like stopping in the middle of the mosquito bog and giving up is an option. There is only one option, and that option is to MOVE. FAST.  Perhaps options is what enables complaining. Or maybe, more simply, we didn’t complain because we were just too darn busy having fun.

Paul posed a dare for us all prior to our backpacking excursion: “I dare everyone to bring something into the backcountry that we wouldn’t expect.” I brought a game of Uno and hair gel. Ivan brought his beloved Bear and a joke book, and actually read us jokes from the book WHILE hiking down the trail. Silas brought everything but the kitchen sink, Beats headphones and his iPod, a hatchet multi-tool, a sketch book and two pens (yes, two), a book titled “50 things to do in the wild”, a deck of cards, a harmonica, a solar light for the tent (in addition to his headlamp), his own first aid kit (even though we already had the family first aid), a compass, a poppit and a fidget spinner. For anyone that doesn’t know the last two items, these are the latest incredibly annoying toys currently banned from school classrooms. And Paul, well, I imagine he had good intentions of bringing a mind-blowing dare, like a nice full-sized bottle of good whiskey perhaps. But in reality when it comes to Paul, it’s usually more a dare of NOT bringing something along that you WOULD expect. Like a sleeping bag. (And yes, this actually did happen. Not on this trip, but on a prior trip long ago with his father. I have many of these examples in my archives :-).

This return to backpacking with my family was a blast. It blew my socks off! Blew all our socks off! Grubby toes never looked so good. And for the icing on the cake, after we came down off the trail, gave the van a warm welcome and slept a cozy night in a nearby campground, Paul and I crushed our boulder problem projects first go the next day. Last day best day!

So can this trip be topped? Or more importantly, does it need to be topped? That’s another question for another day. Because today, with the small exception of me writing this retrospective of an amazing adventure with my three best buddies, we are going to continue enjoying the present moment where time has quite literally slowed down, allowing us to absorb every last morsel of it. That cliche phrase of a state that we all seek to experience, but only the lucky few actually do.

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Day 1: Packed, psyched and ready to go at the May Lake trailhead. Destination: as far as we can get to Ten Lakes

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Day 2: Continuing on to Ten Lakes

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Day 3: Day hike to as many of the Ten Lakes as we can and jump in!

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Day 4: The 16 mile hike from Ten Lakes area back to May Lake

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Day 5: Last leg, May Lake to the trailhead where the van is parked. Then a zip down to The Valley for a swim and pizza. And finally, the cozy campsite.

posted by ARR

posted by ARR

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A visit to the Tuolumne Giant Sequoia grove:

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posted by ARR

…for camping, bouldering, route climbing, day hiking, trail running, BACKPACKING! and epic banjo and guitar playing.

Now let’s rock this Tuolumne Meadows adventure!

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Place: The Grand Canyon

Adventure: South Rim to River to South Rim

Route:

Stats: 22 miles and ~5k feet elevation loss/gain in 10ish hours, including a lunch/water top-off stop at the river, another lunch stop at Indian Gardens and an ice cream stop at the South Rim 😁.

posted by ARR

A quick recap of a jammed packed spring:

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And capping off our busy spring craziness:

Watch out summer, here we come.

posted by ARR