Escaping Heat?
Coffee doesn’t have much of an effect in terms of waking you up once you’ve had a million cups during the work week. I tried drinking an additional coffee on the way to Jacks Canyon last Friday night, to stay awake but it didn’t do anything for me. April and I were both exhausted. We bailed on the idea of driving all the way to Jacks to camp. My driving reaction time just wasn’t good enough to deal with elk dodging on the dark road. So, we stayed at Motel 6 in Payson.
Our weekend objective was to escape the heat of Tucson and get away from hot stuff, like the neighborhood blaze that nearly burned down our house. Since I’m so honest I told the attendant at Motel 6 that we have a dog and they kindly said, “Sure we allow pets. But, we’ll have to put you in a smoking room.” After a night there I smelled like “that guy” who sits down next to you after a fresh smoke. I always had that luxury when I was in lecture, in college.
Anyway, we left Payson on Saturday morning and drove up to Jacks. Since we were in total coffee withdrawl we got to the rocks around 12PM, lazy and with nice pounding headaches. Getting to the crag so early allowed us enough time to get in 3, count em, 3 Jacks Canyon routes! With just three routes to brag about at least April can say she…..onsighted a 5.11a!!! Nice.
Once the afternoon monsoon lightning storm passed we surfaced from the canyon to see that several forest fires were starting to burn on the horizon. Wow! Actually, once you’ve been living in Arizona for a little while, you see one fire, you’ve seen them all. Forest rangers were on their way in to put out the blaze as we drove out.
Drove out? Yeah, we bailed. We decided to head back to Tucson. Not! Ha ha. That’s not us. We stopped in Pine AZ and had dinner for starters. When we realized that there was a little cabin in the back that you could rent we couldn’t resist. Check out our photos and you’ll see, our weekend was all about chillin’, relaxing and then climbing hard at Jacks on Sunday.
The fire that is in the photo above is the view from highway 87 coming into Phoenix from Jacks Canyon. We saw the amazing forest fire as we drove back on Sunday. As we left the cool temps and returned to THE DESERT BLAZE.
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