An Adventure to Remember

What do you do when the temperature outside makes a sauna sound cool and refreshing? The answer: stay inside with the A/C blasting and only venture outside once the ball of fire in the sky says goodnight! I'm not complaining about the heat but it has made us change our lifestyle quite a bit. I'm pretty sure we have degenerated into some form of caveman that only sees the light of day from a window. We try to limit the amount of time our skin is in contact with the scorching environment for fear of total body evaporation. However, we love to be active people and thrive on having numerous adventures so we tried to outsmart Mother Nature and go on a night hike this weekend. 116 degrees, no shade, and wind that feels like its coming from an oven? HA!!! We'll just wait for the sun to go down and skip the thrill of heat exhaustion.

We chose a hike that was in Tonto National Forest in Apache Junction Arizona. Haven't heard of it? I don't think Mapquest had either because it took us a lot of digging around the Internet to find it (Thanks Bryan!).

Crosscut trail is 6.5 miles one way and "well marked" ...r i g h t! The parking lot was well marked. The trail head on the other hand was a guessing game. About an hour and a half into the hike, we discovered that we had guessed wrong when the trail abruptly disappeared into a vast expanse of cacti and sage brush.

I stayed put on the end of the trail enjoying a sky full of beautiful stars while Dave dove over bushes and wrestled cacti trying to find some form of a trail. Unfortunately his efforts were unsuccessful and he returned to me slightly disappointed and transformed into a tumble weed with stickers and weeds stuck into every inch of clothing. Knowing we would have to turn back, we took a few minutes just enjoying the peacefulness of the still and tranquil desert, overlooking the city lights and feeling so relaxed and happy to be together. It was just us for miles. Not even the moon was intruding on our special moment together.

After we had soaked up all the serenity we could, we started the trek back to the car. Somehow we took a slightly different path and low and behold, ran into the real trail! By then in was after 10pm and we felt we better just continue in the direction toward the car and call it a night. When we made it back to the car we realized that we had made one wrong turn at the very beginning and that is why we never saw the real trail.

I guess it is amazing we made it as far as we did on what I will call the Meyer trail because not 10 minutes into the hike we met up with an unwelcome stranger. It was bright enough so we didn't have the flashlight on and Dave was hiking in front of me when all of the sudden he stopped dead in his tracks, flipped the flashlight onto the trail and said as he backed away, " Get back. Get back. Get back!" As he backed toward me, I saw this tarantula scurry off the edge of the trail and into a hole. Yikes! That spider was as big as my palm! I was a little spooked I admit but I didn't want it to stop me from going on. We pressed forward and just made sure we kept the trail illuminated by the flashlight from then on.

Overall, it was so much fun that we are resolved to go back. Crosscut trail has not gotten the best of us yet. We will return, and we will succeed!! Oh yes, we will...

--This post was written by Sheri. Yay for her first contribution! (The taratula really was this big, and so were my guns)