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| Hiking | 18.34 Miles |
1,644 AEG |
| | Hiking | 18.34 Miles | 7 Hrs 24 Mns | | 2.66 mph |
| 1,644 ft AEG | 30 Mns Break | | | |
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| no partners | | Radmila signed up Dmitri for a 5 day orchestra summer camp in Flagstaff. She dropped him off Wednesday and he needed to be picked up on Sunday. This gave me the perfect excuse to plan an overnight trip to Flagstaff to knock out some more of the AZT.
I left early Saturday morning heading up the Beeline. I saw the remnants of the recent Bullet Fire, not knowing what that was all about until I saw Bruce’s photos posted. On Lake Mary Road I spotted a few elk.
For some reason, the actual Sandy’s Canyon trailhead is not shown on GoogleMaps or most of other maps, so I mistakenly started my hike from the Canyon Vista Campground, which needlessly added an extra mile to my hike, which I would have preferred to be at the other end. My goal was to take Sandy’s Canyon to Passage 31 and hike that all the way out to where my family and I left off 11 years ago when we visited the Walnut Canyon NM and decided to hike some of the nearby AZT afterwards. I ended up just short of that, but I can’t tell how much because so much of this passage been re-routed.
Starting from the campground, I saw signs for the pit climbing area, which looks like an old lava flow with treacherous jagged boulders that don’t seem very safe to climb on. There are lots of deep, narrow corridors between the boulders that look like they would be hard to get out of.
Sandy’s Canyon was nice. I hiked this trail with my wife 20 years ago when we were dating and it was nice to visit it again. When I did it before it was in a snowstorm so it looked much different this time. In the stream bed next to the trail there is still some debris left from water flowing in it.
I made my way up to Fisher Point and took in the views there. This area along the cliffs and even down in the canyon is populated by a rather large amount of ravens. They seemed somewhat disturbed by my presence. They made a lot of noise, anyway.
Past Fisher Point the trail is mainly level, with a few rocky spots here and there. The rerouting of this trail tends to zig zag along the original alignment, which ended up adding a minimum of an extra mile one way. I hiked until I got to the 10 mile mark on my odometer, then turned back. It seemed like I had at least another mile to go and I still had to go back in and out of Walnut Canyon to get to my originally planned turnaround point.
To save mileage on the way back, I spotted and took the old alignments of the AZT. The first section hasn’t been touched at all, so the hiking on that was great. The 2nd section was covered with dead branches all the way. This really didn’t make it any harder to hike, but it slowed me down a bit. It did make it easier to follow. I ended up running out of water with over 2 miles left to hike, so it was a good think that I bailed when I did and also took the shortcuts back.
The untouched section that is now decommissioned is definitely singletrack, so I’m really puzzled why they rerouted this. I know they’re rerouting sections that follow old dirt roads, but this really seemed to serve no purpose other than adding distance to the trail. If they ever finish the reroutes, someone needs to go back and recalculate the total mileage of the AZT, because that 804 (?) number I see all time can’t be right anymore.
Saw almost as many bikers as hikers on this trail. The weather stayed cool all day and the breezes were nice for that and also for listening to the wind trough pines all day. Very peaceful and tranquil day hiking through the forest. |
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