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| Car Camping | 4.90 Miles |
875 AEG |
| | Car Camping | 4.90 Miles | 8 Days | | |
| 875 ft AEG | | | | |
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| partners | | Patience, perseverance, and insistence are what best describes the years of waiting for Oregon_Hiker and myself to finally coordinate, and pull-off this originally planned remote, rugged 6 night - 7 day vehicle camping and off-trail exploring trip to day hike mostly within this less hiker visited area of The Tonto Natl Forest - Salome Wilderness.
In past years, having made two previous multi-day vehicle camping and off-trail hiking visits to the adjacent area of Redman Mesa, we both knew that there were many interesting and very scenic multi-canyon viewpoint opportunities (like Workman, Salome, Park, and Thoroughbred) to enjoy in this new (for us) area. From a previous hike, here are some of those vast viewpoint areas on the NE side of the Salome Creek Canyon Drainage that we were able to witness more of in person--> [ photo ] (see tag notes).
One of the limiting factors for visiting this area is safely navigating the 4.3 mile one way difficult, rocky, and high-clearance 4WD FR2752 to reach the active Park Tank Ranching Area [ photo ] at 5850ft elevation. In our heavy loaded, mostly stock, 4WD vehicles, it took Oregon_Hiker and me over an hour to drive it. We searched over an hour looking for a suitable private and off-road vehicle camping location for our multiday visit, and fortunately found a great location (somewhat sunny throughout the day) .6 miles down from Park Tank off unsigned FR2747. This location ended up being a perfect TH Start for all of our planned area off-trail day hikes.
We had a torrential rainstorm (with wind, raining in sheets) come in on our fourth early evening and continued unabated through that night into the next early morning. It woke me up at 10:30pm and 12:30am with a need to rise and check the four corners of my older, smaller backup Kelty tent to see if any water was seeping in or under the floor of my tent. Later this Sunday morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find that all was still dry.. Prayer does work! and due to this rain we decided to extend our multiday visit to eight days instead of seven to give extra time for FR2752 to dry out.
I posted a new HAZ Hike Guide for this location which includes an "official" 4.9 mile Driving Gps Route from Hwy 288 / FR2752 to recommended Camp G/H, .6 miles in on unsigned FR2747.
This trip was worth the wait and I only had two disappointments: 1- I lost my one-year-old 5G Smartphone with 7 years of family/friends/camping/hiking pics all on a MicroSD Card with no backup. It was lost on one of our more difficult bushwhack, death march off-trail, longer day hikes and due to hike time constraints and a committed focus on the very high priority end point for this hike, when I discovered it was gone, I decided to bite-the bullet  with this loss and continue on; 2- To celebrate our successful trip, on our departure morning Wed-10/19, I talked Oregon_Hiker into meeting in Miami at [ image ] for lunch, but unfortunately they are closed on Wednesdays.. Why in the  on Wednesdays?? |
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| (Outside.. "there is No Place Like It!!") |
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Hopefully we will come up with a better solution next June'24.
