The last stop of the day is at the top of Fort Wingate road where it transform into a dirt road. We pass a few campgrounds on the way and all of them to our surprise are closed for the season. It seems the season ends to early, this would be an ideal time to use them really.
There is no one in the trailhead parking lot and after getting our target cache near the nearby campground entrance we start on the level Strawberry Canyon trail.
The trail passes near the closed campground that is now taken over by birds and animals. We find a rare, for us, Pine Siskin on this stretch that even poses for us for a while before moving on.
As we walk through the beautiful colored forest we hear some noises ahead of us. It seems to be something big so we approach carefully, luckily it is no bear but a couple deer that run like crazy after spotting us. We then finally pass the campground and using a bridge reach the canyon from where we start climbing towards the top of the mountain.
We do not plan to reach the top but just hike to a couple of caches and then descend via a loop trail. We have little luck finding the caches even though we spend quite a bit of time and bit bummed we start descending towards the trail that we are going to take back towards the car.
Initially the trail is barely visible and even passes over/under a fence that is helpfully highlighted by white scraps probably for bicyclists that are likely to die at this point if they enter the fence at speed.
There is also a weird monument here that seems to be brought in from Blair Witch forest and makes us almost run back to the car so we can return home. But it never is that easy, as we enter Arizona the tire indicator lights up so we pull over in the wilderness. No luck to patch the tire here so we have to change it which takes some time even with a bit of help. Now with two tires blown the same day we pray that no additional tires will break on the remaining four hours home. Luckily we have a full size spare and we make it home safely even though two hours later. Even though we spend the next days replacing our tires it was certainly a great visit and we really enjoyed the see our first annular eclipse.
