After a morning of birdwatching and an afternoon of dining and visiting the city museum we decide to explore a side canyon in the evening. It has a trailhead for a trail that might or might not be part of the Arizona Trail and we want to explore that trail for a while and see what we can find. But first we have to get there, there is a long dirt road to the trailhead and we do not know the state of the road. First it goes through the town right next to the police car that is trying hard to catch anyone but luckily it is not us today. And then we reach a nice viewpoint where we stop and find a cache while watching the many butterflies just flitting around.
We spend some time just enjoying the views and then continue on towards the trailhead on the reasonably good road except the last part where it is one lane only while descending on a shelf road and we really hope that we won’t meet anyone.
The trailhead is empty so we take a look at the information and decide on the easiest trail at least based on our guess. Basically we assume that the one following the creek is the less likely to have high elevation changes and it is a great choice as we will learn.
In fact the trail we chose is the road we drove on but which degrades in standard going forward. Not that bad but still it is better to walk instead of driving and we can also look for birds and wildlife on the way.
And soon we see the first wildlife a deer surrounded by a lot of cattle, there are cows everywhere we look, and they really do not care that much about us.
In fact some are getting dangerously close and don’t really want to get out of the way so we have to avoid them a few times but at least they do not follow us. They just look at us with a death stare, quite scary.
We continue on the road looking for birds but there aren’t that many as we hoped. Only some flycatchers here and there but nothing more exciting.
Soon it is getting dark and we decide to turn around so we can return when there is still sunlight especially on the shelf road section. The sunset is quite beautiful even from the canyon and we enjoy it as we make our way back.
Here we find the most special bird of this outing, a Hammond Flycatcher just singing next the road, quite beautiful.
And then we are back at the car and enjoy the creek a bit more before driving back to the town. To our surprise we meet a car on the shelf road however it is going in the same direction as us and lets us pass as soon as the road is larger. Back in town we drive to the AirBnB and soon are asleep after a very exhausting but beautiful day out exploring.
