A friend was visiting Arizona and after a lot of unexpected twists due to blocked roads and floods she had to stay two nights with us which was great to catch up. Also given the great weather we make the decision to visit the nearby Superstition Mountains and look for desert flowers. We start from the Horse Lot on First Water Road and decide to explore for 1-2 hours. The views here are great and the trail seemed easy last time so it seems like a great place for a short exploration.
Soon we find flowers, a lot of them. Some of the hillsides are covered in yellow and are beautiful but they are not the flowers we expected, Mexican Poppy, which are quite rare at this time.
However somehow we pick a trail that is more strenous than we expected. It goes up and up towards a ridge and it even leads to a short fall in our hiker group so we decide to return when we reach the ridge.
We were looking for some ruins in the area that were described in our guide book but no luck even though we are searching for them carefully in both direction. But the flowers and the cacti and beautiful landscape make up for this miss and soon we return at the parking lot.
As we didn’t find the ruins in the mountains we decide when we return to stop at a more touristy stop on the way, Goldfield Ghost Town. This is to give our friend a chance to see an old ghost town even though it is a heavily reconstructed one. Unfortunately it is late in the day and most shops on the main street are closed but still it is quite scenic.
The only place open on the main street is the restaurant but given that we need a vegetarian one and this is a steakhouse we decide to not try it out, this time.
At the end of the street is a wooden church, unfortunately it is closed also as we wanted to see how it looks inside. However a benefit of the fact that most stores are closed is that there aren’t that many other tourists around. So we decide to explore a cage in front of the church and even enter it for a few fun photos.
We end the day with a dinner at a Thai restaurant. The food is good even though the 1 (out of 5) spiciness curry is quite spicy, we really don’t want to know what 5 would be. And then it is time to return as our friend leaves the next day early in the morning after the whirlwind visit.
