Given the good weather we don’t have to go far for our weekend hike and in the end settle for a patch of State Trust Land between the city of Apache Junction and Usery Mountain park. We have passed the area before so we know where to park to access the slightly hidden entrance and soon the sounds of the highway are fading away, though never completely.
The trail is level and it is easy walking with the only obstacles being the puddle from recent rains.
The access trail leads to what is the main route through this section of State Trust Land, the powerline road. We continue on it for a while in one direction while searching for geocaches and keeping an eye out for birds or anything else interesting. Cacti of course are everywhere including cholla and saguaro but the birds stay quite hidden.
After some time we finally find one of the birds well hidden and notice also the possible cause of the weird quiet, a pair of kestrels are patrolling the area and likely every small bird hid to escape their gaze.
After reaching one end of the powerline road we return following it in the opposite direction. It is great that it is easy to avoid the puddles of water given how level the terrain is and we are also happy that we do not have to scale the dam that we are passing by, in fact we are prohibited from approaching it.
One of the more interesting things along the trail/road is the R/C airfield where someone is flying a plane in acrobatic loops which is quite fun to watch. We even sit down and have a snack to watch it spin around which attracts also a verdin in a nearby tree.
In this direction we can actually cross the street and enter another section of state trust land while in the other direction we would have entered a housing development so we do that and promptly meet with a group of people on horseback, quite unexpected. There are also sign of homeless camps but they are uninhabited at this time so we continue on.
As we hike along the canal separating us from another patch of state trust land further north we notice something moving relatively close to us. We take a better look and it is a coyote who is watching us, actually two coyotes as we look even closer. We stare a bit at each other, with us being encouraged by the deep canal, until they get bored and move away. Phew.
We decide to loop around back towards the car and the starting area through the desert and closer to the main road, it is easy walking on some barely there animal trails and it feels quite wild if you ignore the sounds of the very busy road.
And all along our hike we were following a series of caches with a turtle theme, some of them were quite imaginative and fun and some we weren’t even able to find as they were too well hidden, who knew turtles hide so well.
Soon we pass the road and then are back at our car after an 8 mile walk through the trust lands that was easier than it sounds given how level the terrain was.