In the morning we eat breakfast from our provisions before cleaning the AirBnB, loading our car and deciding what to visit first. We decide on a trail in Patagonia, the Cemetery Trail, a short hike that we hope will allow us to see some of the rarer birds in Patagonia.
We drive less than half a mile to the parking lot for the trail and then move towards the starting point which is guarded by a very active and annoyed squirrel.
After escaping the squirrel we start on the easy to follow trail that is quite flat and passes through some spooky patches of forest and then some grasslands. While seemingly good for birds there aren’t that many around except for a few hawks, maybe that is why everything else is hiding.
About half way the trail starts going up and up which is a bit surprising as we expected it to be flat. As a bonus however the views start getting quite good in this section with expansive views of the sky islands.
The reason for the climb is that the cemetery, where the trail leads, is on the top of a hill. And it has a road going up to it which is something that we should have expected.
It is quite a spaced out cemetery so we walk around for a while exploring it and looking for older tombstones as the ones closest to us are quite new.
We find a few that are older or at least not so well maintained but only for a select few can we confirm with dates that they are from the early years of Arizona settlement.
Still we wander around a bit more while our relative speaks with some California friends she intends to visit and then it is time to return to the car the explore the area around Patagonia a bit more.
As we descend from the beautiful views on top we are surprised to find on the hillside a field of bones. It is downstream from the cemetery with a wash leading to it and the horrifying idea that they might be actual bones from the cemetery presents itself. There are no skulls or anything else but we decide to leave as fast as possible.
As we reach the level area we start to look again for birds. We find a few interesting ones including a pyrrhuloxia, an unexpected fun find and then it is time to drive to Harshaw our next goal.
