Location: Cave Creek Regional Park, Arizona
It was another horrible winter day in the middle of January, but despite the harsh conditions of overcast skies, bitter wind chill temperatures, and sleeting rain coming in sidew—
Haha. I can't keep going with that and keep a straight face. No, the weather was like this:
Actually, before we even got to the Cave Creek Regional Park we made a few other stops. The first was at REI to pick up a few things. These are for sale in the shoe department:
Anyway, the second stop was a couple hours spent wandering through the Cave Creek Indian Market. A big section of the central strip of shops was partitioned off to allow artists' booths to line the streets and parking lots. There was some seriously impressive artwork and talent on display — everything from woodwork, carving, painting, jewelry, metalwork and sculpture, furniture, and heaps of other things, almost all with a southwest or Native American theme. But of course, it's really impolite to take pictures of artists' displayed works so I can't share any pictures of the event.
What I can do is show just a glimpse of the great work that the groundskeepers do in the market area. We noticed that all sorts of cacti were on display in the planters, including non-natives from faraway places like South Africa. Here's just one example that includes a century plant (far left), yellow barrel, purple prickly pears, and some succulents.
After the preliminaries, we actually did make it to the Cave Creek Regional Park and set out on a circular loop. We started rather late in the afternoon, and so as we made the track between and behind different mountains, we had different lighting and views the whole way due to the lowering sun. This was one of our first views of saguaro-covered hills.
Take a look at this small palo verde's root structure showing through the crumbly rock wall in a few places. The roots actually caused large portions of the rock to separate and break away.
The trails in the park are all mixed use, so we had mountain bikers pass by a few times, and there were a number of horseback riders, as well.
I love how the cholla ("teddy bear cholla", specifically) always seem to glow yellow when the sunlight is hitting them.
And we noticed this with a lot of the cholla: Lower portions of the cactus fall away as it grows taller, leaving lot of little cuddly-looking "powder puffs" on the ground. (They're not cuddly.)
Part of the trail loop we took was on Quartz Trail, aptly named as you can see below. That rock is actually massive — (compare it to the 30 foot tall (9+ meters) saguaro to the left). There were lots of boulder-sized rocks that had broken off from it and rolled downhill, and the ground was generally covered by quartz.
This was towards the end of our hike; this area was absolutely covered with saguaro. The really tall saguaro in the foreground was especially interesting. Look at the central column just where the left arm is growing...
The full Flickr album of all photos taken during the hike can be found here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/CPGetaways/sets/
Two panoramic videos are in the accompanying Youtube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CPGetaways/playlists
(It seems amazing how completely remote it all seems, when really we're only about 20 minutes away from four million people here.)
