Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles

As you may recall, I picked up a really cool book on off road adventures in Arizona. The book is loaded with great tours throughout the area I live. And it has many more trips throughout the state. I’m going to try and check out as many routes as I can over time.

Last week I took a ride along Tonto Road. It’s a little west of the town of Prescott. The photo above was taken as I set out along Tonto Road. I can say, it’s been the least exciting exploration I’ve done so far. But I still had to check it out.

Since I’ve been under the weather so much lately I hadn’t done any other fun exploring (unless you consider flu induced altered states of consciousness while on my couch a form of exploring), but yesterday I fixed that situation.

The photo to the right is another primitive road sign at the start of yesterday’s adventure.  While feeling poorly I kept thumbing through my new book (the Airstream is now exploding with books), and had already decided on checking out the Santa Maria Mountains Loop Trail.  See, there’s a cool stone building out there I wanted to see.

So, I went off to see it yesterday!

This time heading out I had “everything” ready for the long ride.  What extras did I bring this time?

• HAM radio with several local repeaters in the event of an emergency.
• Tons of extra snacks.
• Laptop computer with USB cable to record my GPS coordinates (wanted to match up my photos with my route).
• Tripod.
• Camera (of course).
• Several gallons of water (in the event I get stuck).
• My “Backcountry Adventures Arizona” book.

As I made my way along Forest Road 21 I saw the mountains I was heading to in the distance.  They were really snow covered!  Pretty cool.  And along the side of the road I saw a river actually flowing.  We’ve had some moisture here recently, and it’s noticeable!  We might have a very green spring.

My trip didn’t cover the whole 35 mile loop.  See, as I climbed into the mountains I found more snow.  Every mile yielded deeper and deeper snow.  Seriously, I’m not kidding.  There is snow here in Arizona, especially at higher altitudes!

Finally after covering 13 miles I decided it was time to turn the Titan around.  The snow became deeper, and the road was narrow at points as it continued to climb up along the side of a mountain.  Clearly nobody plows the forest service roads, and I finally got to a point where there weren’t any previous tracks of other vehicles.  That’s a good indicator to hold off on going further (at least for me).

The ride out was fairly uneventful.  I stopped here and there to shoot some extra photos.  Unfortunately as the afternoon wore on the skies became very overcast.  No fun, and a little too gray.

You can be sure, I’ll return to check out the whole loop, take more photos, and do a little hiking along some interesting trails.  But I’ll be returning once I see the snow melt off.  Oh, and I’ll wait for the washes to dry out a bit.

After I returned to CR5 I had a 22 mile drive back into Prescott.  It’s a pretty ride.  Once outside of town you’ll find many cool ranches, and some pretty amazing ranch houses.  Definitely an area I’d be interested in living in.  We’ll see what happens in time.

As I got close to the Dells again I found a nice scenic view pull off, and took the following photo of the Granite Dells from a distance…..

So, there’s the latest adventure all!  Hopefully there will be no more flu incidents, and I’ll be getting out more and more again.  In a few weeks I’ll be celebrating my 1 year anniversary of finding Prescott.  Maybe I’ll do something a little special for that day (like a huge photo gallery, or something like that).  Ooooh, maybe a podcast.  Remember those?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 7:55 am and is filed under Arizona, Digital Photography, Notes from Gadget.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.