Aravaipa Canyon

I have been enjoying doing some things that I had not been able to do before I lost weight. I have always wanted to hike in Aravaipa Canyon and today I got to! Cindy and I went. It is a wilderness area that is managed by both the Nature conservancy and the Bureau of Land Management. You have to get a permit and they limit the number of people who are allowed to enter on any given day.

There is a beautiful creek and you have to hike in the water a good part of the time. The water was the perfect temperature today.

The canyon is about 40 minutes almost due east of Superior. When we first came to the creek we were a little hesitant about hiking in the water. But before long we were sloshing along like pros.

We saw some interesting wildlife! We started out with some javalina.

I am not sure if they ever even realized we were there. I had a decent zoom on my camera to catch him.

Then I suddenly saw this guy. SCARED ME TO DEATH! All I could do was scream, AHHH! And I moved as quickly as I could sideways away from him. He was right NEXT to me as I was walking. He was BIG. About 5 ft long and big around. He looked like a rattlesnake. It wasn't until he decided to move and we could actually see his tail that we realized he wasn't. Got my adrenalin going good though. Here you can see him moving off and get an idea about how big he was.

The rest of the time, it was mostly just beautiful!

We hiked in for a couple of hours. We rested on a rock by this little fall for about 10 minutes and then headed back. We didn't see a soul all the way in. This was our resting spot. About an hour into our hiking out, we ran into our first person. A really nice, good looking guy! We got him to take a photo of the two of us together. He was also very interesting to talk to. He had a graduate degree in Hydrology from the U of A. We ran into two other groups of guys as we were leaving. I told Cindy, maybe I needed to hang out here more, I was meeting some cute guys!

It was a great day!