A hike, some cleaning, a pot luck dinner and a comet

The weather here has turned in a big way. On Saturday it barely got above 50, today we are in the mid-80s with more hot weather predicted this week.



Me at the summit of today's hike. Do I look warm?

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

This morning was challenging hike day and I was up with the chickens (or lizards as the case may be in Tucson) and we were supposed to head off to a hike in the Aspen-Marshall Gulch area near Mt. Lemmon.

Even though it was going to be in the 80s down in Tucson, the weather forecast was for much cooler temperatures in the mountains where we were heading. When I got to the Catalina Room (that’s where we muster on Tuesday morning for the hikes) I noticed that more than half the folks were in shorts.

Yesterday the hike leader called the National Park Service and discovered that the trail we were supposed to take was nearly impassable because of still very deep snow.



One of the beautiful views

So there had been a change in plans to a lower elevation hike in the Catalinas. The Pontatoc Trail was our destination today. A lot of folks around here play tennis, I don’t, so the tennis crowd learned yesterday that the hike would take place at a much lower and warmer altitude.

Unfortunately we non-tennis folks showed up for winter and instead we hiked in summer. There’s always someone who doesn’t get the word and today that was me.

But we headed out to the hike nonetheless and it was a very enjoyable, if not pretty strenuous trek especially considering the warm temperatures. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt, although I shortened the sleeves considerably before too long.

The view from my lunch rock

Much of the trail was on rough and loose stones as well as some fairly steep inclines and high rocky steps. That’s just to say that my knees are a little tired tonight. It was a little more than four miles round trip and only took about three hours of hiking.

We stopped at a nice spot overlooking the City of Tucson and a large canyon on the other side for lunch.

There were 16 of us on the hike as some of the regular hikers are off for a three day hike getting ready for an April trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Our hike leader was “Bud” and he is 84, but moves like a much younger man up and down those trails.

A beautiful night sky in Tucson

Brian (actually we call him Brian II because there is another Brian in the group) has been on nearly all the hikes that I have (and probably a couple more) and his camera wasn’t working today so you’ll see in the post below a number of photos of Brian because I promised him that I would post them so he could pull them off the blog.

Joan spent much of her day cleaning and detailing the trailer. She also found time to watch her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives.

As has become our weekly practice we went to the resort pot luck tonight. Joan always lets me pick what she is going to cook so that there will be at least one thing I know that I will like to eat.

 After potluck we decided to head out in the desert across the street from the resort to try and see the Comet Pan-STARRS in the western sky. Thanks to a local weather forecaster we had good directions on how to locate the comet and after some struggling with the binoculars and our eyesight we spotted the comet.

The sun silhouettes the mountains

Joan gets pretty excited about that kind of thing and squealed a little when she found it in her binoculars. I don’t have a camera good enough to take a picture of the comet, but I’ll put up a couple of the beautiful sunset just before we found the comet.

We are anxiously awaiting the arrival of Joan’s two sisters, Patty and Diane, and Diane’s husband, Denny, tomorrow evening. Lots of fun things and times planned while they are here.

Until then, be good to yourselves.