Walnut Canyon ATV Ride

The weather remains excellent, warm and sunny so we decided this week we would head off to Walnut Canyon for our weekly ride. We also decided to not invite anyone to go along with us other than Trent and Ann as it is so dry out in the desert and the dust so bad when you get in a larger group that we figured just the two ATV's would be enough. The dust was causing us all to cough, our eyes were blood shot after a day of riding, even with our goggles on! Doug and I sat out on our patio for coffee before we headed out to meet Trent and Ann and I just had to take some pictures of the menagerie of birds that visit us each day. At one point we had our favorites: the silly quail but also wood peckers, hummingbirds, sparrows, finches, cactus wren, thatchers and the %$#@doves (you can tell they are not my favorite bird). They certainly entertain us for the very reasonable price of a quail block!

 The male quail have the black face and the larger plume

 

The woodpecker tries his darndest to get a drink from the hummingbird feeder without a lot of success. I give him credit though: he continues to try every day.

I had to take a short video just to demonstrate how active these birds are and how entertaining they can be

 

 Walnut Canyon is south of Superior AZ so we need to trailer our ATV's to the trail head. Here is Doug driving the ATV off our cargo trailer. It was a bit cloudy that day but nice and warm. We started out with sweatshirts on just to protect ourselves from the dust but quickly had to remove them as we were too warm!

 We are just locking everything up as the truck and trailer will sit in the loading area for the day so we wanted to ensure all would be safe till we returned at the end of the day.

 It was so beautiful as we started out. If you look really closely at the saguaro in the middle of the picture, you will see a hawk sitting on the top of it.

 We are getting a little closer to the hawk and he isn't at all concerned by our precense

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 We are right up beside him now and he appears to be feeding on something and doesn't give us the time of day!

 We decided to take a new trail just to see where it went and this is a view as we headed up the mountain side

 There were beautiful views everywhere we looked

 We got stopped at a big metal gate that was locked with a "NO TRESPASSING" sign, saying it was a RAY Mine site. It was obvious by the red coloured tailings, that this was an old copper mine site and we could see an old opening in the mountain down below

 Copper tailings

 View from where we were stopped by the mine gate

 Opening to one of the mine tunnels down below us

 We had parked our ATV's and walked around the gate and followed the road till we saw the old mining site. Obviously, we can't read English and the no tresspasing sign!

 We had to turn around and go back the way we came and that is Trent and Ann ahead of us. It was an interesting ride none the less.

 Hawks were out in plenty today as we saw another hawk on top of a saguaro. We also saw a road runner but it was going so darn fast i couldn't get my camera turned on, focused and ready to shoot before it was long gone! 

 We are down the other side of the mountain range, heading into a wash that will take us down to the San Carlos river. The washes were pretty rough as they had some pretty major rain storms this past summer. Most people say they didn't get the usual amount of rain they normally get during the monsoon season but when it did rain, it came down in buckets. We witnessed that on our ride when we had to go down hills. They were majorly washed out in places. Made for some fun sections!

 We are down at the San Carlos river and stopping for a lunch. The river is very low at this time of year and we know we can cross with our ATV's so we plan to do it after lunch.

 

 This picture is taken looking in the other direction and you can see the sky is much clearer.

 Trent is thunbing or I should say "handing" a ride as Doug decides to try the river and see how deep it is. I guess Ann and I are looking at the river to see if we can figure how deep it is in the center??

This is Doug heading across the river, he kept telling me I was going to have to wade over to join him....

He did come back and get him. He knew what was good for him thank-goodness!

 Only a retired railroader would take this picture. There was a railroad track on the other side of the river that we followed for a bit and Doug just couldn't resist taking a picture of mile post 980. Now don't ask us 980 miles from where as none of us could answer that one!

 Here we have to go under the tracks. Doug was wishing a train would come along as we had heard one earlier before we got down to the river but no way would I be going under the bridge with a train crossing it!!

 You can see the trail through the trellis and Trent and Ann up ahead of us

 I just love all the different  mountain peaks out in the desert. You never lack for pictures to take!

We had noticed a hole in the hillside off our trail on the way to Walnut Canyon that we had never see before so we stopped on our way home to explore a bit and see if any animals were using it for a den. We climbed up the slipperly slope and to our disappointment, it appeared nothing had been using the hole for living quarters.

 It was quite a large opening and we can't believe we had never noticed it before even though we have done this ride many times before.

We had a beautiful sunset to finish the ride off as we were just arriving back to our vehicles. It was a fun day with just the 2 ATV's, minimal dust even though we were all covered in a layer of it but not nearly as bad as the week before. The other couple, Sharon and Craig that ride with us weekly are arriving this week so we are looking forward to them joining us next week.