disjoint thoughts

The the past few weekends have been filled with deary rain for me. Three weeks ago we were rained out in Cochise Stronghold. The week after, it rained Friday and Saturday. Not wanting to let the rain get me down by spoiling my climbing plans, I went out and hiked my favorite rainy day hike: Peralta Trail. The trail head is located an hour or so from Phoenix (depending on where you’re coming from) on the southern edge of the Superstitions. It’s a very popular trail, with wonderful views, and a feeling of being completely in the wilderness. Here’s the reasons why I like this hike in the rain…

#1 The sound of running water is music to my ears. The trail follows and criss crosses with a wash as the trail makes it way up towards Fremont Saddle. Most of the time this wash is bone dry. When it rains it’s a completely different story. The sound of rushing water follows you through most of the hike. Rock hoping or even wading (when it rains enough) across the wash is always fun too.

#2 Waterfalls. Yes, that’s right. There’s waterfalls in the middle of the Arizona desert. You’ll see dozens of them off the ridges on either side of the trail.

#3 Hiking in the clouds is fun. It can also be disorienting. When it’s raining, the clouds like to hang low over the saddle. It’s awe inspiring to look up and see Zonerland or Weaver’s Needle partially hidden in wisps of mist.

You can check out the rest of my pics from the hike here. Unfortunately my camera somehow got set to low resolution resulting in pics that look like ass. If you really want to see them in high res, get out there and hike it yourself. It’s a great trail.

During the last weekend of July Gina, Justin and I hiked the Grand Canyon and stayed the weekend at Phantom Ranch. All day Saturday was spent fishing the Bright Angel creek for some tasty trout dinner. We ended up with six decent sized trout for dinner (most between 8 and 10 inches). All of which were caught by Justin! It became very obvious that there are plenty of fish to be caught, but only if you know what you’re doing. Here’s some tips that should help anyone wanting to fish that creek:

Bait: Spinners
The Bright Angel creek is small, shallow, and fast flowing in all the areas we explored. The deepest pools were perhaps at most 3 or 4 feet deep, and the water was moving through them very fast. I had brought meal worms as my bait of choice. Rigged on a small hook with a bobber a foot or two up, I wasn’t able to get more than a few bites here and there. I have a feeling that the water was just flowing too fast for live bait, and the fish weren’t even noticing my meal worms. I attempted to add weight to the setup and anchor it in a given place, but this only resulted in snagged lines and meal worms getting ripped from the hooks by the force of the water.

Justin initially tried using power bait, but didn’t have any luck. He later switched to using a Panther Martin spinner, and started catching fish where we had previously though there were none. He pulled fish from the pools we had tried fishing earlier, as well as the shallow, broad areas of the stream where we didn’t think there were fish at all.

Location: Upstream past the bridges or at the confluence with the Colorado
According to the ranger we talked to, the best places to fish the creek is up stream past the bridges in the “deep pools” or down stream at the confluence with the Colorado. We hiked up stream past a couple of bridges and fished the creek in that area. We never found any pools we would consider “deep”, but regardless we caught fish.

Cooking: Salt, Pepper, Lemmon
Ok, this is less important, but I thought I’d add it anyways. I prepped the fish by cleaning them, then sprinkling them with a mix of salt and pepper I had brought down in a small ziplock, and placing sliced lemons in their bellies. We cooked them by individually wrapping the fish in tin foil and cooking them in a small pan over a small camp stove. They turned out amazing.

Here’s little preview on a climbing area that I know very little about, Zonerland in the Superstitions. Zonerland is located off the Peralta trail to the west, about 3/4 of the way to the Fremont Saddle. A large rock on the left side of the trail marks the location where you jump off Peralta and start making your way up the hill.

When you reach this rock, scramble up and around to the left of it (west) and look the hill and a little to the left…

The low point between the rock spires it what you want to head toward. There’s a few sets of rock cairns you can follow, but any path seems as good as another as long as you know the general direction to go. Once you hike up there you’re surrounded by many rock spires, most of them with at least one bolted line.

Lots of hard looking routes, lots of over-hanging arete lines, and lots of routes I have no clue what they’re rated. If you do make a trip out there, make sure to bring extra webbing and rap rings. Many of the routes don’t have rap bolts at the top…

I hiked Camelback Mt this afternoon and snapped this pic with my camera phone.

It was a really great view, unfortunately I never have my real camera which such opportunaties present themselves.