San Tan Mountain Regional Park
Unlike most of metro Phoenix, which is laid out in one mile squares, the roads in Queen Creek are all curley. So, for the third […]
Locals Hike
Dixie Mountain Loop
I haven’t gotten out of the house for anything more than a spin around the neighborhood since biking the Maricopa Trail three weeks ago. Funeral […]
South Mountain: Pyramid Loop
Every winter, I do hikes in lower elevations, where there is no snow. Most of those are what I call a “locals hike“: Phoenix area hikes […]
Toothaker / Gadsden / Butterfield
Estrella Mountain Regional Park is 19,840 acres of easy Sonoran Desert hiking. Officially, the most difficult trail is rated “moderate-difficult”, but Maricopa County tends to […]
Marcus Landslide
Marcus Landslide was “discovered” in 2002 by two ASU geography post-grads. Surely, many people had looked at the rocks before, but the students were the […]
Maricopa Trail: Anthem to Lake Pleasant
Counter-clockwise from Bronco Trailhead, this is the 4th and 5th segment of the Maricopa Trail. At the beginning of 2021, I set out to hike […]
Shaw Butte Trail #306
Today, November 17, is National Take a Hike Day — something I only realized sometime in the past year. My two previous hikes on this […]
Brown’s Mountain Loop
Brown’s Mountain is a formation in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, north of the ritzy Troon North Golf Club. It is part of a chain of […]
Phoenix Sonoran Preserve
In 2020, I started finding heavy flowers the first week of March, when I hiked a half dozen trails in the Phoenix Sonoran Preserve‘s south […]
Maricopa Peak
I was going to hike another segment of the Maricopa Trail today, but my wife was visiting family in Florida, and hiking from Anthem to […]