Aravaipa Canyon

Several weeks ago, Kirk and I went with my parents on another backpacking excursion. We hiked Aravaipa Canyon which is down sort of by Safford, AZ. (I've been a horrible blogger as of late, hence the post more than a month later.)

My parents are awesome trekkers, always leading the way. There wasn't much of a trail on this hike, you just followed the creek through the canyon. A lot of the time we walked through the water, but also would hike along a path when we could find or make one. Once my mom and I thought we could blaze our own trail, only to get totally stuck in stickery bushes which we had to crawl on our stomachs under fallen trees to get out of. We followed the guys after that.

Kirk was a trooper and carried most of our stuff in his backpack. On our last backpacking hike we kinda made fun our my parents for having hiking poles, but we ate our words this time and used some and were super thankful for them since they totally helped us as we crossed the creek on slippery rocks.

It was a beautiful canyon! I had heard there was a lot of wildlife, so I was excited to see this deer from about 75 yards away. But I was a little disappointed we didn't see any coatimundi (which I didn't know what it was, but I really wanted to see) or big horn sheep that supposedly lived in the canyon.

This is what Kirk calls his Tree of Life picture.

The first night we stayed in Booger Canyon. We decided it was probably named by a 12 year old because all the moss in the stream kinda looked like boogers. Yuck!

We had to hang all of our stuff from the trees to keep the animals out. Maybe we shouldn't have and would have seen some of the animals I wanted to.

The second day we just hiked a couple miles up the canyon, had a little lunch and then turned around and hiked back to Deer Creek which was about a mile away from where we started the first day.

Here's our camp the second night.

Freeze dried beef strogenoff never tasted so good.

This is a view looking out of our camp the second night. It was so pretty!

It was a beautiful hike! We loved the peace and serenity felt as we enjoyed our Heavenly Father's creations. It was fun to be just with my mom and dad! We had a lot of fun conversations like "what's your dream occupation" and "what's the best things you've ever eaten". It was a great time!

On the way out we went to go look at some cliff dwellings. Pretty amazing!We also decided that if you live in the middle of the desert, with no neighbors for days, you are probably pretty weird, then these people's front "lawn" decorations proved it.

Yes, a real cow carcass.

No idea.

All in all great times!!