Cool looking rocks, big trees and SNOW!!

2/18/2019

We took a drive out to Chiricahua National Monument today. It has some very interesting rock formations. First stop was for Mary to get her Passport book stamped while I eves dropped on the ranger talking about a good loop hike of 3.2 miles. Then we took a drive up Bonita Canyon, it’s a dead end road that goes up in the mountains where the trails and cool looking rocks are.

Sadly, my heel is still tender from the Fort Bowie walk so we didn’t attempt any of the trails. I do hope we can stick around in the area long enough to go back, unfortunately they have bad weather predicted for the next few days and this our 5th night of a 5 limit stay on this free off the grid spot. Tomorrow we are headed to a park so we can do some laundry and get some more water. I’m not sure what we are going to do after that.

All the trails in the park were made by the CCC back in the 30’s or early 40’s.

After we left the drive through the Monument we drove through the National Park of the same name. While the Monument had some good sized trees, the National forest had a few larger trees, Sadly a fire in 2012, I think, burned 223,000 acres and the forest is still recovering. Still the trees are the biggest we have seen in a while and was a nice change from the treeless desert.

We drove a couple of dirt roads always taking the one going up, so up and up we went. Finally reaching 8383 feet in elevation. We even passed a few patches of snow and ice.

Speaking of snow we have snow in the forecast for tonight, hopefully we wont get much with needing to move tomorrow.