Superstition Ridgeline Hike

Amy and I had been wanting to hike the Superstition Ridgeline "Trail" all year. In fact, we attempted to hike it back in April and after getting lost, we had to turn back. So we waited through the hot summer and decided to give it another try in November. This time we were able to convince a few of our gullable friends (Heywoods & Goeckeritz) to go with us. We pitched it to them as a nice 10 mile hike up one side of the mountain range, across the top and down the other side. . .

. . . Anyways, after a shaky start, early in the morning, we finally located the trailhead and we were on our way. It was a beautiful morning . . . and luckily we ran into James who helped us get on the right path.

We climbed to the top of the mountian where we could finally see the other side (overlooking the Valley) and our GPS told us we had gone a little less than 3 miles. I announced that we were about a quarter of the way to our desitnation. The group wasn't all that excited about the news; however, we were still in pretty good spirits. After all we were having a gay old time walking on a designated trail and slurping water/Gatorade at our leisure.

Scott, Lafe and I left our ladies while we took a detour and hiked to the highest peak on the trail.

Once we got to the peak and could see in front of us what we were up against, we became a little concerned that we underestimated our little day hike. The "trail" seemed to have disappeared dor the middle third of the hike. Instead of a nice designated path, we found ourselves spotting cairns and hoping we would see another one in the short distance. There was more than once that we lost our way and had to re-locate the cairns. The ground was loose rocks at best and spotted with cacti and yucca, of which each of us fell victim at least once. I think Jaime wins the award for the best poke (seen here with her's and Lafe's matching stab wounds, how sweet!) as it is now 4 weeks later and there is still something in her leg.

About the half way point we decided to stop for a rest and eat some of our food, and we assessed our liquid situation. We discovered that we had depleted our liquid supply by about 80%. This was not good as the route was becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate, our muscles were wearing, and the weather was warming and other than our new friend James, we hadn't seen any other hikers all day. Needless to say we all began to ration our fluids, which meant that we basically stopped eating our food, as we didn't have much to wash it down. Those "good spirits" we had the first 1/3 of the hike were now gone and our moral was pretty well depleted like our water.

After we were able to struggle through the middle section of the hike, we were able to locate a nice trail, that led us over to Flatiron and down the Siphon Draw Trail.

This was a beautiful part of the trail towards the end, where it looked like the spikey back of a dinosaur. Here are some other pictures taken towards the end of the hike.

We were dehydrated, and our muscles and feet hurt. This being said, it was a fantastic experience. If you ever plan on going on this hike, believe what you read about it. And take about twice as much water as you think you might need. It ended up being about 12 miles and and it took us about 10 hours (total time from trailhead to trailhead) to complete it.