Sorry, we fell behind in our posts this time…I will be adding dates to these posts to show the time we were at the locations visited.

We were in Gila Box November 24 for a few days and on the next post I will add the dates.

We were very sad to leave Chiricahua as it was a beautiful park with some spectacular scenery…it never ceases to amaze me that we keep seeing more things we’ve never seen before in geology.

We arrived in Gila Box canyon just in time to set up including the screen tent – that at some point became our bathing tent too  – it was hot enough to put the sides down and wash.

Linda really wanted to go to Gila Box (pronounced “Hilla”) so we drove up to Safford, AZ and found the road that led to the campground. Wow! What a road! When we approached the sign that said 15% grade, I became concerned about the return trip. So we did the sensible thing and walked the hill. We then drove down about half a mile (that’s 0.8 km to us in Canada) down the hill and went through a wash. We hadn’t seen anyone for about 10 miles (16km), the road was getting twisty and the edges were very broken with little drop offs as well. We found a place to turn around…hungry, we stopped at a lookout about 3 miles back. We met someone who told us the campground was hosted, quiet and beautiful. We thought we’d give it another chance and drove back in – we found the Riverview campground. A beautiful place that only cost $5USD a night. There were only 5 other campers in the area and the camp host. We found a site away from the folk and set up. Lots of hikes, making of bread, more hikes and relaxing. There were pit toilets to supplement the trailer and excellent drinking water.

 

We had planned for one night but ended up staying for five.

We met some interesting people including the camp hosts Walt and Kathy who had been hosting there for eleven years.

 

Above is the view from the campground. That formation looked like a castle that had been buried.

We of course went on a few hikes:

Down to the nature walk.

Then finding this cairn about soldiers in 1844 from the US-Mexican war.

Then down to the river:

Of course as we were training for the Tucson Half Marathon…

And more hiking to find interesting cacti:

The ears of the Prickly Pear Cactus.

The Barrel Cactus and some Chollas on the left I think.

The yellow fruit of the Cholla cactus.

A building left by a rancher about a hundred years ago.

This campground has water and pit toilets but no electricity. The trailer is pretty good at solar charging but I used supplements to charge the electronics during the day.

This is a Bluetooth speaker with a solar charger.

Solar charger batteries can charge the iPad as well.

A spare solar charger, this does the iPhone well.

This is a 20 watt solar charger and a Biolite light – that doubles as a charger – more than 100 hours of light – even fancy colours.

So much to see and do there – this was a keeper of a campground.

There was intermittent signal in the campground for some reason so if we wanted to do anything we had to walk up about a mile to a place we all started calling “telephone rock”. Lots of fun. It was hard to leave it.

We filled everything we could with good water and did the tough road that through experience became easier.

Off to Phoenix and the Lost Dutchman…