All in a Day's Hike

After living in Tucson for 3 whole months, we finally ventured out to the local recreational attractions which, as you can imagine, include cactus and desert. We packed a lunch this morning and drove to Sabino Canyon which is on the North East side of Tucson at the border of the Coronado National Forest. I still haven't seen much reason to call it a forest but it's a huge area so maybe we will get a chance to find the trees sometime. Sabino Canyon was recommended to us as a great place to start our adventures around here so we took the advice and drove over to the park. After paying for parking and getting a little direction from the visiting center we headed down the long paved road that goes into the canyon. The road is a very popular spot for walking, hiking, and riding bicycles and the only other traffic on it are the little trams that give guided tours of the canyon. The road follows the small brook that winds down through the canyon and along the way there are rest areas with bathrooms and places to sit and eat lunch. We started out right around noon, with 3.7 miles of paved road in front of us.

Our first exciting discovery was that the brook had water flowing in it and there were trees along the river bed turning nice shades of golden from the autumn weather.


This picture reminds me of verses in the Bible that talk about the man who is like a tree planted by streams. (see Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17:7-8 for starters). Living in the desert gives you a lot of great pictures for images that are described in the Bible.

We stopped about half way up the paved road to eat our lunch and then kept trekking. The canyon walls got increasingly higher as we went further along and the rock formations and layers in the canyon walls were fascinating to see. We took lots and lots of pictures and then weeded through the ones that give a good representation of what we saw.

Finally, we reached the end of the paved road but our adventure was only half way over.

Our map showed us a trail that went back down towards the parking area but this path was half way up the canyon wall! Instead of turning around, we headed up the narrow trail and found ourselves overlooking the paved road from quite a ways up. By this time, my legs and feet were tired and it was starting to get hot from the sun. This part of the hike was lots of fun though because we saw some super tall catci up close and there was no one on the trail so it was quiet with lots of interesting things to look at and take pictures of.

All in all, we hiked close to 9 miles by the time we reached the car at 6 p.m. I was reminded of my days on STEP when I would hike 9 miles and then sleep on the ground and eat over a fire. Once in the car, I announced to Eric that I would be taking a bath and soaking my feet after dinner and enjoying our nice mattress in a climate controlled environment. A bath felt great! Our adventure today whetted our appetite for more exploring to come. Next time we might tackle one of the mountains that surrounded the city of Tucson.

A note for prayer: A couple weeks after we arrived in Tucson and did our first respite we shared that a family of four siblings was going home again to live with their dad and his girlfriend. This sibling group included the 3 year old boy that we loved to have fun with. Unforuntately, their dad made an unwise choice and the four children are back in GAP with little to no hope of going home again. They are living in the house that they lived in while they were here for 2 and a half years and now there are 15 children at Splash 4! Yikes! Please keep everyone involved in the situation in your prayers (including us because we are doing respite there right before we come home for Christmas!).