A Friday Hike

We finally have made a plan to leave Venture Out on Monday (March 29) so, on Friday, decided to take advantage of one more opportunity to hike in the Superstition Mountains before we left. Carl had previously done a hike with his daughter and granddaughters just up from Lost Dutchman State Park to a rock formation called the Praying Hands so we planned to do that. He had the route from Alltrails (https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/arizona/praying-hands-to-slot-rock).

The day was cloudy and one weather forecast earlier in the week had indicated rain but none of the ones we checked on Friday morning listed rain, so we headed out.

Our objective is over there...

The trail was nice...

Seemed to be wide and easy to stay on it, though there were multiple places where other trails went off, so Carl used Alltrails to keep us on the right path.

An ocotillo

Another view of our objective... but... this is about where we turned around. It had been spitting rain, but as we got further along the trail, the more it turned into pretty steady rain, and it looked like the rain would continue as we got further up and into our objective.

Out to the west the sun was out though!

So... we headed back toward the Jeep.

Carl took a last picture --

And I got a picture with him in it.

We had seen a deer when we were first on the trail, and as we were heading back, we saw this rider with his two mules.

Toby is the larger one and Will is the smaller one (a pack mule). Their owner/rider was clever to be in rain gear!

On the way back to the Jeep, we saw this bush with pretty pink cottony flowers.

We took a slightly different path back to the Jeep and realized that we could have parked further in so our hike (if we had made it to the Praying Hands) would have been a little shorter. But, since we had to turn around, it we got a nice 2+ mile hike for the part we did. And now we can look forward to doing this hike at another time!

As I indicated above, we are planning to leave Venture Out on Monday -- we're going to go to a Thousand Trails campground near Cottonwood, Arizona, for about a week (just over 100 miles north on I-17) -- then we are *hoping* that we'll be able to return to National Indoor RV in Surprise, Arizona, to get the long awaited awning. We're not holding our breath... but... we're *hoping*!