Wednesday's observations

On Wednesday morning,

... Miss Kitty was checking out the news on the Breeze News Network (BNN)...

She loves sitting in the sunshine, gathering some Vitamin D (since their skin is covered by fur, do cats collect Vitamin D in the sunshine?), and, if the window is open, she sniffs the breeze to see what is being reported!

When we had gone bike riding on Monday, we had gone a little ways down the Arizona Trail, according to a map that we had seen at the kiosk at Grandview Lookout Tower: 

We had seen the indication that there were views to the Painted Desert -- we had not ridden our bikes far enough to find that, but we noticed that FR310 appeared to parallel the Arizona Trail, so we decided to see if we could find those views.

It was quite windy on Wednesday (Miss Kitty's access to the BNN was limited as we soon had to close the windows against the chill and blowing dust) -- so we drove the Jeep.

Along the way, we saw some cattle grazing along the road.

We got to a place that looked like it might be a higher overlook and drove into the area.

On Google Maps here

Sure enough, we could see off into the distance (the Painted Desert is about 135 miles from here). I walked down the hill a little ways...

... and found a trail that I guess is the Arizona Trail.

View into the distance from down on the level of the Arizona Trail.

The view from the top of the hill

Another shot of the view from up at the top

There were a couple of fire rings there and obviously folks have camped at this location. We briefly considered bringing Gracie to this location for a few days, but... the roads to get to this location are pretty rough, the Motor Vehicle Use Map indicates this area as not for motor vehicle use, and there was no cell signal, so would be no internet service for us there.

Back along the road, I tried to get a picture of the fencing...

... this is zoomed in... you may be able to see that there is one metal "T" post and then just random "sticks" on either side (the one on the right is leaning). It appears that whoever does the fencing uses the metal posts to keep the fence located, but in between, connect the wire to branches that they picked up from the woods to keep the wires from sagging. Generally it appeared that there were two sticks/branches between each metal "T" post.

We kept on driving on the gravel/dirt roads -- we drove down to near where Hull Cabin is located

There was a sign on the gate indicating that we should not proceed so as not to disturb occupants, but when I looked up information on Recreation.gov for booking it, it appears that they are only doing bookings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and the bookings don't start until May 1 (https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/233242?tab=info).

We continued on our drive, coming back to our campsite from a road that came up behind -- along this route, we came to the fence that separates the National Forest land from the National Park land... I tried taking another picture of the fence...

Here they have metal separators between the two T posts -- it looks like a long piece of metal is bent over the top of the top strand, then twisted down to the next strand, twisted again to capture the 3rd and 4th strands.

Turns out... it isn't that complicated -- they are called "fence stays" and they are "screwed" in place. I found a YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDCom2UJg-s

We enjoyed our drive around the area. We found a LOT of roads that we would not want to take Gracie on. We also found that we are glad that it is dry while we're here, because it looks like some of the roads can get *very* muddy with deep mud holes that even the Jeep would be challenged to navigate.