New Year's Day Tradition

For the past three years, my mom and sisters have made a New Year's Day tradition of going hiking to a Ghost Town. We live in Southern Arizona....aka The Wild West. The town of Tombstone is only 15 minutes from my house. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of old and deserted towns in this area that are fun to explore, and most you have to hike to. It's been a fun tradition so far. The first year we went to the Presidio Santa Cruz de Terrenate. Last year we went to Fort Bowie (I guess I didn't blog about that. I will have to do a FLASHBACK to tell you about that trip).

This year, we decided to go back to Fort Bowie since Kelli didn't get to go with us. She just bought a new camera and there are a lot of great photo opportunities on this hike. There is a lot of history in those mountains too....a lot dealing with the conflict between the American military and the Apache Indians. It's pretty fascinating stuff, but I'll let you research it.

Side note...on Wednesday (December 29, 2010) Southern Arizona got a pretty big winter storm. Sierra Vista got some snow, but nothing really stuck. There is snow on the Huachuca Mountains though.

When we left for our day of hiking, we didn't really think anything of the storm that had blown through here. I guess we should have thought about it a bit more, especially since we were traveling up to some mountains.

So there we were, we had just drove the hour and a half to the turn off to Fort Bowie. This eight mile dirt road was just a little wet when we turned onto it, but as we traveled onward, and got about four miles into it, it became pretty scary without a 4-wheel drive truck. My CR-V kept fishtailing and sliding over the mud and ice and snow. We passed a sign that said "Fort Bowie in 4 miles". I didn't think my car (or my nerves) could take another 4 miles of this, so I found a semi-dry place and we turned around. We made it off the dirt road and decided to try the Chiricahuas. We used to hike around these beautiful rock formations when we were kids and we were only about 15 miles away from it.

When we arrived, I went into the visitors center to pay for the pass. However, the ranger said the roads were all closed because of the snow. The trail starting at the visitors center is about 7 miles one way to the rock formations. It was already 2PM, so there was no way to hike in the snow over there and back before it got dark. But the ranger suggested we hike up the road to the first rock formations (The Organ Pipes). They are not the biggest formations, but they are her favorites. The road was closed to cars, but we could hike it. She just warned us to move out of the way of the plows and other vehicles cleaning the roads if we should see them.

So that is what we did. It was about a mile and a half round trip to the Organ Pipes. And there was a lot of snow. Even with all the disappointment of the day, we still had a fun time hiking in the snow and seeing the beautiful sites that Heavenly Father has created for us to enjoy on this earth! It ended up being a very enjoyable day!

Here are some pictures of our adventure:


See...it does snow in Southern Arizona! It's a Winter Wonderland!!

Notice the animal tracks in the snow. We think it's deer tracks.

Some fun rock formations. Can you find Winnie the Pooh?