Time to resurrect this zombie bitch from it's grave. It has been entirely too long, and while I have many, many things to say about my failure to keep up with these internet love notes, none of them merit posting about. That said, we will begin with the Ridgeline Hike.
The Plan:
Like the many, many genius adventures that have come before this, this one too began with a solid plan. With months of solid planning, actually. Also, training. Lots of training.
As you may or may not recall, the Fancy Pants Adventure Team now more or less lives in the mountains. We are now more or less in a position where our regular hikes are too extreme to recruit the average person who wants to hike. This hike in particular, was no exception to that.
The weekend prior to it, we had climbed Mount Kimball, which was a beast of a 10 mile hike with close to 8,000 ft of elevation change. Prior to that we had done a 20+ mile loop in the Superstitions that included the thorny and unmaintained Red Tanks Trail.
It was awesome.
We felt prepared.
Ready.
We had our first "official" hiking club meeting at Moira earlier in the week. I say official, because this was the first one in which we had a legitimate (read:written) agenda. (As an aside to this particular story, our hiking club has gotten progressively more militant and official as time passes. It now includes a lengthy questionnaire/application, among other things so the move toward more official meetings was inevitable). We discussed in particular, the specifics of our ridgeline hike.
It was to be a momentous occasion. One that began at the Siphon Draw Trailhead at Lost Dutchman State Park, climbed up and over the Flatiron, over the saddle behind it and onto the ridgeline. We would hike along the crest of the mountains over to peak 5057, down Carney Springs Trail and finish up on Peralta road on the other side of the wilderness. It was to be 11.5 miles of glory.
Brilliant, mountan-y glory.
Or so we had anticipated.
But like all our best laid plans, things immediately began to go awry.
