The past two weeks this fall we have lived in our new cabin in Pine. It is in the mountains on the edge of the Mogollon Rim. The small hamlet of Pine is surrounded by three National Forest—the Tonto National Forest, the Coconino National Forest, and the Apache Stigreaves National Forest.
We have had a wonderful time hiking for days on end in this area. The more we have explored this area, the more wondrous discoveries we have found.
Much to our surprise, we discovered that Arizona has amazing grasslands. This area is not labeled “Grasslands,” but they rival the National Grasslands where we camped and hiked throughout the midwest on one of our five-month-long road trips in the fall and winter of 2016.
These are the “grasslands” on the plateau of the top of Mogollon Rim—an immense new playground that we found just a few miles from our cabin. It is a treasure!
We sold our Whidbey Island home and moved to Nuestra Casa (our beautiful home is Leisure World) two years ago. During the previous eight years we had camped and hiked in every state west of the Mississippi and across the south to the tip of the Florida Keys.
During these eight years we also spent months camping and trekking all over Arizona. We knew even before we moved to Arizona that we loved the vast diversity of desert lands that are spread throughout this magnificent state.
Most people we have talked with in our years of road trips and cycling cycling throughout the United States think of Arizona as a miserably hot, barren desert state. We know different.
In the northwest part of Arizona is the Mojave Desert with it’s unique Joshua Trees. The Joshua Trees thin out as you travel south. There is a stretch of central Arizona where the Mojave Desert and the Sonoran Desert meet. The Sonoran Desert is characterized by the ancient, majestic, towering Saguaro cacti. Where the two deserts meet, you will see cacti gardens with Joshua Trees, Saguaro, Barrel Cacti, Prickly Pear Cacti, Ocotillo, Cholla, and many other varieties of cacti.
Down south near the Mexican border, we camped and hiked in the Organ Pipe National Monument. That is the only area in the world where the Organ Pipe cacti grow and thrive.
In south central Arizona we hiked through the mountains, following the trail through the rocky Dragoon Mountains to the Cochise Stronghold, where Cochise, the leader of the Apache Chiricahua, and his warriors hid out. We also camped and hiked near the border of New Mexico in the Chiricahua National Monument east of the Apache stronghold.
We have camped above the Grand Canyon with 50 mph wind gusts that nearly blew us off the edge of the canyon. We have hiked just south of Utah in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument and explored east of that in the Oljato National Monument (which becomes Monument Valley as you cross the border into Utah).
We also have trekked through a multitude of mountain ranges in Arizona, including the Superstition Mountains, Pinal Peak near Globe, the mountain in the Coconino National Forest surrounding Tucson, the Kofa Mountains in the Kofa Wildlife National Monument, and Madera Canyon on the western slopes of Mt. Wrightson.
We discovered and explored the area around General Patton’s Bouse World War II Training Center. This is one of the historic training centers where young eighteen-year-old boys were trained in desert warfare to prepare them for the battles in Northern Africa. This Training Center is being lost in time to the desert.
It is a powerful experience to walk in this training center, and all of the other Desert Training Centers we have camped and hiked in, and to think about how many of those boys never made it out of the Northern African deserts--living their lives so we can have full lives, and our children can. It is mind-boggling. We are so grateful to them, but can never even tell them or their parents who died emotionally when they got the news of their sons.
All of the amazing deserts in Arizona where we have camped and hiked are different, but similar as they are filled with an array of different of rocks formations, wildlife, plants, trees, flowers, and cacti.
We had thought we knew Arizona and had experienced most of the wonder and beauty of this state.
But we were wrong. We had not seen the expanse of grasslands high on the Mogollon Rim’s vast plateau…
These grasslands extend from our cabin in Pine to Flagstaff. It is thousands of square miles and there are hundreds of miles of dirt roads and trails that crisscross the plateau. There are more beautiful places to camp and hike in this area than there are years we have left in our lives. But we certainly intend to do our best to explore this entire grasslands plateau!
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