Aravaipa - 2013
At the end of May I took the opportunity to drive an hour and a half from Superior, Arizona to the trailhead of Aravaipa Canyon. For those of you unfamiliar with Aravaipa, it is a ten-mile-long canyon with an ever-flowing creek and lush green vegetation, gently squeezed between imposing stone walls which are, in turn, outlined sharply by normally blue skies. In short, it’s paradise. Hiking Aravaipa means that you are often wading ankle-deep in a creek. You splash upstream, passing cottonwoods and sycamores, horsetail and cattail, listening to birds chattering away in the underbrush. Damsel flies hover silently along the water’s edge. Minnows swim quickly out of your path. And in the steeply rising hills you see saguaros standing precariously on crumbling rock. The experience is made better by the fact that the Bureau of Land Management allows only 50 people a day into the canyon. (Yes, you must make reservations....
