Day 6: Rain Coming
Everything about the day was perfect, except for the storm coming in.
On March 7th Chris and I woke up, walked a few steps down the street to The Gathering Grounds for pancakes, then hiked out of town. Past the Wagon Wheel Saloon, past Velvet Elvis Pizza, past Patagonia High School and 7 miles up a dirt road to the Temporal Gulch Trail Head for a picnic lunch with my parents. They had made the 90m drive from Tucson to bring us fresh sandwiches and hear our war stories from the trail. Mom whimpered when we showed her pictures of one of our campsites – somehow it looked more desolate in photos. We talked, watched two cowboys drive a herd of cattle down the canyon, then said goodbye as they took Chris back to civilization and left me to keep hiking solo.
After they drove away, I hiked north through Temporal Canyon. My goal, spending the next night in a mining cabin in Kentucky Camp, was 16 miles away. I wanted to put in at least 4 miles in whatever last hours were left of the afternoon. The trail was a dirt road that climbed at what seemed an impossibly steep grade into the Santa Rita Mountain Range. Mount Wrightson started to loom in the distance.
By 5:30 I crested a saddle at 6000 feet and decided to call it a night. Wrightson loomed overhead to the west. I scrambled about 50 yards off the trail to a (somewhat) flat spot amongst the rocks and junipers, set up my tent and even got a little campfire going. It didn’t seem desolate at all – actually very cozy. My tent was well positioned to get the earliest rays of sunshine in the morning, assuming the rain forecasted for that night ended early.
The Arizona Trail 