Houston Brother's Trail = 10 miles

It was Jeff's long weekend, which meant he had Friday off.  We had to go to a birthday party on Saturday at 2:00pm so I planned a short, easy, scenic hike.  It was everything we wanted it to be (once we got there!)  Jeff bought me a new camera and I was eager to use it on some beautiful scenery!

First things first...food!  This is the food plan.

Look at that elevation gain!  Yea!!!

Difficulty?  I'd say 1 out of 5 compared to our last two hikes!!!

Now that we have good directions from a hiking site and not AZ Highways, we were on track!

 We stopped at the little kiosk and took a picture of the map.  We learned later that there are no maps on GPS  for this hike!

 Excellent road with guard rails!  Except there were more cars on this road.

 Could it be????  Its 2:50 pm and we started off at 8:15 am.  Hmmm, that's like 7 hours!

It is!  The site said to start here and it will lead us to the Houston Brother's trail.  

 We're ready to go!  The back of the truck was full of dirt and our packs were filthy!  Never doing that again!

 We had to book it!  My goal was to camp at the fireplace in the middle of the woods!  I had no idea how far that was but we WERE going to camp there!

What a glorious flat trail!  We got to the Pinchot cabin right away!

 We found our trail!  Leaving the cabin behind we headed out.

 The first gate.

Then we had to immediately cross this little stream.

This was another little stream along the path.

 There's the cabin and the fireplace!!!!

 We just took a quick glance and kept on walking.  We had to do at least 7 miles!  But we were coming back to camp here for sure!

 Is this a golf course???  No it's the trail!

 We came upon this high fence and wondered if this was to keep the raptors in????  Then we read the sign.  Phew!

 Is this not a cool trail?  No up hills!!  I was in hiking heaven!  SNOW!

After we'd gone about an hour past the fireplace the trail ended.  We could see the little rock pile to mark it and then one across the street to mark the continued trail.

 This was a good place for us to turn around and go back to camp.

We saw a TON of elk!  Jeff even thought he saw a turkey!

 We had to cross this cool little bridge to get to the camp site.

 What a great place to camp!!!! 

 This is the stream we crossed. It was awesome to sleep next to a babbling brook!

LOVE this fireplace.  Jeff wouldn't let me make a fire in it :(

 The cabin was so cool.  It had a working door and dirt floors.

 Like I said, I love this fireplace, ha!

 I tried a Pinterest hack of dryer lint inside a toilet paper roll, wrapped in newspaper.

 I don't know if it was this or the magnesium tablet or the super dry wood...but I started a fire with no problem! 

 Jeff figuring out how to make our Turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy.

 Dessert!  Those strawberries are going with us on every trip!  The cheesecake tasted like pudding but it was still good!

Jeff hanging our food.  He put the strawberries in the bag and I wasn't done with them!  So disappointing! LOL!

As the sun went down, Jeff heated up our apple cider.  That's right, I packed in apple cider in my Nalgene water bottle!  It was SOOO worth it!  Warm apple cider by the fire in the middle of nowhere by a babbling brook.  H E A V E N...

These were our stats for the day.  We hiked over 7 miles in a little under 3 hours! We got into the tent a little after 8:00 pm and began listening to our book (Warbreaker).  A little while later around 9:00 pm, we thought we saw lights outside.  Sure enough, there were two guys on bikes!  They asked if it was alright for them to share our camp site because this was their final destination for the night.  They were bike camping.  They had NO TENTS!  Who does that?  Ha!  They seemed super cool and it felt less scary being in the forrest at night with other people around.

 It was cold that night.  In the morning we met George and Todd.  They were around our age and super cool!  I can't believe they camped without a tent.  When we took our tent down we had the "breath snow" under our rain tarp!  They said their water bottles froze (and they had no tent!)  They didn't even have proper sleeping bags!  Impressive. Jeff heated us up some warm apple cider and we got to know George and Todd.  We learned that George is a DPS helicopter pilot and he was 10 years older than us.  Todd mentioned that he was in his 40's and that he doesn't like to be cold!  Hilarious! They said they were about 22 miles from their car and that they even saw some wild turkeys!!!

Todd was super sweet and offered to take a picture of us!  What a great job he did!  He definitely has a photographers eye!  I love the pictures! 

 I took these pictures on the way back to our car.

 We stopped at the Pinchot cabin and had breakfast in the sun!  

I had to investigate the outhouse.

 We sat in the grass and had freeze dried oats, milk and blueberries!  Mmmm!

 Our stats for the day.  Short hike.

 Our trail.  When we got to the truck and were leaving, we immediately passed about 5 cars coming down the road!  Then we kept passing even more!  I'm so glad we got there on a Friday and left Saturday morning!

We've been through Pine/Strawberry millions of times but we've never stopped to enjoy the town.  We stopped here at this little bakery and I got an awesome apple muffin!  Then it was home to the 100 degree weather!  

Rim Road #300 = 43.3 mile drive

 Sometimes things don't go as planned....and sometimes you have an adventure before you to get to your adventure!  When this happens you just have to roll with it.  There's always a reason things happen and maybe we'll never know that reason but we'll just be grateful for the journey!  This is how we discovered Rim Road.

We were heading out for a nice easy leisure hike of only 7.5 miles on the Houston Brother's Trail.  But firsts we had to find it.  Hence, the adventure before the adventure.  We followed directions from GPS coordinates that were accurate but not really.  We were a little apprehensive about taking the road to Payson since it was April 21st.  April 21st is the day my Dad died and also the day Jeff and Larry got in a roll over on the road back from Payson.  AND it's also Little Ryker's birthday.  But we obviously survived, ha!

This is exactly how to get the Rim road but NOT how to get to our trail!

 Once we got off pavement we were in the beautiful trees....then it got crazy.

 We left the house at 8:15am and we should have hit the trail around 11:30am. That was the plan.

 I had to hold the camera out and take this picture without looking because it was straight down.  I don't like drop offs!

 From a distance this looked like hangman!

 My Dad use to take us camping on the rim!  We'd sit on the edge and eat our breakfast!  Maybe he just wanted to remind us of him by taking this road!

 We saw lots of signs for other trails!

 We were excited to see that the AZT comes through here!

This is where the GPS coordinates told us to turn - FR 139 to...

 This road that had trees growing in the middle of it!  Um, not the road!

 We drove back and found the marker for the Houston Brother's trail but there really wasn't a trail!?

We continued on Rim Road till we got the the very end of it!  It was slow going (as you could see lots of switch backs).  So it took a few hours!  Back on black top it took us about an hour to get back to Payson.  It was around 1:30 so we ate lunch at Wendy's.  Mmmm a frosty!  Now, time to find the trail!