Lady Lemmon and the Lowlands

Greetings from the trail!

Despite the grueling heat, we pressed on in the hope of finding some fresh air high above. This post covers our Sobo trip over Mount Lemmon and Sabino Canyon.

Day 7:

After a refreshing night at Arizona Zipline Adventures in Oracle, we woke up early and began the big climb to Lady Lemmon (Mt Lemmon). 🍋 We did about 5500 feet of elevation gain to SummerHaven, which is the town at the top of Mount Lemmon. On the way we took the old AZT to avoid a big PUD. (The new AZT has a PUD of 1000 feet. See elevation map on FarOut.)

I love Summerhaven! They have a general store that sells packets of applesauce. I bought 4 and ate two sitting there. Info lengkap: cbha. hahahahahahahahahaha. There is something very refreshing about fresh packets of applesauce in hot, desert weather.

Hey Southerners, fill up your water bottle in the community center bathroom, because then we found out that none of the other businesses in town filled our bottles and we had to back out.

After Summerhaven, we hiked a couple of miles to the Marshall Gulch trailhead (#3), where we spent a pleasant night at a higher elevation in Ponderosa Pines.

Day 8:

We descended through the Wilderness of Rocks and into Sabino Canyon. LSL loved the Wilderness of Rocks area. I took a nice, refreshing swim near the Hutch pool. There are frog toads on some of the rocks, super cute! Look in the image below!

Sabino Canyon has many trees that are large enough to provide shade. Finally!

We hiked through the canyon all day and ended up at Shreve Saddle for the night.

Day 9:

We got up early and passed through the Mill Basin. Then we headed to the lowlands. We had 11 miles at low altitude and wanted to get through before it got too hot. Not much to say about that stretch of lowland, except that we saw a snake! My mom almost stepped on it. Ha. We arrived at our campsite around 2:30 and then spent hours lazing under a tree. We couldn’t even be in the store because of the heat. It was too hot there. 😞 We stopped there because we knew we were going to start climbing Mica Mountain after that point and we didn’t want to start in the intense afternoon heat.

Collapse learned to make me quesadillas!!! Trucker now has competition. I never thought I would have eaten the entire bag of tortillas mom brought, but when they are sizzling in ghee they are delicious.

Thanks for reading! Come back soon.

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