SasEz! Simple & Sustainable Living…

After the first Tanque Verde experience, we went looking for Pinery Canyon Campground. This one is roughly 130 miles south and east of Tucson in another section of The Coronado National Forest. It’s not too far from The C hiricahua National Monument (Don’t ask me how to pronounce that )

The forest road turns really steep and winding after a few miles, and you can barely drive 10MPH on it. This was taking quite a long time to find the campground and we’d passed some really nice spots along the way already, so we decided to turn around and go back to one of those.

We only spent 3 days in that spot because we had to go back to Tucson for …

On the 4th of July we were in Tucson with William’s family and that was really nice. We left that night and decided to try going further out past Tanque Verde Falls on Reddington Road to see if we could find the forest roads that are supposed to be out there.

It was a great drive. Unfortunately we couldn’t find the forest roads and the few additional campsites we found were just as trashed as the others. The area appears to be popular for shooting and partying.

So after driving most of the night on this rough, primitive road we turned around and went back to the main area above the falls. At 4am we finally parked on an overlook and took a nap for a couple of hours.

We tried camping above Tanque Verde Falls our 2nd or 3rd night in Arizona but every campsite we found is littered with trash, glass, and ants. Some of the sites have been used to dump stuff like TVs and furniture.

We couldn’t put our tent up because a windstorm hit that evening. We’d only had a 2 hour nap over the previous 24+ hours though so we really needed to get some sleep. We ended up parking in the trail head parking lot and sleeping in the front seats of the truck.

A few hours later a car full of drunk, stoned teenagers showed up. Despite this large parking lot being completely empty, they parked right beside us and proceeded to make as much noise as possible. I got pissed off and roared out of the lot soon after. I drove a little higher up the road and …

So today is roughly our 17th or 18th day on this adventure – I’m writing this on Friday July 17th – and I’ve fallen behind on getting my notes all down. I wrote them by hand this morning while waiting for the laptop to charge, so now I’ll try and get all that transferred into Live Writer so I can publish them the next time we have an Internet Connection.

We’re currently camping on the backside of Mount Lemmon. This is black bear country plus there have been mountain lion sightings in the area. On our first night here we heard something walk down the dry creek behind our tent and Onyx barked. Later in the night William heard that something go back up the creek again. Yesterday he saw a glimpse of something about as big as Onyx with a bushy tail, so last night we slept in …