Slavin Gulch, Take Two (12-14-14)

Slavin Gulch Trail is a hiking trail in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona…..but I guess I am getting a little ahead of myself, since my last blog post was a couple of weeks ago, and we were in Texas.



Well, after leaving Big Bend, we stopped for a few days in El Paso to spend some time with Paul’s mom.  Julie and Mike came with us for a day or so and we showed them around town a little.

While in El Paso I usually get some exercise by having Paul drop me at the bottom of the hill on the way to his mom’s.  Its two miles up the hill with an elevation gain of 800 feet.  Not bad. If we really wanted to hike, all we have to do is step out her back door.  Her house backs up to the wilderness.

  

After leaving El Paso, we stopped in Benson AZ.  We are working our way towards the Palm Springs area of California, where we will park the rig for Christmas.

In Benson we caught back up with Nancy and Dave, and Mike and Julie.  We had time to go out to dinner and some of us went to the town craft fair.  No pictures though.  On my list of things to do in Benson, is to hike Slavin Gulch.  We attempted this trail almost exactly 3 years ago, but a mile or so into the hike I fell and broke my wrist.  (the link to that post: 1st attempt at Slavin Gulch )

A mile or so into the hike, we came upon the “scene of the crime” so to speak.  Yup, I fell going over that little itty bitty barbed wire fence.  It was a less squished down back then, but still, the height wasn't the issue, the instability of the rocks was.  A boulder shifted, my foot rolled, and down I went.  This time Paul made sure he was hanging on to me, haha.

No broken bones this time, so we continued on the 7.5 mile hike.  It has 1400 feet of elevation gain and ends at the ruins of an old mine. The trail, in some spots, could barely be called a trail, and was very difficult to navigate.

We stopped for lunch along the way and discussed the fact that it didn't seem like we were going to be gaining that much elevation, since we hadn't been going up too steep of an incline.  But, of course, we should have known better and that situation changed very soon after lunch. 

One of the perks to elevation gain is the view from the top.

 

Once we reached the end of the trail, Paul wanted to do some exploring of the mine, as usual, and I didn't, so I plopped myself down on a very convenient nearby bench and dozed in the sun while he scrambled up the rocks to the mine.

 

The trip back down wasn't very much fun because it’s hard to control your speed and easy to roll on the rocks when you are going too fast, but we made it down with no injuries.  We had been hoping we’d have enough time to do the short hike to the historic Council Rocks, an area used years ago by the Chiricahua Apache Chief, Cochise, but with a 12 mile drive down a dirt “road” ahead of us, we thought we’d lose daylight too quickly. Maybe next time.


We have now moved on from Benson and are getting closer to Palm Springs.