Twenty-five years ago I was on the Arizona Trail

In the White Canyon Wilderness

Journal entry. 6.00 a.m. March 29, 2000.

“A calm, starry night. Woke to a myriad bird calls. A thick crescent moon hangs over a red sandstone rock peak. To the north-west a slanting wall of coloured rock ends in a sharp cliff. The wall is split by just one steep gully. The rock is red-brown in various shades with cream bands. A similar wall lies to the east, this one double-tiered with a sloping band of desert plants between the two. Cacti are everywhere & the ‘trees’ visible high on ledges & ridges are mostly saguaro, occasionally cholla. This is a beautiful & spectacular place – the finest camp of the walk so far”.

The camp was in the White Canyon Wilderness and the walk was the Arizona Trail. This was day 21 of my 800-mile (round figure, could be less, probably more) 53-day walk from the Mexican border to Utah.

The Grand Canyon

Several years earlier I’d spent a few weeks walking in the Grand Canyon. From the North Rim I’d looked south over a sea of trees to distant mountains, the San Francisco Peaks, and wondered what a walk to them would be like.

The San Francisco Peaks

Some time later I discovered a trail was being developed that ran south-north through the centre of Arizona that included the San Francisco Peaks and the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t resist and began making plans. I really wanted to spend a couple of months in the desert.

First camp!

At least I thought it would all be in the desert. It wasn’t. The first night I found myself camped on snow on a mountaintop. Then there were forests, rivers, more mountains - a far more varied landscape than I’d expected. Of course there was a great deal of desert but even this was much more diverse than I’d assumed.

A typical camp

The walking was a delight, even if I was hot and thirsty at times, but even better were the many nights I spent sleeping out under the stars. I just loved waking to watch the world coming to life as the sun rose. When it was windy or, just once, rainy I pitched a tarp that still gave me extensive views but more often I just threw my mat and sleeping bag down and called that camp for the night.

A tarp to keep off the breeze in an aspen grove in the San Francisco Peaks

Twenty-five years later I can still close my eyes and be back on the Arizona Trail. The heat of the rocks, the sharpness of the air, the blue of the sky, the clarity of the light, the grandeur of the landscape, the gloriousness of it all. It all returns. It was a wonderful experience.

Back on snow in the San Francisco Peaks

Back home I wrote a book about it, called Crossing Arizona. It’s published by Countryman Press and is still in print

Photo note: these images were taken on the Arizona Trail on a Ricoh RDC-5000 2.3 megapixel compact camera with a 38-86 35mm equivalent zoom lens. This was the first time I’d used a digital camera on a long walk. However my main camera was a Canon EOS 300 35mm SLR film camera with a 28-70mm zoom lens with which I took fifty rolls of 36-shot slide film. The film images are far higher quality than the digital ones, unsurprisingly, but I haven’t scanned any of them yet. I must get round to it! I also had a Ricoh GR1s film compact as backup to the Canon. I took half a dozen rolls of print film with this and again the results are better than the digital ones. I should digitise some of those too.