Rocks in the Desert

All summer Shaun and I have been hiking and climbing around in different areas of Arizona.

This weekend we headed down towards Sells, AZ to hike and rock climb Baboquivari Peak (the peak sticking out behind the two others in the photo). We planned out our route and printed out all the needed maps and info, packed up all our gear, food, tent etc...

We left Phoenix on Saturday eve, a little later than we planned and pulled into the campground just as it was getting dark. All of the surrounding peaks were completely hidden by the clouds and it was pouring down rain.

We waited for the rain to let up a little and for the other two people in our party to show up before we set our tent. It was cool and dry inside the tent and we went to bed early to be up for our 345am start!

It was dark but dry when we woke up. We gathered our stuff and our group and headed out towards the mountains on the only trail we could find...

We hiked and hiked and hiked....then bushwhacked and hiked some more, then back tracked, bushwacked and hiked some more! Each one of us looking at our maps and trying to tell the other how to get to this particular ridge (Lions ledge) so that we could start the technical climbing.

Shaun has been mountaineering all of his life and I had/have 100% confidence in his ability. I trust him with my life. But even he could not find the route and was starting to wonder what the heck was going on!

Finally, at 9.5 hours of (strenuous) hiking, out of shear exhaustion we gave up and headed back down.

As we descended we noticed a very small detail that would have made all the difference in finding our route on Baboquivari! We noticed Baboquivari Peak! Out in the distance and over to the south by two peaks!! Yep, we hiked around all day on some other peak! This one:

It just goes to show, when we start out in the dark, we can get lost and try to make things fit. We can see things as we want them to be, try to force some similarities and think we see something we don't. We can cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering trying to navigate our way thinking we know where we are...

Sometimes, when we've tried and tried to make something fit, if we just step back and look at the situation for what it truly is, we might find, it really doesn't fit and the things we think we see aren't really there at all...in fact, we may actually be on the completely wrong mountain!

What a great experience. I hope I never have to duplicate!!