CrossRoads Blog

Our second hike of the year started out a little chilly, but within a hour or so turned out to be a perfect day. We hiked a trail called Badger Springs in the Auga Fria National Monument. The trail has a ton going for it - it’s relativley close to Phoenix, it has water (even a trickle in the Summer), the geology is cool, many Native American cultural spots within the Monument, petroglyph’s, rock hoping, and some cool spots to just hand out. We had a great hike and found a perfect lunch spot.

The big attraction of the day (native findings aside) was rock hunting. The place has a huge variety of rock and minerals and we hunted some great specimens (reminded of some of the days we did this when the boys were youngin’s). The volcanic ash is everywhere, there were some nice jasper samples, the Proterozoic rock was multi colored, lots of Onyx of every color and a whole lot of other unique stones I have no clue what they were.

We spent about 5 hours out on the trail and then headed back into town. On the way back we swung into Rock Springs Cafe, grabbed some beefsteak tomatoes as we always do, and scooped up one of their world famous pies (Blueberry Crumb) - then stopped by Kerry and Mike’s to share the Blueberry love. Nice when you can justify a big piece because you just hiked for 5 hours….

We began the New Year where we left off 2007 - enjoying great hikes. Yesterday we headed out to Castle Hot Springs just North of Lake Pleasant and hiked the Spring Valley Trail (not sure why it is called that as there is not a Spring Valley anywhere?). The trail is in Hell’s Canyon Wilderness and was one of the better ones from a visual perspective. The trail has a wide variety of vegetation and wildlife. We spotted several Wild Burros, various birds, and the rock and mineral variety is excellent.

We hiked out about 3 miles and back for a nice little 6 miler. We paused a couple of times, once for some pictures and a snack, then for some rock hunting (picked up some cool ones) and even found some meteor fragments!

So the first hike of 2008 is in the books. There will be many more. As promised, we will soon have more details, pictures, and video of this trip, along with all of the others in our Hiking Section of the Miller family website coming soon.

As we had been talking about and promising, our family from back East made it out over the Holidays. What a great treat it was to have so much family around for the season this year. They came into town on the 20th of December and did not head back out until the 30th. So we had 10 days of fun and (some) sun (kind of - it was a little colder in town this year).

During their visit we wanted to spend as much time as we could could with Aunt Lisa, Uncle Carl, and cousins Alexia and Austen. We also wanted to make sure they got a great feel for why we love living out here in the desert so much. So a jammed packed 10 days it was - I even had a spreadsheet agenda (surprise). Just a few of things we packed into the trip were: A White Tanks Hike and Picnic, A Sedona and West Fork hike (cut short), Vegas and a show, Hoover Dam, Wings game, Camelback summit hike with Uncle Carl, T-Bird hike, Gingerbread house making, a whole lot of Wii, and even a trip down the Anthem park slide!

The pictures above are just a sampling, there are lots more of their visit (plus video) on the site, as well as pics from the whole Miller family holiday time.