Sycamore Canyon – presentation of trails

The first day of Summer last year, 6/21/2020, brought me back to a place that I had first explored on 3/29/2015, Parsons Trail in the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Area…which is located just north and east of Clarkdale, Arizona…which is a bit south and west of Sedona.

I left the canyon with almost six hundred photos after my first exploration…

…and brought home a bit under four hundred this last time.

So after browsing and examining the recent cache, I was able to whittle-down the presentable images to a few dozen…

…some of which I have already presented, here, and the remainder of which will appear in following posts.

Given that there were so many photos that I thought were “share-worthy,” I have separated them into the general categories of…

…trails, fauna, water, grass seed-heads…

…and one set of two images that will present the Sycamore Canyon version of Kermit….

It took roughly two hours to make it to the trailhead, some eleven or so miles beyond Clarkdale, from my house in the far northwest corner of Metropolitan Phoenix.

The very first image in this post was from the cliff edge where the trail drops from the trail-head parking lot into the canyon, at just shy of 7:00 am…so the sun was already up and well enough over the horizon to remove the shadows for a good portion of the canyon, but as you can see, was not sufficiently high to do so entirely…there was still a softness to the light in the canyon and a strong remainder of shadow to effect the images with a broader view.

In the eighth and ninth images above, to the right side of each, you can see raspberry bushes…a nice surprise for a high-desert, canyon hike.

Incredibly diverse plant life…just wonderful stuff.

The “focus” of this post is supposed to be the actual trail itself…a general subject of which I am quite fond…whether they’re winding through a mountain forest, through a “typical” desert range or flatlands, I find something very alluring about them; compelling, drawing, inviting….  In the below photo, you may notice that the trail is actually on the lowest level of the tiered rock just above the waterline…leading us back into the greenery…

…and this bit of trail takes us to the right of the fallen, sharp edged blocks, and skirting the cliff wall.  By the way, the sand that you can see in the foreground was finer than beach sand…almost dusty at that location…making for awkward and struggling foot steps.

Now going beneath aged cedar trees….

…and now pass along the flattened rock, again, taking us beyond another larger pond that has formed in the length of stream.

On the way back, now, in the below photo, with the sun full overhead…

…and welcoming the shade again, of the branching mesquite and other canyon trees…at just after 11:00 am.

And below…the price one pays for going north to hike on a weekend day…the drive back to the Phoenix valley…..

The wrecked juju or Zen aside, it was well worth the drive to hike in Sycamore Canyon again.  Thank you for joining me.