A New Year's Day Hike Thru The Desert

On New Year's Day, Ray and I took a hike through the desert. Our goal .. from our house to the top of Gates Pass.

We live at the base of Golden Gate Mountain in the Tucson Mountain Range. There is a pass, called Gates Pass, that takes one to the other side of the mountain.

Here's a pic of the mountain from our front yard. This was taken during monsoon season. Notice the lightning bolt hitting the right hand side of the mountain??? This is one reason we do not like monsoon season!

(HINT: Click on image to enlarge)



The pass runs between the two peaks that you can see.

We started out about 11:00 in the morning. We just need to go the back of our small 40 house development, go through the gate and we are in Tucson Mountain Park. At this point, we can either hit the trail, go up by the water tower, and continue on to the pass. However, we walked the road into Tucson Estates, a large development where my mom lives, and picked up the trail at the corner of her street and Tucson Estates Parkway. It starts out as a nice easy stroll through the desert.



You can still see the houses from here.

Up a little further, turn around and look at Cat Mountain.



Up a little further, a view of our mountain. We're headed up towards that little rock sticking out on the right hand side.



Getting closer the pass



This one is pretty close to the top of the pass, looking back down onto Tucson Estates. Our development is just to the right hand side, off view of the screen. When Mom and I go for our walks, we walk all the way to the house way to the left hand side of the screen, where we have a lovely view of the pass. It looks like such an easy stroll from there!!



Marching saguaro cactus.



This is about as high as we got. It got too hot, bees were bugging us, and even though it looked like we didn't have far to go to get to the very top, we turned around. This is looking back at Cat Mountain.



Back down near the bottom, looking back up towards the pass



We took the path down to the water tower and over to the gate to our development. It took a total of almost 2 1/2 hours. Course, I'm a slow poke. :)