Mike's Hikes: June 20, 2009 - Hidden Valley Trail; South Mountain

So, today's hike was a neat one. Some parts were fun, and some parts were frustrating, but overall it was a neat hike.

I'd never hiked any of the trails at South Mountain; though as it turns out, there are a whole bunch. Today our plan was to go explore the Hidden Valley Trail. To get to it we were supposed to take the Mormon Trail to the National Trail, and the National Trail would take us to the Hidden Valley Trail.

Well, first of all, we slept in and then decided we would still hike, even though it was already 9:00. A little advice: Don't do this! It was SO hot by the time we got on the trail (10:00) and that aspect of the hike was NOT fun!

The other set back on this hike, and the frustrating part, was that we got off the trail we wanted to be on. You see, the route we wanted would have been 3.9 miles and was supposed to take 2 hours. We got off on a branch out trail and made a loop that added 3.3 miles, making our total hike 7.2 miles! We still finished it right at two hours though! Because we're bad.

Here's the map:

If you can see it, we accidentally took the Mormon Loop off of the Mormon Trail and did that big loop to the right to get back to the Hidden Valley Trail. Phew. The beating sun sure made those extra miles not that enjoyable.

But:

The Hidden Valley Trail was cool. A lot of hikers crawl all over South Mountain, but the Hidden Valley Trail was fairly secluded; we only saw three other hikers on that section of trail, so we were free to climb and explore and enjoy. And that part of the trail was a lot different than most the rest of the trails. There was this sweet rock tunnel:

And there was this sweet squeeze/crevice thing in the trail:They call it Fat Man's Pass. Can't imagine why it's called that, but i thought it was cool.

This is on the way back: There were pretty neat views of the city. You could see just about all of Phoenix, similar to last week's great view from the top of Brown's Peak except this was much closer than last week, so you could actually tell what things were down below you.