From Casa Grande, we headed northeast towards the Tonto National Forest and Tonto National Monument.  The Tonto National Forest is huge, and seems to cover most of the public lands from just east of Pheonix to about 40 miles out, and a good 40 miles south to north.  That area isn’t all National Forest and contains a few towns and private ranches, but you can’t drive too far in any direction without seeing the “Entering Tonto National Forest” signs.  We had looked on iOverlander for a good place to camp, and found a disbursed camping area just west of the town of Superior.  We didn’t really know what to expect, but found an area near the Picket Post Trailhead with very clear camping spots, some in groups, and some individual sites by the side of the road.  Since cows were wandering the area freely, and lots of people were camping with horses and dogs in the other areas, we picked an individual site on the side of the road so our dogs wouldn’t make everyone crazy barking at everything passing the camper.  We found that the area has a lot of trails through the desert, but it also has nice dirt roads without too much traffic, so we were able to get the dogs out for a good long walk and scope out other sites in case we came back.

We pulled out the next morning and headed for the Tonto National Monument, which was about 50 miles away through a few towns and over a few mountain passes.  It was beautiful drive, and we easily found the park.  Tonto National Monument is another National Park site featuring cave dwellings.  We were very lucky because the site contains two cave dwelling areas, with one up a paved trail very easily accessible from the Visitor Center, and another larger dwelling up a mile-plus dirt path which is usually only accessible with a park ranger as a guide, but on that Sunday the were allowing people to walk to the larger dwelling on their own.  We visited both dwellings, and enjoyed talking to the rangers and archeologists on site.  We also enjoyed seeing the local flora and fauna, and spotted a few lifer birds as well as some very fat squirrels.

Our plan had been to leave the Tonto National Monument and head to a campground closer to Phoenix near Tortilla Flats.  However, in talking to one of the rangers, we discovered that although that campground is only about 25 miles from the National Monument, a landslide had closed Rt. 88 and the detour around the landslide meant it would be more like 90 miles whether we went north or south around the landslide.  In looking at the map, we realized that the southern detour took us back through Superior and the area where we had camped the previous night.  But, we needed water and wanted to get some laundry done, so we called a campground in Superior to see if we could get in that night.  They didn’t have any full hookup sites open, but they said they could give us access to water and they didn’t care if we dumped our gray water in their gravel parking lot, so we went to the Box 8 Ranch RV Resort and parked in their parking lot and both got our laundry done and filled with water.

The next morning we went less than 5 miles back down the road to the Picket Post disbursed camping area.  We went to one of the spots further off the road that we had scoped out on one of our walks the first night we stayed there.  The second spot was quieter with fewer people around, but was still in a spot where we could easily access both hiking trails and the back roads for dog walks.  We stayed there two more nights while Tom did some maintenance on the camper, we took the dogs on a couple of long walks, and we took a couple of hikes by ourselves through the desert.  

We left the Tonto National Forest after a walk with the dogs on Wednesday morning because we had made arrangements to meet friends Michele and Gino in Phoenix for dinner that night.The Tonto National Forest is less than an hour outside of Phoenix, but it seemed like worlds away as we drove back into civilization.

We left Tucson and headed north towards Phoenix with a planned stop at the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.  This is a small site south of Phoenix where extensive ruins of an Ancestral Sonoran Desert People’s settlement was discovered, complete with a very large structure dubbed Casa Grande, or Big House, because of its size.  The site had long been abandoned even when it was found by Spanish Missionaries in 1694, but research over the years has uncovered some of its background.  Archeologists believe the area was settled around 300AD, with the Casa Grande completed around 1350.  Nobody is sure when the area was abandoned, but archeologists now believe that the Ancestral People may have been too good at creating irrigation from the nearby Gila River, and may have caused the river to run dry, meaning they had to move to where the could find water.  Modern day ancestors of the Ancestral People don’t believe they went far - since these modern day people are still in the area - but the population centers were abandoned for more disbursed living.  This site was the first national archeological reserve, and became protected under the National Park system in 1892.  It takes only an hour or so to wander around the site and see the ruins as they have been preserved since  1892, but this is a significant site nonetheless because of it’s historical value both as an archeological site for the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People, and as a testament to how the National Park system can protect these ancestral relics.

We left the site by mid afternoon, heading for the Tonto National Forest east of Phoenix.

We woke up in the morning to an inch of snow in the desert and on the truck, and lots of mud in the parking lot.  Temperatures were above freezing so the snow was melting fast, but Tom got outside in time to get a couple of photos.

Tom had tentatively scheduled an oil change for the truck, so after breakfast we left the campground and headed into Tucson to the garage.  It was a small, privately owned mechanic who didn’t have a big enough bay for the 12’ camper, but they did it outside the garage and were happy to have Tom watch and help, which made Tom happy.  They were done well before noon, so we headed to the Saguaro National Park East.

Saguaro National Park has two locations in Tucson, one on the east side of the city and one on the west.  The main headquarters and Visitor Center is on the east side, and we’d already hiked near the west side location, so we wanted to visit the east side.  According to the park volunteers who helped us plan a hike, the saguaros on the east side are bigger and older.  There may not be quite so many of them, but there are still enough that they call that area of the park a cactus forest.  And, they are huge and very old.  We learned that they are very slow growing and don’t even flower until they are about 35 years old, and don’t start to get their iconic branches until they are almost 100.  The big ones with lots of arms are estimated to be 150 years old or more.  We drove the 8-mile loop around Cactus Forest Drive before heading to the other side of the park for a hike.

After driving around the loop road, we left the Rincón Visitor Center area and drove around to the edge of the park to a trailhead.  Tom had mapped out a hike based on information from the park volunteer, but we were planning to do the hike mostly for exercise since we’ve been hiking in the desert since Texas, and we’d seen a lot of saguaros in the previous day’s hike.  We didn’t think we’d see much that was new and exciting.  

We were, delightfully, wrong.  Maybe it was because of the snow, or maybe it was just that this desert and the saguaros are so different from where we’ve been recently, but we both ended up enjoying the hike and the scenery way more than expected.  We never expected to have to wade through mud in the desert, but discovered that desert mud isn’t all that offensive.  It’s not deep, and not sticky or slippery.  We also didn’t expect to still see snow at 3PM in the desert, but as we climbed we saw snow on the ground, and on some of the saguaros.  What we really didn’t expect was so much water in the desert.  At one point, we had to turn back and replan our route because we came to a stream that was too deep to cross.  Then we climbed a mountain and found a dam with a pretty significant amount of water flowing through it.  Then we heard running water and found a big waterfall, and then another, and another as we hiked around the mountain.  We saw lots of tracks and lots of birds, as well as a bunch of rabbits.  I wanted to see a Gila Monster; we weren’t that lucky, but with all of the surprising things we saw, we ended up being thrilled with the hike.  

All afternoon, we’d been asking around about places to camp to avoid going back to the very trashy BLM site of the previous night.  The mud certainly didn’t help, but the whole place was full of trash and dog shit, as well as lots of campers in bad repair, and it had left a bad taste in our mouths.  However, all of the other boondocking sites people had recommended came with the caveat of “the road to get there is a little rough, and it might be slick because of the snow.”  So, we sucked it up and went back to Sawyer Mountain BLM, but instead of parking in the sketchy muddy lot that’s a little off the highway, we went to the more crowded graveled lot closer to the highway that had more nicer campers.  That was an okay choice, and we had a quiet and uneventful night.

We didn’t make it to City of Rocks State Park that night.  When the dust storm was done we got on the road, but it was still very windy, so we pulled off at a Walmart less than 10 miles from where we’d waited out the storm.  Quite a few RVs were parked in the Walmart lot, so we knew we weren’t the only ones playing it safe and not driving in the wind.  Since we already had the campsite at City of Rocks, we knew we could get there any time and not have to wait until their late afternoon check in time to park, so we got on the road early the next day.  We stopped for fuel, and when Tom talked to the attendant, he found out that winds at the airport had been clocked at 95mph.  Crazy!

City of Rocks State Park is the kind of place that makes me wish I’d grown up in New Mexico so my family could have gone there for vacation or, even better, lived close enough that we could have gone every weekend.  The City of Rocks is a huge formation that you can wander through and climb on pretty much forever.  Even better, they’ve designed the campground so that campsites are tucked into the rocks, which made us regret getting an electric site since it would have been much more fun to camp in the rocks.  However, the temperatures dipped into the mid-20s, so it was nice to plug in our electric heater and let it run all night.

We left City of Rocks State Park around 8AM because we had been told that while the drive to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument was less than 50 miles, it was very curvy and very hilly.  We had heard the same thing from multiple people, and they weren’t kidding!  We started the morning at around 4500 feet of elevation, and to get to Gila Cliff Dwellings we went through a pass that topped out at 7440 feet - and most of that climb was done in less than 5 miles.  However, we were glad to take it slow and enjoy the ever changing scenery since the route leads from the desert into pine forest as the elevation increases.  Because there was a lot of snow at the higher elevations, there was also a lot of water and runoff on the road, which made icy patches.  They were short and didn’t give us any trouble, but we definitely hadn’t planned on driving on ice.

The Gila Cliff Dwellings were fun to explore.  The NPS has created a path of about a mile which winds through the valley, up the hill to the cliff dwellings, and then back by going behind the dwellings and down to the parking area.  The whole route is beautiful, and the preservation and reconstruction of the actual dwellings is, as expected, quite well done.

We left Gila Cliff Dwellings and drove back through the pass on our way to a BLM campground on the other side of Silver City.  However, as we were approaching Silver City, we saw miles and miles of mined hills, all crawling with mining equipment and gigantic trucks.  We ;then found an overlook with informational signs for the Santa Rita Copper Mine, so we pulled in to look and take photos.  We were very lucky, because a man who works for one of the companies that provides the drills was there, so he shared a lot of information with us.  Some of it was technical details, but some was more philosophical.  For example, he pointed out that the whole world is trying to go green and make everything electric rather than fossil fuel powered, but most of the copper mined out of the hills is used for electrical equipment.  The copper mining process is obviously not geared towards conservation.  Besides the stripped mountains, we were also told that the copper is extracted by putting the rocks in leach fields and bathing them with cyanide.  And, the gigantic trucks running the ore back and forth 24/7 definitely aren’t running on electricity.  I’ll have to do more research before I form an opinion, but it was definitely food for thought.

We left the copper mine overlook and went to a free established campground in the Gila National Forest between Silver City and Lordsburg.  The campground is on the Continental Divide Trail and gets some tent camping through-hikers and -bikers, but it’s also very convenient for RVs.  We found a level spot and took the dogs for a short walk to enjoy the view from the trail.

As we were doing our normal evening stuff, we took a look at the next day’s weather for the area.  We were dismayed to find out that yet another high wind advisory was starting the next morning at 8AM, which would make leaving difficult.  We were also dismayed to find out that a Winter Storm Warning had also been issued, and the area was expecting up to 8” of snow the next afternoon and evening, along with temperatures in the teens.  Tom suggested going to bed immediately so we could get up and evacuate by 3AM, but I persuaded him to move the departure time back to 6AM so we could eat, get some sleep, and get up around 5AM rather than the middle of the night.  That’s what we did, and we beat the wind out of New Mexico.  We also decided to skip a couple of sites we were going to see in eastern Arizona, and we headed directly to Tucson, where we pulled in shortly after 9AM.  We did some grocery shopping, went for a hike, and found some BLM land just outside the city to park on for the night.