Hackberry Springs

    To the east of Mesa - the Phoenix suburb where we are for the this winter - lies the Superstition Mountains. They are part of the Tonto National Forest and there are numerous hiking trails in these mountains. The trails range from easy to extremely difficult and short to lenghty. Monday, January 21 our Mesa Regal hiking group of 30 people hiked the Hackberry Springs Trail from the trailhead at First Water. It was an easy to moderate hike of 9.2km.

   Our leader, Bruce, stops to tell us about the mound ahead of us. It is an ancient Hohokam Indian burial mound - if we looked closely, we may find some pottery shards - then again, after many hikers, there may not be any left!
  Jack is checking his new GPS watch.

   


In the distance, we can see Weaver's Needle - a well known landmark in the Superstitions.

The trail is not all level!

This is the first of two different group of horseback riders that we meet on the trail. They are bigger, so we politely move over for them. Since they covered the trail we are now walking on, we are the ones to have to skirt around "road apples".

Another one of Arizona's earthquake early warning signs!

We stop for our lunch at the base of this looming rock wall. Hackberry Spring is here and because of the water, there are many of these deciduous hackberry trees - their leaves now down because of winter. Lots of other vegetation abounds here and we see signs that javalinas (desert "pigs") have been digging at the base of bushes and trees to get tender roots.

This is the spring as it comes out of the mountain
Nearby in the soft mud, we saw pawprints that look to us to be those of a bobcat.

After we have had a 20 minute rest and a snack, we make our way now along the streambed.

Some of the boulders are a fair size and we have to pick our way around and over them for the next mile or so, still finding a fair number of water pools and a trickily stream.

We came upon the remnants of an old ranching operation out here in the hills. Cattle sheds, an old windmill and a ramp for loading the steers onto trucks for transport are all that are left. That and lots of bullet holes in the old tin roof!!

  The stream bed flattens out and we will follow this for another mile, then we meet the beginning of the loop of our hike. This has been a "balloon" hike with a start and finish on a common trail and a loop to Hackberry Springs and back. The weather was great - a high of 80F after a cool start to the morning and some shade along the way. Good company and lots of conversation as we hiked!