Barnhardt Trail

Its been a while since I went on a hike with the hiking group. Most of them wanted to go to the Paralta Trail in the Superstitions. For Sam and I it would have been our fourth time this season so we did our own hike and convinced Shane to come along. We went into the Mazatzal Wilderness and hiked to a seasonal waterfall. (The Mazatzal mountains run between the Verde River and the Beeline highway that heads to Payson.) We were up pretty high in elevation, I'm guessing around 6,000 feet, and it was a little chilly, the air temp never got above 65. In fact there was still snow on the peaks above the waterfall. We hiked the side of a canyon that overlooked the creek which gave us spectacular views of both the canyon and the surrounding country. When we got high enough, you could see the Mogollon Rim heading out east and I could roughly pick out the summer time area for Anasazi. The wild flowers were just starting to make an appearance and the trees were beginning to leaf out.

The best part about the hike was not seeing the waterfall or the surrounding country but the conversation that took place on the way back down. We talked about the gospel, physics, space and higher mathematics and how they are connected. We talked about the amazing potential of people and the actual power of thought. This conversation didn't end when we reached the car or when we had our usual Dairy Queen stop. In fact we sat and talked for three hours at DQ. I loved every minute; it was just what I was needing that day. I wish I'd had a tape recorder with me to remember exactly what was said because it made my mind stretch in so many ways and made the gospel and the love of christ and God that much more real to me.

We found this amazing patch of wild miner's lettuce along the trail. It was the biggest wild lettuce I had ever seen in AZ so of course we had to stop and graze for a bit.

We were up so high that we got into the ponderosa pines. I always get happy when I see them because they remind me of Tahoe and I love the vanilla/butterscotch smell.