March 5th- Outside Superior to Artesian Well

Picketpost Mountain

     Resupply went like clockwork.  Got to Family Dollar at 8 a.m. just as they opened and purchased six days of food for less than $20.  Further into the old town, I reached the post office just as its doors were opening.  Postcards mailed off, I headed back west to the edge of town hoping for a ride, which unfortunately never came.  Five miles of walking on the paved highway shoulder in due course landed me at the Picketpost Trailhead.  From there the trail starts wending its way higher into the hills past the western flanks of Picketpost Mountain, a sentinel of rock that dominates the early part of this section.  A healthy stand of saguaros can be seen on its slopes.
     Within a mile or two of the trailhead I passed several groups of older hikers and four people riding horses all returning from a morning jaunt through the desert scrub.  The temperature today is supposed to reach the mid to upper eighties and with the heat increasing as noon approached, everyone was calling it a day.  Unlike yesterday, where there were places with cottonwood, oak or pine, there is virtually no respite from the sun on this part of the trail.
     Trough Spring was dry as a bone, which came as a bit of a blow in light of the fact that in 2012, while I was on the AZT, I actually camped near it and found the trough full with piped spring water trickling into its overflowing sides.  Searching around, I was able to find a small pool of water trapped in a depression of bedrock that yielded a crucial liter of water that would see me through a dry afternoon.  At the junction of the "new" AZT and the former route which the GET follows, I met a pair of mountain bikers who stopped for a chat.  One of them had hiked the trail before and knew Brett Tucker, the founder of the trail.  He shared a few insights and said his favorite section was the Safford-Morenci Trail, so I'm looking forward to reaching that to see if I share his opinion.
     The de facto AZT is a very vague route with an initial uphill scramble marked with the occasional blue flagging tape or a stray cairn.  However, even with these directional aids, I must admit that I lost the "trail" a couple of times on the route towards the saddle.  I'm not sure if I missed seeing them or if, as is certainly possible, the tape had somehow fallen off.  Either way, it was only a minor inconvenience.  A bit of map work reading the terrain and I was back where I needed to be.  Once the saddle was reached the trail was easy to follow the rest of the way to White Canyon.
     The prettiest place for me today was the area around Hole-in-the-Rock.  The interesting ochre-colored rock formations lit up by the piercing light of the mid-afternoon sun were quite pretty.  The amount of rabbit, ground squirrels and quail hopping about or dashing across my path added to the scene.
     The steep descent into White Canyon is along an old, rocky two-track that becomes smoother the closer you get to the canyon floor.  Once it bottoms out, its a nicely graded dirt road to the artesian well.  My oh my!  Things have changed since 2012.  The well water used to bubble up into a small stone-ringed basin set beneath the branches of a smallish oak.  That was all gone now.  By the looks of things, a huge flash flood had ripped through this area, uprooting the oak and ripping up the ground.  The well is now capped and the area around it gated.  The water is siphoned off down the drainage into four black tanks that service two round, metal troughs one of which was algae covered while the other was pristine.  Already dusk by this time, I cowboy camped nearby and after a hot and mostly waterless day concentrated on rehydrating myself. From what I can gather after having talked with some area residents, severe tropical weather coming up from Mexico in the summer of 2014 dumped horrendous amounts of rain in a two-day period.  The effects of this deluge is what I've been seeing in a few of the canyons up to this point on my journey.

Distance: 20.2 miles

Blue Flagging on the Old Arizona Trail