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September 20, 2004 Hutch's Pool         Hike Leader:  Gary Borax

Adventure on the Wilderness of Rocks Hike

Five hikers participated in the Mt Lemmon Wilderness of Rocks Hike.  The hike took an unexpected adventurous turn.  We went past where we intended to stop for lunch and turn around for the hike out.  We were going to backtrack when "crazy" Gary Borax said he thought he could bushwhack/scramble down some boulders thinking he would intersect the trail to meet the rest of us.  At that point everyone decided that if Gary thought it was possible to scramble down to the trail we all would.  We didn't want to leave Gary to "go it alone".  That's where the craziness comes in.  After bushwhacking and scrambling down some huge boulders we found that we weren't going to intersect the trail at all.  Instead we were going deeper and deeper into a large locked-in pool area.  We were either going to have to go back up the way we came down or cross the pools (somehow) and scramble/scramble back up the opposite side of the pools.  Turns out the trail was actually on the other side of this obstacle.  Quite an obstacle it turned out to be.  All five made it (we had to) out safely.

After participating in this adventure we all wondered how an experienced woman hiker would have continued hiking down treacherous Lemmon Canyon and lost for six days.  She surely should have realized that she was not traveling in the proper direction.  When you are hiking into this area, you can see Tucson, the Lemmon Rock Lookout Tower, Radio ridge and Mount Lemmon.  She surely should have gotten her bearings, before she hiked into the depths of Lemmon Canyon/Creek.