Casa Grande, Arizona

Casa Grande (pronounced grahnd - not grahn day) is a town of about 25,000 people located between Phoenix and Tucson. It is directly east of Maricopa, where we lived until we moved into the trailer a year ago. Gosh, it has been a year. It’s amazing how fast time goes by. We have finally found an RV park that we are comfortable calling our home base, which means that we have paid for a year. Doing it this way saves a lot of money. Most of the big resort parks have a daily, weekly, monthly, 3-month, 6-month, and an annual rate. To give you an idea, if you sign up for a week at this park, it works out to about $14 a day. If you sign up for 3 months, it works out to about $10 a day. If you sign up for a year, it works out to about $5 per day. At that rate, even when we leave for the summer, we still don’t really lose money. The area is great for us. We are finally out of the city and back in the desert, just outside Casa Grande, but close enough that a grocery trip is only 5 minutes away. We will probably stay here until the end of May which is when the temperature starts to get really warm. We like to think of ourselves as “reverse snowbirds”—we live in the valley most of the year and go away for a few months when it gets hot. It looks like we will go back to Cottonwood for the summer. We have been studying the topographic maps of the wilderness areas in Arizona and have plans for ATV riding, kayaking and lots of hiking in Central AZ this year. And “camping”. I can hear some of you already. “Camping? What do you think you have been doing for the past year?” Well, for us, living in the trailer is home. Going somewhere with a tent, sleeping bags, Coleman stove and cooler is camping.

This area of Arizona generally has the exact same climate as Phoenix, however in the summer, it gets about five degrees warmer than the city (we never have figured out why) in the daytime and cools off a little faster in the evenings. Often we can have the windows open in the evening while the folks in Phoenix are still running the air until much later. Our scenery isn’t quite as spectacular as it was in Apache Junction, but we still have mountains visible in at least three directions. Most of the folks who spend the winter in the park have already left. In fact, they were mostly gone when we arrived at the beginning of the month, so we have a few neighbors for now, but by the end of April, there will only be a few people here. For now, that is kind of nice, because we like being a ways away from our neighbors. This park has a computer room with 12 PCs in it for the residents. We are currently the computer room monitors, which means a few times a week, we open up the room so people can get their e-mail and work on any projects they have. We’ll probably be teaching some computer classes next winter when everyone comes back, and our project for the summer will be to create a web site for the park. I guess that means that we won’t be the “anti-social youngsters” any more. (This is a 55+ resort. We can live here because Arizona law requires a percentage of people younger than 55 be allowed in.) Gary says that means we are “geezers in training”. I’m not so sure I buy that.

Picacho Peak

Picacho Peak State Park is about 30 minutes from “home”. It is a nice park with several picnic areas, and of course, hiking trails. We have experienced two of the five main hiking trails. The scenery is pretty good-different from Lost Dutchman, but still good. There is one trail labelled for children, a nature trail, one that goes up to an observation point (great view of I-10), and a couple that go to the peak of the mountain. We have hiked to the observation point a couple times, mostly for pictures and because we didn’t have a lot of time on those days. However, we have been hiking a trail on the west side of the mountain that is superb. You start out by climbing for about 10 minutes and then for the next hour you travel along through a saguaro and cholla forest that follows the rolling contour of the foothills to Picacho Peak. We didn’t think that we would like this park much because it is situated right along I-10, but this trail is on the “backside” of the mountain and except for a few planes, it is a beautiful, quiet hike. Here are some pictures of the scenery at Picacho Peak. Since the park is about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, I suspect that it sees less use than some others. I would think that most people travelling along I-10 are headed to one city or the other and don’t plan a stop here.The park fee is $5 and the park ranger office hours are 8 AM till 10 PM. There is no gate however, so you can go in earlier. Just don’t forget to pay on your way out. We went in a little early one day and happened to get a picture of a gila monster, one of the two poisonous lizards in the entire world. Our rating:

The Road to Show Low

April , 2000

When we were trying to decide where to go for the summer, Show Low came up as a possibility. It is up in the White Mountains a couple hours from Phoenix. So we planned a trip up there to see if there is a good place to stay. The trip was very pretty, driving through canyons, valleys and up onto the Mogollon Rim. We did not take the trailer for this trip because it was for exploration more than anything else. We stopped before we actually got to Show Low however. This trip is not for us with the trailer. Without it, it’s beautiful. But you have to understand that driving in your truck is not the same as pulling 10,000 pounds of house behind you. Here is the basic problem: you climb several thousand feet up, then lose about 1500 of them, then climb another couple thousand and then lose about half, then climb more and lose more. You get the picture. It’s not that we couldn’t go this route, but we don’t want to. There are several ways to get from Phoenix to Show Low, and if we really wanted to go there, we would probably drive up I-17 to Flagstaff and go east from there and turn south. According to a friend of ours, that route only forces you to climb the Mogollon Rim once. I must say, most of the time we don’t get very excited by the scenery along a mountain road. Being from Colorado, we feel like we have experienced the best mountain views anywhere, but after this trip, we agree that there is more than just Colorado. Here are some pictures we took on this trip.

The Arizona Trail

During our research on hiking in Arizona we discovered something called the Arizona Trail. It is a group of trails, linked together, that runs from the northern border of Arizona to Mexico. How cool is that? Wouldn’t it be great to say that you have hiked all the miles of the trail? I don’t know if we will hike the entire thing, but we sure are going to hike some of it. Here is a link to their website if you are interested in learning more, or volunteering to help finish parts of the trail yet to be completed.