Dam and Done: Along the Trail in Sabino Canyon, Pt 3

Here's the end of my photo tour of Lower Sabino Canyon; and not a day too soon! Tomorrow night is the Weekend Assignment, and I just got the email for my online FAR (Financial Accounting and Reporting) seminar's first assignment, due in a couple of days. Wait, haven't we been here before? Yes. I just about killed myself struggling through most of the first assignment for the 41-day version of the seminar, only to drop it in favor of this later 61-day version. Reason: I got a job and couldn't handle the heavier workload of the shorter seminar at the same time. Now I'm jobless again, and the coursework will be heavy but doable.

Well, anyway. Back to Sabino!

Let's start here, at a stone wall within a few hundred feet of Sabino Dam. My rocky trail started to run parallel to a road after about 0.4 miles, right by a convenient restroom building, with modern plumbing and everything. The side path to the restroom, it turned out, led toward Sabino Dam itself, which the main trail only looked upon from a distance, it turns out. The trail led past this nice old stone wall, and also some of that nasty orange netting as a temporary fence nearby.

Surprisingly, there was no wall or fence when I reached the actual dam. I could have waded right into the water at the top of it. Of course, this would be a very bad idea, especially in January.

Here's another angle on the dam. That path makes it look as though people actually do go down to the water to wade.

Here's the dam as viewed from the main trail. Can you see it? Perhaps it will help if I do some zooming and cropping on the next shot:

And now you see why I think wading at that spot I photographed earlier would be a bad idea, even in summer. It would be like swimming in the river just above a waterfall! Then again, I've actually swum in waterfalls before - Buttermilk Falls (probably the one outside Ithaca NY) and at least one little waterfall in the Adirondacks somewhere.

After that it was another half mile or so to the end of Bluff Trail, which deadends into Bear Canyon Trail. It was about 4 PM by then, and shadows were getting longer. I love the way the saguaros I photographed along the way were silhouetted beneath a patchwork of little white clouds.

From my Picasa album Sabino Canyon 2009

Here's one more shot for Carly's "Rocks or Stones" theme. I love the way someone placed different colored rocks along the top of this wall when it was built in the 1930s (probably). Were they being artistic, or just having fun?

The Bear Canyon trail at the end was desert scrub and grassland, with (unfortunately) private homes to the south of it, but an excellent view of the mountains to the northwest. I'm not going to show you any more photos in this entry, because I'm overloading the blog as it is, especially for those of you who are still on dial-up. But you may want to check out my Picasa album of the Sabino Canyon day trip for lots more photos of this beautiful place.

Karen