White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Waddell, Arizona.

This week, I was reminded of our hiking club in Arizona in a couple of ways. Yesterday (Saturday, 18 August), I got an email from the folks at MapMyWalk. It was my 5th anniversary of downloading and using the app to help map our hikes. Though I don’t use MapMyWalk for hiking exclusively, the vast majority of miles tracked with the app are in Arizona deserts on hikes, mostly with the Verrado Hiking Club. Among other details, the email pointed out that it’s tracked 1362 miles (2192 km) since I started using the app.

My second reminder came in a text from one of my hiking buddies who mentioned that our club is featured in the August 2018 issue of Main Street, the local community magazine. Not only that but some of the hiking leaders, including myself, are featured on the cover. You can read the article by clicking on the magazine cover image above and navigating to page 6. In the article, the author mentioned the blending of two smaller clubs. I was a leader in one of those clubs, started originally as a physical fitness workout group with the goal of hiking 100 miles in Arizona’s Centennial year. Eventually the gym folded but my wife, Lynn, and I took on the role of arranging hikes on a weekly basis for the small number of original hikers that still got together for weekly hikes.

About the opening photo: One of our favorite hiking trails in the White Tank Mountain Regional Park is the Mesquite Canyon Trail. The trail starts with a good workout climb that rewards the hiker with views of the Sonoran Desert canyons. This photo was captured in March 2017 with my Samsung S7 cell phone. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple, the image must be captured on a mobile device. To get an enlarged, higher resolution view, in most browsers you can simply click on the image.

John Steiner