But I Digress… as this is being published on the last day of March, I want to take a moment to thank all of you who have followed this humble journal for the last six years. It was March 18, 2013 when my first blog post appeared here at Journeys With Johnbo. Since then, I’ve published just under 850 entries. In the next few months, we’ve got lots more travels to share including some new international stops we will be gathering starting this week on a new cruise adventure. Stay Tuned for More! Now, on to this week’s Cellpic Sunday post…

One of my favorite parks is in Cave Creek, the Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area is one of the newest Maricopa County Regional Park additions. The trails wander through the riparian area along Cave Creek and into the mountains, for those who wish, you can leave the park and continue on trails that go into the Tonto National Forest. On this day, we hiked the Spur Cross Trail to the Tortuga Trail and then on to the Dragonfly Trail. The views along the trails are always a treat.

About the photo: This capture was at the upper level of the Tortuga Trail on the flat meadow, this year green with all the winter rain. In the background on the left of this two-image panorama is Elephant Mountain, a favorite visit for those wanting to hike a more challenging trail. I used my Samsung S7 Cellphone that day and you will probably see other Cellpic Sunday images from the captures I made that day. The two images for this photo were merged using Lightroom and the photo processing completed in both Lightroom and Luminar 2018.

John Steiner

Over the years, one of my favorite places to hike is the Spur Cross Ranch near the community of Cave Creek. Though it’s about an hour’s drive from our house in Buckeye, we find ourselves hiking there at least a couple of times each year. in wetter years, Cottonwood Creek flows freely through the park and even in dry years, there is always some flow from the spring-fed stream. The abundant water makes the conservation area home for coyotes, mule deer, and javelina. The many trails in the park invite hikers to explore. History written on the rocks exposes the site as a home to almost 90 archeological sites that were residences of the Hohokam Indians and a careful eye might just spot some of the written historical signs.

About the photo: This image was captured some years ago during my first hike in the park. It was captured on my first Smartphone, a Samsung S3. I used Lightroom, Luminar 18 and Aurora 2019 to process the image. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple, the image must be captured on a mobile device.

I was introduced to Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area in late 2012. I have seen the former dude ranch become a part of the Maricopa County Parks System as the 2154 acres of Sonoran Desert joined the other parks in the Regional Parks System. The park has an interesting history, the dude ranch site was eventually all but stripped of the buildings and the park is returning to the natural desert from which it came. The view above is from the Spur Cross Trail and is a shot of appropriately named Elephant Mountain.

Our hiking club was introduced to Ranger Kevin in previous hikes. Our last hike with Kevin can be found here. Much can be learned by a Ranger-led hike. I recommend checking a location’s website to see if there are hikes where rangers accompany the hikers and describe points of interest along the way. Don’t expect these hikes to be fitness hikes. The goal is education, not calorie burn. In the photo above, Ranger Kevin points out that the unique indents on the rock are actually very early Native American petroglyphs. Funny, I’d have just guessed it was some kid playing with a hammer and a rock. Shows you what I know, and what I learned.

The photo above is of a more typical (and more recent in historical time) example of a petroglyph. Native Americans left these signs of their presence throughout the Valley of the Sun. Many of the parks feature areas with these rock drawings.

The conservation area features some beautiful scenery so while we listened to Ranger Kevin, it was easy to capture some images of the nearby mountains.

Probably the best advantage of a ranger-led hike, however, is the ability to bypass signs like the one above. This trail is off-limits to hikers unless accompanied by a ranger as it leads to some archeological sites. There are several Native American residential clusters in the area, some have been surveyed quite thoroughly for artifacts while others still remain relatively untouched. We visited both types of sites on our hike.

They may look like they are just piles of rocks, but stand back a bit and you can see they are the remnants of rock walls that surrounded living areas. The area in the above photo has been surveyed for artifacts, where the relatively untouched area has pieces of broken pottery and other artifacts just “laying around.” Unfortunately for historians, in the days when this property was a dude ranch, the owners told guests about the Indian souvenirs that could be found in the hills. I’m sure many items of historical import went home or were damaged or destroyed by those souvenir hunters.

One of my favorite images from this hike is this view of a saguaro cactus that appears to want to give everyone a hug as they walk underneath its outstretched arm. The gallery of images below features more of the views discovered on our archeology hike. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

This year, the desert is awash with green. A layer of green grass is visible in the normally brown desert floor. The Phoenix metro has seen a lot of rain this winter. I am hoping I won’t be back in Fargo before what is sure to be a banner wildflower season. Recently our hiking club visited Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area. Formerly the home of a dude ranch, the area is now a reserve where Cave Creek winds its way in a southerly path. One of the prominent peaks in Cave Creek is Elephant Mountain, as anyone with even a bit of imagination can probably note in the image above.

Spur Cross Trail was our  trail for the day, and it was a Ranger-led hike. The trail crosses the creek a couple of times, and the plank bridges hadn’t yet been set out. The ranger and a few others, myself included, stepped across the rocks and found the plank bridges in their makeshift storage area slightly off the trail and hidden. We carried them out and put them down so the rest of the hikers wouldn’t have to rock hop across the stream. I heard from the Spur Cross Ranch Facebook page that recent rain storm ended up washing these planks down the creek. I don’t know if they were ever found.

The creek has water in it all year, though in the hot summer months, it flows underground. A couple of years ago, we visited Spur Cross Ranch, documented here, and we enjoyed an even fuller Cave Creek than it was on this visit. I brought along my best camera, the Nikon D500 in the hopes that I might spot some wildlife. I haven’t had much of a chance to capture some 3-image high dynamic range photos (HDR), and I thought this would be a good chance to do so. The ranger-led part of the tour was a bonus as we learned a lot about the history of the park and even were treated to an off-trail detour to visit one of the petroglyph rocks.

One of our sharp-eyed hikers spotted a Harris Hawk sitting on the top of a saguaro cactus at some distance from us. I aimed my zoom lens in his direction and snapped the first photo. Only a moment later, the hawk decided to take flight. As it turned out, the still shot of the hawk was not in focus when the shutter snapped. Fortunately, as the hawk lifted off, the auto-focus on the camera locked on to the hawk and I captured the image above.

In the shade of a giant saguaro, a rock jutted out from the terrain. The top of the rock had a V-shaped groove worn in it. The ranger told us that this rock had been used to grind food for the ancient ones, the Hohokam, who lived in the Phoenix valley for several centuries before mysteriously disappearing sometime around the 15th or 16th century. The gallery of images below features the petroglyph rock I mentioned earlier. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

It’s October and the North Dakota chill is starting to set in. Visions of desert views and warm breezes are dancing in my head. For this week’s Cellpic Sunday, I looked through my cellpic image collection and discovered a collection of images captured in March on one of the trails in the Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area. You can read more about the conservation area in a post from 2015 here.

One of my favorite parks, Spur Cross Ranch is about a 45-minute drive from our home in Buckeye. We will be sure to visit there again sometime in the next few months. When this post publishes, it will be another two weeks before we head south to Buckeye. As I will be travelling on Civil Air Patrol business next weekend, I am posting this image on October 23, a week early to auto-publish on the 30th.

About the photo: This image was captured on a Samsung S6 cellphone and edited on an iPad. For the techie types, the camera was in automatic mode and it selected f/1.9, 1/2300 sec. ISO-40. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple. The image must be captured and edited on a mobile device.

John Steiner