A Lakeside Hike

We decided at noon to hike along the coast of Bartlett Lake (note you need a $6 Tonto Park pass to get in; the ranger's office was closed so we had to turn back and get it a Circle K 20 miles away). It's always so neat to be driving through all this brown and then see a blue or green lake come into view.

There's a beach-like place, which is really where the lake/reservoir has receded. There are also lots and lots of picnic tables (see on hill below).

Most were filled by Latinos, which made us feel like we were in Puerto Rico again. We had spent months in the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos where we never saw any locals on their beaches, and then we hit Puerto Rico (eventually) and families flocked to the beach with everything but the kitchen sink every weekend.

This lake was surprisingly not crowded. We went the wrong way to the trail first and were treated to a good view of the "beach." Honestly watching the people walk back and forth with their stuff sort of looked like buffalo migrating.

If you go to the right, you can do some minimal walking and find some nice private coves to hang out in. We will definitely do that soon. We'll just pack a small backpack cooler and some camper chairs.

Once we realized we were going the wrong way though, we turned around. It's a pretty large lake, and it too, was surprisingly not all that crowded.



Like the drive, it's so cool to be walking amidst the dry tundra and then run across blooms. I'd never seen a saguaro bloom pink before.



We were the only ones out there, so I started having the weebie jeebies about being attacked by a mountain lion. While I was in the midst of that thinking a jack rabbit jumped out of the bushes right next to us and took off. I had to make sure I hadn't soiled myself, and now Michael could stop pouting because I'd seen one once and he hadn't. We ended up scaring up two on this hike, but they were way too fast to capture on camera. We did capture a blue heron and a buzzard though.



And even better than that, we saw mule deer!  Three of them.



That really made our hike. Which started going sour not too long after that. We'd been hiking for 2 1/2 hours and were starting to get pretty hot (it was 101 degrees). The hike is supposed to be along the water, so we'd been expecting to douse ourselves off occasionally, but the lake was so far away and down cliffs now, that it didn't quite work the way we'd expected.



It was almost like walking in a quarry.

Once the trail started going away from the water, my mind and body started to lose it. I could hear my heart beating, I sort of went deaf, I started getting dizzy. Uh oh. We had water, but it wasn't helping. We turned around and decided to try to get down to the water and cool off.  An oasis. Excellent.









We still had a ways to get back. Seriously, does this look hot? It was!



We still had enough energy to play with a beach ball (two actually) we found along the coastline.



We decided to ignore the trail back, staying along the waterline all the way back. I would have loved to have known what our body temps were at the end of this trek. Jeez. Lesson: We're good in heat, but 2 hours is about our limit, this one was 3 1/2. The trail wasn't really all that tough, but going out at noon once the temps are over 90 is dumb. We still had fun though.