Mesa, AZ - The Training Hike

As you all know, Gary and I like to hike. That’s one of the reasons we’re in Arizona, there is a wealth of places to hike around here. You get tired of hiking in one mountain range, try another. You want to hike in piney-top mountains, hike over there, you want to hike in Sonoran desert, hike over here. There are even some hikes around lakes. Lakes? Lakes? In Arizona? Sure and we’ll hike around some while we’re here.

Meanwhile, near Mesa is a park called Usery Mt. Park with a nice 7.1 mile trail going over a neat pass from which you can see Phoenix lost in haze on one side, the 4 Peaks on another and the Superstition Mountains across the way. We hiked it twice last year, once clockwise and once counterclockwise. Since we’re woefully out of shape for hiking (although we’re in great shape for walking around neighborhoods in Des Moines - as long as it’s flat) we decided we needed a few training hikes before we try anything difficult. Usery Mt. would fill that void.

The park is quintessential Arizona, plenty of ocotillo, saguaros, bundles of jumping cholla just waiting for an unwary hiker to pass by, soaring craggy rocky peaks and abundant views. In the picture below, you can see the slender branches of the ocotillo with the small red flowers at their tips, the bushy, light green, almost white chollas scattered around and the stately saguaros holding forth in the background.

But, hey, there is also some history about the area. Long ago, before suburbs, there were many individual homesteads in the area and today many of the trails are named after the homesteaders. The most famous, or possibly the most infamous, of these homesteaders in the 1870’s and early 1880’s was named ‘King’ Usery. Times were not easy on the ranges in Arizona and King and a friend of his Bill Blevins held up a stagecoach near Globe, AZ, and took 2 bars of gold. This earned them 7 years in the Yuma Territorial Prison. When he got out he was arrested as a horse thief. But he left his mark and a local park was named after him and a trail was named after Blevins. Well, hey, you can’t name everything after a President or a philanthropist. Equal time to crooks.

We enjoyed the hike although near the end it was painfully obvious that I had been neighborhood walking rather than mountain hiking recently. At least it was a good training hike.

7.5 1127’