05-15-13

The first place we went yesterday was the Bill Williams  Lookout.

The lookout is just south of Williams, AZ. and on a 9216 ft mountain.
The road to the lookout is one of the best lookout roads that I have ever been on. The road is graded
with a lot of switch backs.

We didn’t even need to use four wheel drive or low range to get to the top.

Along the road were some nice rock outcrops.

We saw a few patches of snow along the road near the top.

At the top there were many towers with communications antenna arrays.

We didn’t climb to the top of the tower.

There was a guy in the lookout tower which kind of surprised me as I thought that the towers were no longer manned since they now use satellites to watch for fires.

The views from the top of the mountain were nice.

We had our new forest service map and the our atlas with us and we wanted to try some of the roads that weren’t on the atlas. 
From the lookout we drove south on Perkinsville Road to forest road 354 where we turned south. 
Shortly after turning onto fr 354 we turned east on 3209. It was not numbered on the atlas but was on the forest service map. This was the beginning of a long loop where we took several trails.
As soon as we turned on to 3209 we had to use Low range to get up the first hill.
Cool!

 

We remained in 4 wheel low for the  the rest of this loop.
Along this trail we saw a few deer. They were to fast to photograph.
We also saw a mob of turkeys.
Patti was able to get a picture of one of them. The rest ran away to fast.

We came to a few trees down across the road.

 

In one place we went through a grove of Aspens that were just beginning to leaf out.

The trail went through several park like sections of the forest.

Patti got a picture of this bovine in one particularly nice meadow.

We slowly continued down the trail.

Patti got some wildflower pictures.

Eventually we stopped for lunch in the shade of a couple of Junipers.

Shortly after lunch we arrived back on forest road 105.
 

This is a main graded road that goes east/west.
We drove west on 105 to 127 where we turned south. After a mile or so we realized that we had been on this roar a few days ago so we turned around and returned to 105 where we continued west. Road 105 ends at the intersection with 354. We followed 354 north to where it turns southwest. Here we turned onto road 746 and followed it northwest. After about a mile we came to a road 57A that was on our atlas but not on the forest service map. It appeared to be a unmaintained or jeep road so of course we took it and headed north toward road 57.
We were not disappointed. The road was pretty rough

and almost disappeared in a couple of spots.

We stopped at one spot to check out a small canyon to the west.

There was a little water in the canyon.

We crossed a small stream at:

 

About a mile past Bear Springs we came to fr 57 where we turned west and shortly arrived back at Perkinsville Road where we headed north back to Williams.

The clouds had been building all day and Patti got a few nice cloud pictures.

 

There was quite a bit of “virga” (rain that doesn’t reach the ground).

We even had a couple of drops on the windshield.

Later in the evening we had a very nice sunset.

Today it it extremely windy so we have decided to stay home.