Jo Ann, Dave, Patti and I met Suzanne and Roy in front of their RV park just south of Florence, AZ. From there we went north to the Shell/76 station. Union oil must have bought out Shell because we have seen several Shell stations that have been changing over to 76 stations.
Anyway we topped off the fuel tanks in the jeeps and headed north through Florence and turned east on Price Road.
There is a lot of farm land along Price Road.
The road follows the Gila River for a ways. After all the rain we have had there is actually
water flowing in the river. We stopped to get a picture of it at a place where there is a low dam with some gates.
I am not sure if the gates are for power generation or irrigation.
Into the mountains.
The road is heading into these rugged mountains.
There are several ranches along the road. You can see the roof of one of the ranch houses in the mid ground.
We are traveling through the Saguaro forest as we drive along the road.
As we drove along we saw this Coopers Hawk sitting on the top of a Saguaro.
As we get closer to the mountains the road name changes to N Box Canyon Road
The sides of the canyon get closer to the road.
The slot canyon.
We enter a narrow slot canyon.
There are some large rocks that we have to go over along the way. They were pretty easy to get over.
We stopped in the canyon to check out the walls. The recent rains have made the moss on the rocks really stand out.
The canyon widened out for a little ways and the trail got a little rockier.
Then the canyon closed in again.
Eventually we cleared the canyon and the trail got better.
Lunch at the Stage depot.
We continued north and stopped at an old stage depot for lunch.
There were a lot of ATV’s coming and going while we had lunch so we waited for the crowd to clear to take pictures of the old building.
The bypass.
After lunch we continued along the trail. We came to a place where there was a very large step that we didn’t want to attempt to climb so we went looking for a bypass.
We went up one wash
but it was going in the wrong direction so we turned around and tried an different approach following a trail that climbed the mountain. The trail was pretty steep and rutted but we were able to get up it.
Along the trail we encountered some Arizona Moose.
We eventually got high enough on the mountain that we could see the main trail below us.
There was a rough trail going down that looked like it would intersect with the main trail so we decided to try it.
It was a bit rough but we eventually made it to the main trail and continued our trip north.
Granny’s Pass.
At one point we came to Granny’s Pass. Here there were some monuments to ATV’ers who had passed away.
From the pass we could see the Superstition Mountains and the Weavers Needle in the distance.
Heading home and a Mexican dinner.
After a couple of hours winding through the mountains we came to highway 60 and headed back to Florence where we stopped to have a Mexican dinner at the LB Cantina.
The food here was better than what we had in Coolidge on Saturday.
It was a very good ride with lots of beautiful scenery.
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