Today we are in a pretty remote part of southeastern Arizona at Chiricahua National Monument.
It's famous for its stone hoodoos, and was created as a national monument in 1924 to
protect its rhyolite rock pinnacles.
And some of them are apparently hundreds of feet tall and balanced on pretty narrow platforms.
I'm excited to see this.
We're gonna do the scenic drive which is eight miles long, and then do a hike near the top.
Sounds good.
In this episode, we visit Chiricahua, see the sights along Bonita Canyon Drive, and
hike the Echo Canyon Trail to see grottos and stunning rock pinnacles.
Bonita Canyon is the only campground within the national monument.
It has 25 sites with a max vehicle length of 29 feet and no hookups.
This would be the perfect place to be right in the middle of it all.
Be aware though that there is a 24 foot length restriction on the rest of the park road beyond
the campground.
So it says, that millions of years ago the volcanic bedrock in this area was uplifted,
and as the mountains rose they tilted slightly and caused cracks called joints in the rocks.
And then over time as the water penetrated those cracks and eroded away, it left you
with these amazing pinnacles and rock formations.
There's at least one up there that you can see has cracked and fallen.
They're so striking.
They are so beautiful.
So we're still driving up and we see this other pull out here on the side, and I look
over at the sign and it says Sea Captain.
I'm like okay great let's stop and we'll go take a look.
I get out of the truck and walk over here, and someone has written in Horse so it says
Sea Horse Captain.
Tell us if you think it actually looks like it.
Echo Canyon is our hike today.
We are going to do the Loop Trail.
If you want you can just go half a mile out and back to the grottos, which is one of the
big milestones on the hike.
I'm really excited about that.
But we are going to do the loop.
We're going to connect Echo Canyon to the Hailstone Trail to the Ed Riggs trail.
Those three trails will form a loop, 3.3 miles in total.
Let's do it.
There are over 20 miles of hiking trails in this park.
Many of them are laid out so that you can hike a different loop depending on what sites
you'd like to see and how far you'd like to go.
Some of the more notable hikes are the Heart of Rocks, Echo Canyon, and the Natural Bridge
Trails.
Check this out.
I mean this is a good example of just these little pedestal bases some of these things
have.
And it just gets worn worn away.
Can I have a snack?
The overlooks here are just stunning on the way down this trail.
And we're making slow progress, but it's worth it.
And here we have all the stone hoodoos in the background.
They just look like little people, little soldiers, all standing on the hillside.
Don't they?
Yeah they do.
So now I think we're going to walk through some taller pinnacles here.
I'm looking forward to that.
We've made it to the start of the grottos.
They're just around the bend.
Here we go.
All right climbing up.
Wow.
It is quite the view from the top of the grottoes here.
Now I think it's time to continue on down the trail and see if we can get down into
that Echo Canyon.
This is where the trail turns and we start heading down into the canyon.
We had a little slip on the trail.
All this loose sandy stuff.
Little man slipped.
I think he's okay though.
We'll keep going.
You ready?
I know you can do it.
Stand up.
I know you can do it.
Everybody's going again.
You got to kind of embrace these times when everybody seems to have energy and just keeps
headed down the trail because the next step will probably be another snack break.
We just made it around a bend down here and we finally figured out why they call it Echo
Canyon.
Echo!
Oh!
Go go!
It's in every direction.
Echo-go-go!
Now we're walking through this fissure in the rock.
And it's pretty neat, just between one slab and another.
Now we are down below.
According to this we've made it 1.6 miles.
Let's look at this sign over here, see how far we have to go.
And now we're on the second trail, Hailstone Trail, which means we have 1.8 miles to go
back to parking.
We're not even halfway.
All right, we can do this.
We can do this.
So we've made it to the third trail, the Ed Riggs Trail.
That means we only have 0.9 miles to go, but it starts going up.
We feel like this hike has just felt longer than we expected.
I feel like we've been on this hike all day and we pretty much have.
I think this was also a little bit longer of a hike than we've done with the kids in
the past.
And on some of our other adventures they did really well, and sometimes you just go out
and things go really well and it's great and then sometimes they don't.
I wouldn't call today a loss.
It's just been a little harder than some of the other ones.
And so that's why we're just feeling like we're kind of dragging a little bit.
So we will see you all back up at the top.
So we made it back to the truck.
Kids are all loaded up.
That was long.
That felt like a feat.
Yes.
Like an accomplishment, not just for them, but for us.
We are gonna wrap it up, show you a quick pan, at Massai Point, and then we're gonna
head home.
It's been a great day.
Thanks for joining us.
We hope you enjoyed this video and that you check back next week.
If you like what you saw, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing.
See you soon.
There's a fire mountain.
Fire mountain?
What's a fire mountain?
You gotta keep this down.
We're always thankful that Kevin carries all our
stuff.
Papa the pack mule. Echo. Echo. Oh. Ahwooo!
Slowly but surely we're making it back.
I've resorted to singing silly songs.
I'll spare you.