The hike in Fiddler’s Canyon was really only supposed to be a morning dog walk, but it got more complicated – and more scenic – and so deserves to have a few photos shared. The intention was to walk a few hours before we had a commitment on the north side of town and so we brought our packs but were not necessarily bargaining on bushwacking up the 700 foot canyon walls. Tom had brought we to the canyon last year (when we went up the north side) but I still hadn’t hiked into the canyon along the creek or seen the waterfall. The canyon runs east-west and we were hiking into the sun, which made for some bleached out photos, but hopefully it’s possible to see some of the neat features along the creek bed. It’s also possible to see me doing strange things in order to take photos. Anyway, after we had walked a ways we decided to start ascending into a side canyon, and from there decided to continue up the side wall. The last couple hundred feet included some scrambling but mostly it was moving aside pinyon and juniper as we hiked up the steep canyon. At the top we were rewarded with some pretty great views and a relatively easy descent down the gentler western slope of the mountain.
The second canyon hike was a fantastic jaunt up Ash Creek. Both Terry and Tom had explored this area multiple times before but it was my first time here and so I gorged myself on photos of the stunning basalt and volcanic rock of the canyon ripped into the high desert. We hiked west up the canyon for a couple miles before climbing up an old steep jeep track, crossing a section along the rim and then finding a fire access road that wound through the trees a few miles up to an old dam. Views of the snowy Pine Mountains in the background made it perfect. On the return we descended into the canyon in a different place in order to see petroglyphs, then hiked back through the sloped fields of grass and volcanic rock for another few miles back to the car.
