Rich was feeling almost completely normal this morning after the scorpion encounter! We talked over some ideas for the day’s activities while we ate the remaining sticky hoppy pudding for breakfast with some cranberry juice. (Btw the pudding was excellent cold, and very different from when it was served hot in the cast iron pan. It was delicious both ways but I wasn’t expecting it to be so good when cold. Sweet and very dense, most, chewy.
We decided to start at the visitors center at North Mountain Park. It’s about a 20 minute drive from the motel and traffic was pretty light. We spent a few minutes getting oriented inside the visitors center, which seemed very nice and I would have loved to look around more, but it was already getting hot so we wanted to start our hike as soon as possible. The women at the desk were pretty helpful. Rich happened to mention the scorpion sting and the one woman who lives in Phoenix has them in her house frequently and still had never been stung.
We began by hiking the Christiansen Trail, a multi use trail that forms the backbone of this trail system. Many of the other trails in North Mountain and Phoenix Mountains Preserve branch off of the Christiansen, #100. We were originally thinking about hiking some of North Mountain itself but err figured with the triple digit heat we should probably keep to the more level trails and maybe just do a longer distance.
We followed the #100 to its intersection with #306 which we then took in a nice loop around back to the visitors center. In all it was a 3.2 Mike hike. This is a fantastic park! We saw desert quails in a wash, first two, then two more, then maybe half a dozen more, we watched and waited and heard their goofy calls. We looped around and found a shady spot in the wash they had just vacated, and waited and watched some more while we had a snack and drank our 25-cent Gatorade from the visitors center.
All along the way we had been noticing the frequent Ferocactuses. One hillside features a dense covering of them! I mention to rich something I had been thinking about fit a while - where are all the baby Ferocactuses??? I hadn’t seen one smaller than a basketball yet I wad sure they had to be around somewhere. Our assumption is that they take advantage of nurse plants just like saguaros do, so we spent a good portion of the hike looking inside the palo verde trees and creosote bushes to see if err could find any. We’re quite sure nite that they do use nurse plants, but still the smallest one we found was about the size of a jumbo grapefruit. Still not sure where the seedlings and younger juveniles are. Also on the second half of our loop, we encountered a family of quails in a wash, which Rich had mentioned earlier that he’s seen before. So cute! There were about 6 babies that all flew off to the nearest shrub when we got too close. It was significantly hotter in the washes where there wad no air movement than up on the trail, in the open.
The trail was very quiet and peaceful today. Only four hikers/runners and one mountain biker passed us. The first part of the trail led us through saguaro flats with the mountains riding all around us on the distance. The second part featured even more of the saguaros and barrels (Ferocactus) as well as cholla, which we hadn’t seen on three first half. The sun was sizzling hit but there wad a breeze the entire time which made the hike extremely pleasant (almost no elevation gain/loss helped with that too) despite triple digit temperatures.
It was still quite early so we decided to take a drive to the other nearby park, Phoenix Mountains Preserve. We knew we wouldn’t be hiking more today but wanted to check out the trails for next time. Even this area of the park, featuring the popular Piestewa Peak (new name for Squaw Peak) wasn’t too busy today, probably because it was Thursday and hot. We drove to the end of Squaw Peak Drive and found quite a few interesting trails along the way, including Nature Trail #304 that looks quite easy and doable for a hot day. But we weren’t prepared to do another hike today.
It turned out that we were both thinking about pizza again, so we looked for another nearby Grimaldi’s location since we enjoyed the one in Tucson so much. It was still very early in the afternoon, though, so I took a quick look to see what else might be nearby and found that the Wrigley mansion was only a mile away, and they give tours. One tour was to start in 20 minutes, at 2:00.
We went to the mansion which is this beautifully bizarre mansion on a hill in the Biltmore area basically overlooking all of Phoenix. The views are insane! The mansion was built between 1929-1931 by William Wrigley, founder of the chewing gum company. It also hosts a restaurant now, Geordie’s, named for Geordie Hormel who bought the house in 1992 and whose wife is now the owner.
We decided to take the tour. It was $15 so a bit expensive but very interesting. The were only two other people on the tour. Our guide was new and a bit goofy but she did a good job for someone who is obviously not a natural speaker. Some of the insights into Wrigley and his fancy were really interesting as were the painted ceilings and original chandeliers (I liked the one in his wife Ada’s room with amethyst crystals). Pretty amazing also were the balconies and hallways everywhere connecting the different rooms, as well as the alcoves, and bathrooms with separate tubs and showers.
Our next and final stop was for pizza at another Grimaldi’s location, this one in Scottsdale. Pretty rare for us to go to (basically) the same place twice, especially a chain, while on a vacation like this! But after all of our adventures, we looked at each other in the car and both said “Pizza???!” which sealed the deal. The pizza at this Grimaldi’s location was just as tasty as last week. If they’re this consistent over time, they get my vote for best pizza chain by a mile! We got one margherita pizza again and one white, but this time we ordered the white with onions and no garlic. I forgot to make a note of which beer Rich ordered, but I had the Citrudelic. We couldn’t resist a cannoli for dessert, half of which we brought home to have later, along with three slices of pizza for tomorrow’s breakfast.