Goomz Goes West

A girl and her Goomy go outside (on purpose!) to explore the best of the American West. All photos are taken by me. 

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Wave Cave out of the Peralta Trail is a notoriously undermarked trail leading up to a very Instagrammable rock formation (yoga and/or surfing poses optional). Having hiked it once before, sans Goomz, I knew to ignore every branching path before the anti-motorized vehicle gate and then, when in doubt, to stay left. The cairns along the trail were entirely decorative, but someone had sharpied a very helpful arrow onto a post, and laid out another arrow with rocks from the trail.

Goomz noticed some white fuzzy stuff on the prickly pear cactus. He thought it was fungus. I had once thought it was fungus too, but a few months ago I learned that the white fuzz on prickly pear cactus is actually a protective sort of soft coating for the cochineal beetle. The cochineal beetle is an important source of red dye! But yes, they do die in the harvesting processing.

The last half hour up to Wave Cave can be grueling. Not one person on the trail did it without stopping. Goomz tucked himself in my backpack for the climb, so he had plenty of energy to bounce around Wave Cave when we finally got to the top. 

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On the way back from the Grand Canyon, we stopped to play in the snow. Goomz saw a little bit of snow around the treeline on the hike up to Sky Pond last summer, but this was fresh(er).  And best of all, Goomz made a weird tiny snow friend! 

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Goomz finally got to see the Grand Canyon! I took him to Mary Colter’s Desert View watchtower and told him that when I rafted the river this past summer, I could see the watchtower from the base of the canyon. 

These are his favorite photos from my trip down the river. My first morning waking up in the Grand Canyon, stops along tributaries and caverns carved by the water over time, day hikes and drifting afternoons.

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Goomz and I will be doing our next few hikes in the Superstition Wilderness and Lost Dutchman State Park. Many hikes in the area begin with an unshaded gradual hike upward to something amazing. Goomz and I woke before dawn so we could get going while it was still cool.

Goomz was allowed to touch prickly pear, saguaro, and ocotillo, but never jumping cholla. The rule works pretty well for curious humans, too.

The ‘hieroglyphs’ on the basalt are petroglyphs created by the Hohokam people, though some are the result of more recent vandalism. 

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The trail at Watson Lake in Prescott isn’t so much a trail as your best impression of a mountain goat. The granite dells can be seen from the highway, which made the drive in very exciting for Goomz. 

The trail continues past the lake into a canyon, but we brought lunch, and a book, and it was just such a nice day... 

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Water levels were kind of high today at Tonto Natural Bridge State Park. Which is great for Arizona, but most of the trails were closed. (Yes, it’s posted on the website. No, I did not check the website.) So all photos except for Waterfall Trail are from a previous trip - a trip without Goomz! He got to see the natural bridge, though, don’t worry. 

This is the largest natural travertine arch in the world, according to Wikipedia. Gowan Trail has a few short switchbacks but leads to the far side of the bridge, to a viewing platform. Looking up at the bridge is like looking up into the vault of a Gothic cathedral. When the water’s lower, Pine Creek Trail is an incredibly fun half mile scramble that lets you get right under the bridge. 

Don’t be sad like Goomz! Check the park website before going on a hike!

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Ever since I found an online review for Lake Mary that read “it’s just a lake” and gave it two stars, I’ve loved reading bad reviews for this lake. Upper Lake Mary, like the rest of Arizona and much of the American West, is having a few problems with its water level (the photo of the ‘meadow’ is Lower Lake Mary). That doesn’t take away from its popularity. 

Goomz and I stuck to the west side of the lake, which is free from the boats and jet-skiers that make Upper Lake Mary a little noisy. Sometimes you don’t need a hike. You need a place to sit. Despite the muddy water, we did just that. We sat, and watched other people fail at skipping stones, met the very best dogs, and enjoyed the afternoon.

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Video of a spatter cone on Lava Flow Trail at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, featuring Goomz!

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We pulled over at A’a Trail, then headed up Lenox Crater Trail to get a good view of the gentle sloping crater and Mount Elden. 

Lenox Crater Trail is rated ‘strenuous’ by the official monument signage. I have trouble with strenuous hikes. While this trail has the sharpest elevation gain in the monument, I think I would have needed to wear shoes without traction and leave my water in the car and attempt it in early afternoon in the dead of summer to earn that ‘strenuous’ rating. So I had plenty of energy left over to get Goomz over to the Bonito Vista and around the unpaved but well-maintained Lava Flow Trail. 

Photos do Sunset Crater few favors. Even though I could still see the road from most points on the trails and I was far from alone, there were moments where I heard absolutely nothing. That silence and the stark, black landscape... absolutely worth it.

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Turns out Aspen Corner is where everybody in Flagstaff goes on a Sunday afternoon to take photos of each other: there are ten people in frame of the first photo, behind the trees. So I decided to do a Western-autumn-glamour photoshoot with Goomz. Artistically stacked dead wood, rusted barbed wire, aspen leaves. All we needed was something pumpkin-flavored.

We did get some wandering accomplished in between striking all those poses. The path through the aspens that starts at the parking ‘lot’ on the shoulder opens up into a beautiful mountain meadow with a small pond. It gets a little hot out there without the tree cover, so if you can’t make someone else do all the walking for you like Goomz here, bring a hat.

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I didn’t bring the right shoes for Lava River Cave. Goomz would be perfectly fine, but he can’t wear my headlamp or turn it on and off, so we decided to drive up to the Snowbowl (sans snow) to hike Kachina Trail 150, my new favorite hike in Flagstaff. 

This trail’s a bit long, so Goomz had an absolute blast riding in the backpack except for breaks. It slopes down from the Kachina Trailhead parking lot and makes you take on the uphill on the way back. It’s also easy to find yourself on a side trail - I spoke to two different hiking parties who were either a bit lost or well aware they were on their way to being lost.

Aspens, ferns, cloud cover, chilly air: four checks on a checklist I didn’t know I had. We came a little too early for fall aspen colors, so maybe we’ll come up again in a few weeks.

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Buffalo Park was my first return to the mountains when I moved to Arizona from Los Angeles. The smell of the pines and the grasses baking in the sun, the wildflowers, the wind, the dry clean cool on my skin - I felt like I was finally letting out a breath I’d been holding in for years.

This time of year, yellow-blooming rabbitbrush is everywhere in Flagstaff. Buffalo Park is also quite special with its ‘advanced challenge course’ for people who need a little more out of their trip to the park than just a pleasant later afternoon walk. People like the after work workout crowd, and people like Goomz. He crushed the vertical ladder! With just a little help with the vertical part from... guess who?

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Goomz and I are in Flagstaff for a bit. The Elden Lookout Trailhead is a great access point for the Mt. Elden and Dry Lake Hills trail system, so I decided on the popular Fatmans Loop for a nice warmup hike before we tackled some of the longer excursions we planned. 

So here’s where I went wrong. The relatively flat trail made me knock back the miles much faster than I’m used to and I overestimated the scale of the map, so while I thought I was taking us around Fatmans Loop, I actually tacked on what I’m pretty sure was Christmas Tree Trail for quite some time before I caught on to what happened. 

The southern end of the Elden Lookout area is a very interesting transitional area with succulents and oak trees intermingling with various evergreens, including my Arizona favorite, alligator juniper. Alligator junipers are named for their scaly, dare I say alligator-like, bark. 

Flagstaff is a great home base if you don’t really want to pick just one type of hiking. While we’re here, we’ll be tackling mountainside aspen groves, lakes, and lava flows!

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Goomz was the perfect hiking companion, but I ended up not putting up the rest of our San Diego posts while we were still there for... no real reason, really?

Anyways, we had a heck of a good time at Cabrillo National Monument, even if we had a better tide pool experience at Torrey Pines (did we come too early? Too late?) I’m going to need to sneak him into an aquarium one of these days.

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Goomz was the perfect hiking companion, but I ended up not putting up the rest of our San Diego posts while we were still there for... no real reason, really?

So I told him, “Hey, there’s this place called Sunset Cliffs that’s just downright incredible at sunset. Let’s go there at eight-thirty in the morning.”

I’m a big fan of San Diego’s misty mornings. They trick me into thinking it’s cooler than it really is. We had a lovely if somewhat humid morning walking along the Point Loma peninsula. Goomz might be gooey, but I didn’t have the right footwear to go for the sea cave. We’ll just have to come back!

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Goomz and I are in San Diego for the next few days, and it’s hot. It’s a muggy, briny, draining heat that makes you just want to set up camp on the beach and never move. So we ditched all our elaborate canyon, city-view hiking plans and went to go play in the water.

We took a beautiful, misty drive up to the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. Many of the trailheads are up on top of the cliff. To make the hike a bit more of a workout, I parked at the bottom and walked the road up to the trailhead. 

I love weirdly eroded rocks. (Who doesn’t?) When I moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, it was these eroded sandstone formations that made me excited to explore California. This sandstone, and the coastal sage and the smell of the sea on the wind: perfect morning. 

The banded cliffs down at the beach are famously spectacular once the sun’s on them, but we were working on a morning exploration schedule. Goomz has never been to the beach, and he was trying to get a good spot on the rocks when he saw the first crab. The first of hundreds. I feel like his expectations for beach wildlife are going to be unrealistically high now.

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Goomz was so happy to go hiking again, I couldn’t break his little gooey heart. I had to tell him what we were getting into. I sat him down and I said, “Goomz. We’re gonna have to get up really early.”

Big deal. We did that in the Rocky Mountains.

“It’s gonna be hot. Like really hot. And also weirdly humid. And it’s a city hike, so there’s gonna be lots of other people. And uh... bikers. Biking’s a thing in Phoenix.”

Phoenix retains a lot of heat at night due to the heat island effect (hello, vague memories of science class!) Many people hike here every day, no matter how hot it gets, and South Mountain is one of the more popular areas to do just that. 

My favorite thing I’ve seen on the Hidden Valley Trail at South Mountain was a lady walking her cockatoo, but the trail’s great, too. We started on Mormon Trail and got most of the elevation out of the way before sunrise. There’s a couple of outlooks over downtown, and good views of the Four Peaks (of beer, Arizona license plate, and being four impressive-looking peaks fame.)

We took a brief diversion onto National Trail to get a better view of the cloudy sunrise, and on the way back, we found this uprooted barrel cactus. 

After that, we doubled back and headed over to the Hidden Valley Tunnel. Goomz had fun going up the dry waterfall above the tunnel. The rock’s become quite slick with the amount of people who have clambered over it. The trail then led us up and through a very narrow space between boulders: Fat Man’s Pass. After that, the loop connected back to Mormon Trail.

It wasn’t until we got to the trailhead that I realized how much Goomz had been mucking around in the dust. “You need a bath,” I told him. After that hike, he was more than happy to hear that.