Tuesday, November 14, 2017

We were supposed to move to Tucson today, but after looking at the temps there, we decided to stay in Willcox another week.  We are 10 degrees cooler than there, so for now, we are staying put.  We had a late start, but went back to the Chiricahuas and only did a 3.3 mile hike with 557 feet elevation.  It wasn't a difficult hike, but we are still working on our stamina.  We had a sighting of 6 coatimundis on the trail, and it made our day!  We had only seen them once before and that was from the other side of the Chiricahuas, coming in from Portal.  We were told to not hike on that side, as the illegals were coming up that valley, so we didn't go back there again.  That is one thing we have to comment on, is that we aren't having to go through a checkpoint after we leave here.  We understand the Border Patrol is using more vehicles for tracking down the drugs coming into the country and there must not be much of the illegal foot traffic, as there used to be.  Now, back to our hike and wonderful wildlife experience.  We had just turned around to return back to the visitor center, and only went a short distance, when Jim sighted the coatimundis on the trail.  We were quiet and slow to approach them, so we didn't scare them away. 

This is a good head shot of the coatimundi, but I was so excited that I didn't get his whole tail.  They have really long toenails and toes for digging for grubs, and other food.

Here is one after he dug a hole, to go after whatever was in there.  You can see how long their tail is.

You can see two coatimundis on the trail.  It gives you some idea of what our trail is like.

This is a view of our trail with the fabulous rock formations across the valley.  Are you tired of seeing these rocks yet?  We might have one more hike in us yet, for this area.  Hiking this trail in the late afternoon is nice, as it's in the shade.  Today we met a couple on the trail, and they are from Plymouth, WI and they are staying in Tucson for a month.  We usually, always stop and chat with whomever we meet.  It gives us a chance to 'catch our breath'!  Tomorrow, we'll have a late posting as we are going geo-caching near Tombstone, and stopping in Benson for Mexican.  The geo-caches we are going to check out, are placed in the form of a tombstone!  Now, remember that they are all 538 feet apart, and there are about 190 caches in all.  We won't get them all done in one day! I doubt if we will get half of them done while we are here.  For you geo-cachers, if you want to check it out, the caches are named after all the people buried in Boot Hill in Tombstone.  The first cache is called, ORMSBY and the cache # is GC6CXNJ.