From Cave to Summit to Arch at Picacho Peak

After visiting The World Famous Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, and a little pause for lunch, we decided to spend our afternoon today climbing a volcanic outcropping right near our campground.

This is a photo of our quarry - ahem, our outcropping:

As we hiked over to it, Kathy spotted an arch in the rocks at the highest end of the formation:

We also spotted this "shar pei" saguaro, just hanging out and shimmying for us at the base of the volcanic stuff:

Eagle-eyed Kathy then spotted a cave, which was at the lower end of the outcropping and right on the route we planned to climb.  As we got close to the cave, she scampered ahead to get a photo inside:

Again eagle-eyed, inside the cave, Kathy spotted this strange black, hardened "goo" which looked like it had oozed down from higher in the rocks.

We wondered:  "Is it dried bat guano?  Some sort of oil or tar?  A rock like black shale or obsidian? We plan to do some further study, but as of now, we're mystified.

Back to our originally-scheduled program, we picked our way over the volcanic boulders and through the scree and the palo verde toward the top of the rock, having to do some minor free-climbing in order to conquer the final rise to the summit.  From atop the highest point of the rock, we could see Picacho Peak in the background, and our VERY TINY RV in the campground to the right:

Now Kathy wanted to go get a closer look at the arch we spotted as we were crossing the desert floor toward the outcropping; so we picked our way down the wall of the steep end of the formation, to try to find a ledge that stuck out far enough for us to peer back at the arch.

Hold it.  Kathy spotted something else she wanted to see first.  Here she is, caressing some rhyolite - or tuff - that, when it was formed as soft volcanic ash, got squeezed out from under a lava flow that oozed and plopped over the ash at some distant time in the millenial past:

What were we doing?  Oh, yes.  Right.  We were trying to get a better view of the arch.  Okay, back on track, we continued picking our way down the rock until we could get out to a view of the arch:

Here's a closer view of the arch, with a cute little orange-and-green-stripped barrel cactus in the foreground.   We couldn't get quite as close as we would have liked, but nevertheless we got close enough to be on a first-name basis with that rocky wonder:

While we had to strategize carefully to find a route up to the top of the formation, we found it pretty easy to pick our way nearly straight down the near side - probably because we could look down at the surface we would be walking on.  We pretty much dropped straight down from the high point, past the arch, down to the desert floor.  A short quarter-mile hike or so across the desert brought us back to our campsite, some ambrosial Gatorade, and the thought of Happy Hour dancing in our heads.