Hike to Wind Cave

Today we decided to do a short, 3.6 mile hike up to Wind Cave on Pass Mountain above our campground, because this would make a nice change of pace between yesterday's and tomorrow's paddles on Saguaro Lake.  It wasextremely windy last night, with a thunderstorm, and the heavy breezes continued this morning, but we thought the breeze wouldn't affect a short hike.  The trail was very crowded because, although today is a weekday, it's many students' Spring Break, and so groups of college students and families were out trying the climb to the cave.

Here's a photo showing the approximate path we took up to the cave:

But, before we start, the obligatory trailhead photo:

Rising from our trailhead, we started to get a view south across the valley east of Phoenix through a desert of saguaro:

Kathy found a friendly, three-fingered friend partway up the trail.

We climbed steadily until we reached exposed, multicolored layers of sandstone and tuff (rhyolite), which you can see clearly on the photo of Pass Mountain at the beginning of this blog entry.  This layer was riddled with caves, arches, hollows and holes:

Once we reached Wind Cave itself, we had an expansive view of the desert below, to the west and south:

We were not alone in the cave, however.  A beehive hung ominously above our heads --

-- and dozens, if not hundreds, of mud swallows made their nests in holes in the cave walls and ceiling.  Some hollows and holes in the cave had enough soil to support some green plants:

Just beyond the cave, up on the western end of Pass Mountain, we could climb to a point to overlook the desert east of us.  Kathy worked her way out there and could see the Superstition Mountains to the southeast of us.  David wasn't sure about venturing out, because this warning sounded ominous:

On the way back down the trail, David spotted an arch and thought, "Why, that looks like my back when I do my Downward Dog!"  And so he did:

Working our way back down the trail, we could see the entire expanse of Usery Mountain Park in the foreground, with our campground (circled in yellow in the photo below), our trailhead (circled in blue), and the route we pedaled on our trail bikes the other day (marked in red):

This was a fitting last hike here at Usery because it gave us a wonderful overview of our stay here.  This week is proving to be an active and fulfilling one.  To top it all off, as we walked into our rig just after the hike, we had a message from our friends Duane and Jean, asking if we'd like to meet for lunch in Mesa.  "Why, of course!"  And off we went.