Here's the list of who went on the hike:
Submission from Kathy Sharp:
The Saturday road trip took less time than we thought. We left Phoenix at 7 a.m. and were at the Tucson St. Mary's Road exit before 8:45 a.m., which was when we were supposed to meet Sam. We were hiking on the French Joe Canyon Trail at 10:19 a.m. The road to the trailhead is just south of Kartchner Caverns on the west side of 90; look for a signed road just after a little concrete railing over a wash. The road requires reasonably high clearance. We only used 4WD to pass through the last wash before the end of the road. We could have easily parked earlier and avoided the wash. Other people had done that.
We didn't see any other hikers on the trail, but there were quite a few birders. People were coming specifically to look for Rufus Warblers, which have been spotted from the trail. Apparently this area is a birder's paradise; half of the bird species in the U.S. are found in the San Pedro River Valley.
We hiked to the dry waterfall described on the AZ Central hiking web page for the canyon. The canyon must be magnificent other times of year. We saw columbine bushes everywhere, but it was too cold for them to be blooming. In fact, we were seeing snow in the shady parts of the trail. The trail is supposedly 2 miles long, but it seemed shorter to us. We climbed a ways up above the waterfall, until the canyon started to look less interesting, and then stopped for lunch.
We finished our hike pretty early, so we decided to go visit some museums at Fort Huachuca, and then we went to the Coronado Memorial and hiked the .4-mile Coronado Peak trail at sunset. There's a 3-mile trail there, too, but we were running out of daylight.
We had a bit of an adventure driving out of the park. A big border patrol chase was going on, and at least a dozen patrol cars were racing around. The effect of the blue and red lights flashing at night in the dust over a hill was kind of neat. It was kind of hard to know what to do, though. We had several patrol cars cross the road in front of us at high speed, but one of the patrols told Bruce and Debby not to stop their car and they radioed the message back to us.
We stayed at the Thunder Mountain Inn in Sierra Vista. Bruce and Debby had arranged good rates for us. We ate at Baxter's, feeling under-dressed, and had a real nice meal. We ate breakfast at the hotel cafe in the morning.
We were on our pre-arranged schedule Sunday morning, but it took longer to drive to Kartchner Caverns from the hotel than we thought. However, since we were supposed to arrive an hour early, we were fine. We left one truck at the French Joe Canyon road exit and all piled into mine so we'd only have to pay $11 to park rather than $20. (In addition, the adult tour tickets, which we had paid for to make tour reservations, were $14 each. The tour size is 16 reserved people and 4 people without reservations.)
We thoroughly enjoyed the cave tour! I will most certainly go back to Kartchner Caverns. Eventually, the Big Room will be open for tours, but the rangers wouldn't even speculate on when that might be.
After the tour, we did a loop hike in the park (2.5 miles?), stopping at the high point to eat our bagels and cookies for lunch. Along the trail we had run into two people who had helped build the trail. One of them told us we couldn't eat anywhere on the trail! This is one of the most ridiculous hiking rules I've ever heard. We suspect the lady was mistaken. We had purposely decided to have our lunch during the hike, and the rangers we spoke to had not mentioned that we couldn't eat. When we entered the park we had received a list of things we could not do, and eating on the trail was not on the list. We made sure we left no trace of our picnic, as usual.
When we finished the hike, we spent some time looking at the nice variety of flowers in the little Hummingbird Garden outside the Visitor Center, and then we decided to drive to and check out the trailhead for a more difficult hike that only starts in the park. A ranger had told us how to get to that trail from the little loop trail we took, but we had found a "Trail Closed to Public" sign at the connecting trail. She thought the trail was over 4 miles one-way (over 8 miles total to go in and out), as well, but the trailhead sign made it sound like the trail was a loop. The ranger had heard that the hike starts out easy and then gets pretty hard at the end.
We had also brought a printout of a GORP web page for San Pedro hikes, but we headed back to Phoenix and were home a little after 5 p.m.
Email from Debby Brown on January, 12, 2000:
The Border Patrol has captured 4,000 people crossing the border in the Douglas/surrounding area in the last four days. This would include the Sierra Vista area and the mess we witnessed. The article says they have been extremely busy.