Pay No Attention To That Sign.

Seeing as this could possibly be our last weekend in the desert, we decided to take a trip up the nearby mountain. We ignored the sign telling us our car must have four-wheel drive past this point and began our journey up the winding (and I mean curves til you're sick in the stomach winding) road. The first fifteen miles took us through rocky hillsides covered in saguaros and tiny shrubbery. It was pretty, but it wasn't breathtaking. As we drove up and up, we noticed something on the cars coming down the other way - some of them had mounds of snow hitchhiking on their vehicles. A few more miles and we started seeing snow on the ground where the sun hadn't touched it yet. Then that little bit of snow started to cover the trees, and soon even the ground in the sun had snow on it. We had seen a bit of water on the roadway earlier (lucky for us, it had rained slightly the night before), but now we started to see something else on the ground.


Water that had melted from residual ice or snow (after they paved the roads early this morning) was evaporating into the cold mountain air and turning into mist. We were literally driving through clouds, or at least the very early beginnings of clouds. Clouds! You can imagine how excited I was when H. rolled down the windows and we breathed in that incredible fresh, pine-scented air.

There were a few icy patches that made me hold my breath as we drove through them, but H. was such a pro and got us through everything safely. I still don't understand the drivers that insisted on going much too fast around these steep curves. Thank goodness there were allotted spaces for drivers to pull over and let the jackwagon behind them pass. Sometimes, you just gotta let them learn their lessons.

One of the few straight portions of the roadway.

Gorgeous snow-covered trees.

Some of the trees were smaller than you would think for living on a mountain, but that's because they're relatively new. A wildfire back in 2003 burned about 84,000 acres of land and destroyed around 300 homes within a month. Most of the hillside is filled in with new trees, but up close you can clearly pick out all of the dead tree trunks.

Clouds rolling over the mountainside. 

The highest that we drove was 8200 feet up, and that's where we found the little town I read about online. I was so excited to finally get there, but as we drove around we saw that everything was closed. H. said I should have researched this place more, but it's not like they have a website. Most of the information is from online tour guides and such, and those sites don't exactly post hours of operation. We didn't visit the gift/craft shop, the mountaintop restaurant with a ghostly background story, or the famed cookie shop that sells ginormous cookies and radical flavors of fudge. Sad times for Chuck. I had also planned for us to take a one hour ski lift ride (half an hour up, half an hour down, and we'd get to see the rest of the landscape and maybe even some critters), but I wasn't sure I could spend an hour in the forty degree weather with just jeans and a shirt and my Flames hoodie. We did stop for a lunch break and take in the scenery, though.

Just waiting for the zombies to come storming out.

The drive down the mountain was a little less intriguing. With the mystery of what our destination looks like solved, it almost felt like we'd driven this road a hundred times. There was an interesting sight when we approached the icy patches on the road. We saw a car off on the shoulder with its front bumper (and headlights and nose) missing - we think it slid, crossed over into our lane and hit the guardrail with such force that it shattered the front of the car. The driver must have moved over to the shoulder and called for help, allowing the three passengers to walk around the rubble to look for anything worth saving. Poor guys, but they must've been going pretty fast to manage that wreck.

Watch out for bears playing tag. 

Since I can't stop thinking about that cookie shop, I'm gonna make me a cookie pie of my own. Hope your Saturday is almost as cool as ours.