I can't find Christa's photos of the Mazatal Wilderness, northeast of Phoenix, so I am substituting these cards. Because of my back injury I rarely carried a camera -- I was very concerned with weight. Only when my wife accompanied me did I take photos. My big adventure here was a 16-mile day hike around Mazatal Peak, commencing on the Barnhardt Trail. Christa and I did an out-and-return hike half-way up the same trail, to the west face of Mazatal peak, in snow. I also hiked the Mazatal Divide Trail from the North, but most of my hikes were up the shorter Deer Creek trail, about ten miles south of Barnhardt. Deer Creek was the the prettiest hike within 70 minutes of Phoenix, but now it is a near-wasteland due to fire and rain-erosion.

This map doesn't exactly show a lot of detail, but it does give a sense of the lay of the mountains, deserts, high plains and forests in Arizona. Now that Deer Creek is burned out, I haven't gone back to the Mazatal. Barnhardt Trail is much harder than Deer Creek (more elevation gain), but there is a large stream 2 1/2 hours out and a neat place to camp (in big pines) about three hours out. The book I have used for almost all my Arizona hikes is "100 Hikes in Arizona". This has rudimentary maps, but you should really have a Forest Service map as well. The best map is a USGS $8 map, available from Wide World of Maps. You can download USGS maps from the internet (Topozone), but the visual quality is lousy. When you are making important decisions out on the trail, you want a good map.

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