Redemption on the Catalina Peaks

 TTR is awesome. So are the Santa Catalinas


I don't have time to flesh this out just now, I will come back to this post tomorrow on my day off and add some wordiness. For now, enjoy the views.
HUGE thanks to Renee and Dallas for RD'ing this one, and to Ross for creating it!

Okay, a brief fleshing out.
I can already tell that I will be spending a lot of my spare time this summer out in the Santa Catalinas. What a spectacular retreat from the heat. And that isn't to say that its gotten hot just yet, but it is starting to warm up and staying more consistently in the 90's.
So, all that being said, it was a wonderful feeling to be wearing my sugoi sleeves, a longsleeve technical shirt, my technical beanie from the Pemberton 50K and a baseball hat, gloves, tights, thicker socks...and to still feel a little chilly at the start. I ran this entire route with all of those things on and had maybe two moments of feeling a bit warm, and a few moments of being chilled by the passing breeze. Spectacular.
I convinced Dawn to come up for the day and hike around while I was running, we left Tucson nice and early, around 6, to be sure and give the Sami enough time to make it up the mountain. Fortunately there wasn't much traffic on the way up that morning, the Sami drove like a champ, and I'm pretty sure Harry- a fellow TTR'er- was the only runner to pass us on the way up. We hung around the parking lot waiting for more TTR'ers to show up. Swapping stories and asking how the week had gone. Apparently most of the TTR group had read my blog about my Tuesday adventures in the Santa Catalinas earlier in the week...the most amusing piece of all these conversations was the repeated question 'So why'd you run up Bear Canyon?' Apparently, I missed the piece of the run description that shows them running up the tram road to East Fork...added a few miles on that, but just par for the course on that run. Or perhaps, it was foreshadowing...

8 am rolled around
Dallas and Renee  organized our motley crew and with the touch of a button sent us off on the trail. Fortunately, they had done some reconnaissance on the trail earlier in the week and set up some cairns which would prove to be quite helpful. Ross really outdid himself on this one. Throughout the entire run, the views were incredible. We headed up Butterfly trail and then broke off to the right towards Incinerator ridge and out to our first peak of the day at Barnum Rock.

Approaching the first summit of the day, what a view!

Ken and Julie at the first summit of the day: Barnum Rock

After taking a minute to enjoy the panoramic beauty out on Barnum Rock, I headed back along the trail and towards the next summit of Mt. Bigelow. This I was looking forward to, since it was part of my intention on Tuesday's run, but as we all know, that didn't exactly work out. The trails were nice, but fairly overgrown in some parts, good thing SCC is coming out there for National Trails Day in June to do some corridor work. Looking forward to those improvements.

Touching the towers at Bigelow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After touching the towers at Bigelow we headed out on the FAA loop and then dropped down into a section called Bear Wallow. This portion of the run made me feel as though I had been transported to a completely different world. It was amazing and lush and green, at times the geek in me really came to the surface (not that its ever very far below) and I felt like I was running through Tolkien's Shire. Especially as I ran through the culvert towards Sunset Point, daydreams of elves, hobbits and other fantastic creatures crossed my mind.  

Yet another gorgeous section, felt like I was in another world on this one, running through the culvert.

My shadow says hullo.

I made it to the Sunset Trail, snapped a picture of the sign at the trail head, and should have taken a slightly closer look. I guess I'm just one for bonus miles. Instead of branching off to the Marshall Gulch trail upon reaching the Marshall Gulch Picnic area like I was supposed to, I took the Aspen Trail, I know I had remembered seeing Aspen trail on the run directions, so I went with it. (And added about 1.5 miles, mostly climbing)

Should have paid more attention to this map...

Waterfalls at Marshall Gulch

Remnants of the fires on Aspen Trail

Bonus miles on Aspen trail

Joan and I kept moving along, and we reached to towers more or less together. It was a great day, again with some bonus miles, but I decided to take the ride back to the parking lot with Dallas and Renee, given my stomach being a bit upset, and not wanting to keep them waiting forever for my tortuga-ish self to finish.

Steward Observatory, touchin the fence for a final peak

Done for the day.

Long Live TTR!
All I can say is, this running group has been a fantastic addition to my life. I'm so stoked to be a part of it, and look forward to many more runs with and or designed by them.