Blowhole at the waterfront of Xcaret Park near Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
Where are Kevin and Ruth now? Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Where are Kevin and Ruth going next? Toluca on December 24th!

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Almost caught in a storm!

We're getting caught up on our three days away from internet, so if you missed this morning's post you can read it here...

http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2015/02/back-to-civilization.html

The following was written Wednesday, Feb 25th 7:30am.


Things cleared up a bit yesterday (Tuesday) morning, and by 10:00am we were actually getting some sunny breaks. So we decided to get out for a hike while the getting was good.

The view out of our side window. Another great campsite! GPS 33.623893, -111.196189

Setting out on our hike at 10:00am.

We had seen a forest service road across from the 88 highway here at Burnt Corral Campground. It was a mile walk just to get to the service road, and then we were hoping that it would take us higher into the mountains for a view.

We set off on Forest Service Road #49.

Didn't take long before we were getting some nice views.

Pretty easy at the beginning, with just a gradual incline. But it was going to get fairly steep later on!

Someone would have needed a high clearance 4x4 to get to a camp up here. But what a great spot!

As we got up in altitude, we noticed some really black looking clouds to the east of us looking towards Roosevelt Lake. We continued watching them, but from the wind direction, it really didn't look like it was coming our way.

Dark clouds in the distance.

And yet looking back at the lake, it was beautiful.

Ruth, near the top.

This was as high as we went. Look at those black clouds coming in behind us! It was windy and I had to hold my hat on!

We decided that the clouds really were heading our way, and we figured that we had better high tail it back down and try and beat the storm. It had taken us nearly two hours to hike up to the ridge, and we didn't quite make it to the highest point. But, better to avoid the storm!

Trying to beat the storm. 

We felt a few raindrops about 3/4 of the way back, but the worst of it seemed to bypass our area. We made it back to Sherman in exactly one hour from when we were near the top. We were moving!

Back at Sherman, it was overcast for the rest of the afternoon. In fact, we did get some precipitation for a half hour or so...in the form of rain, hail, and snow pellets! Odd, because it wasn't that cold...maybe 62F (17C) or so. Of course the frozen water that fell from the sky melted right away.

And then the skies cleared. After supper, we went for a stroll around the campground. There are 79 sites here, and perhaps 10 are occupied. Not very busy...just the way we like it!

Of course a clear overnight sky means it could get cold. And it did in fact go down to about 38F (3C) last night, so it was a little chilly inside Sherman when we woke up this morning. But our Mr. Heater Buddy went right to work, and we're nice and toasty warm now!

Looks like the start of a beautiful day, so I think we've decided that we're going to spend one more night here. Wow...that'll be three days without internet. Haven't done that for over a year. We sure are getting a lot of book reading done!


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8 comments:

  1. Good that you missed the storm, and love our Mr Heater too, does and awesome job.

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    1. Our Mr. Heater is definitely getting a good workout at the moment and we are very pleased with the results.

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  2. We were over in Apache Junction and saw that storm brewing up in the mountains. We too high tailed it home to Mesa and were lucky.....it never hit us! Marsha got some great "spooky" pictures of those black clouds though.

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    1. Glad that you were able to avoid the storm as well, it wouldn't have been much fun getting caught in it. We couldn't believe how black the sky was!

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  3. might want to get on the internet soon though as another weather system is heading our way... cold, wet and windy

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    1. As soon as we got back into the land of technology we saw that the weather was headed into a deep freeze here and have now had to rethink our route. Looks like we are turning around and heading south again for a little while, those temperatures are way too cold for us!

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  4. Glad you all beat the storm. I used to live in Mesa and Tempe. AZ gets some serious lightning storms. Pretty but I'd hate for you to be stuck out desert.

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    1. We are glad that we turned around when we did and hightailed it back. Although that storm actually did pass us by but the next storm a few hours later sure didn't!

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