Four Peaks - 3-12-06 (31 images)
Well, I don't even know what to say about today. It was insane. Myself and two friends decided to
go up to Four Peaks to play in the foot of snow that fell yesterday. Snow fell in the valley as low
as 2000 ft. There was even snow on the McDowell Mountains on my way out this morning. I get on the Beeline
to find out that it's closed at the Bush Highway. There was a bunch of people pulled over on the side
of the road wanting to go play in the snow. We decide to go out behind Butcher Jones (the coves) and
up to the peaks from there. Once we hit the main Four Peaks road (FR 143), there was practically nobody
out there. We got about half way up the mountain when we ran into a Land Cruiser that was buried on the
side of a shelf road in a ditch. We spent about an hour working that thing out. Well,
while we were doing that, a line of about 20 trucks had built up on the hill waiting to get by. Long
story short, it turned into a HUGE cluster fuck. Some people wanted to get by, some wanted to turn
around, some didn't know what the hell they wanted to do. About 2 miles further up the mountain it got
to a point where it wasn't even passable. So we decide to turn around and head back down. Oh my god...
on the way back down it was absolutely insane. They had opened the Beeline by that point so every one
and their mom was coming up FR 143 wanting to check out the snow. I mean
hundreds of cars, trucks, jeeps, minivans, conversion vans, geo metros... you name it, it was trying to
get up that mountain. There was people kicking back drinking beers and listening to music, families
building snowmen, quads and dirt bike motors screaming around every corner, dogs
running amuck... it was pretty crazy, but kinda cool. I mean, what do you expect? We live in the middle
of the Sonoran Desert and we're on our 144th day without a drop of rain, then all of a sudden a foot of snow falls in
our backyard. Of course every one is gonna wanna check it out. So anyways, after all that madness we went
back out via Butcher Jones. We stopped on the way out to play on some of the rutted hills by the coves and
then called it a day.
Click a picture to see a larger view.