Flat Iron

Sometimes it's better to start the story from the top.

I love this Nike shirt by the way: "The Only Way to Finish is to Start." What a great saying.

In preparation for the big hike next month, Ryan & I had been planning on making the hike up Flatiron for several weeks, but we had some conflicts the last couple of weekends. Finally, the stars aligned and we did it. It was a great hike (or should I say great climb) - so different from what I was expecting. I thought we'd be mostly on trails and switchbacks. I had no idea we were scaling a mountain. Ryan has hiked this mountain a few times before, but I was a newbee.

Does it look far away? Does it look high? It's only about 2.5 miles from where I was standing, but it is pretty much straight up. Almost 3000 feet up. Just for perspective, that's about halfway up the grand canyon - a pretty decent climb.

Here's the skinny on Flatiron, per AZCentral.com (published in a good write up a couple of years ago):

"Imagine hiking two Camelback Mountains in a row.

Believe it or not, that would be easier than hiking to the Flatiron, a prominent rock outcrop overlooking the western flanks of the Superstition Wilderness.

The ridiculously steep route up Siphon Draw gains nearly 2,800 feet in 2.8 miles, stressing thighs, burning lungs and sending heart rates into the red zone.

It's one of the best hikes in Arizona."

We left the kids fast asleep with Barrett in charge of the slumber at 5:15 am, and were making our first steps up the trail at 6:00am on the nose. Surprisingly, the weather was incredibly pleasant for a mid-August day, mostly because the sun hadn't reared its head over the mountains yet which meant we were blessed with shade all the way up and about a third of the way down. The breeze was nice too. It didn't get really warm until about the last thirty minutes of the hike (despite what the gallon of sweat soaking through on my shirt might tell you.)

This part is called "slippery rock" and is the point where many hikers apparently turn around. Or so I read. Whatever. Why would you even make this journey if you weren't planning to shoot for the top? Anyway, it was indeed a steep, slippery slope to climb. Ryan and I both commented that it was a good thing it wasn't wet. I have no idea how you'd scale that thing wet.

This was pretty typical of the hike. Lots of hand over hand and straight up stuff.

The whole hike is 5.8 miles round trip. It took us 2 hours to get up, and 1:45 to get down. We stayed up top and enjoyed the incredible views for about 30 minutes, ate some fruit and granola bars, changed my socks, listened to the sound of peace on the the mountain top, took a few pics, joked about things we could do up there that no one would ever see or hear...It was a good morning for sure.

And here we are at the tip top of Flatiron. Pretty cool view. Super cool company if I do say so myself. Some fellow hikers arrived at the top just a few minutes behind us, so we took each other's pictures. Love this one. It looks like we're on top of the world. Not quite, but 3000 feet up isn't too shabby.

The hike up was the cardio workout. The hike down was the quad workout. It was fun busting out our new day packs that we bought each other for our early anniversary presents (Happy 14th Anniversary, Babe. I have a separate post to follow about that too...) I also broke in my new Solomon hiking shoes this trip. They worked great. No blisters.

We saw this guy on our way down the mountain. Some hikers from Denver told us that it was a collared lizard and pretty rare to find. They are lizard gurus (or so they say), so we thought we should take a pic. Of course, this was the only pic our kids really cared about.

I think our next long hike will be on the 28th. Not sure yet where it will be, but we probably only have 2 more practice hikes before the real deal. Oh, and lots of miles on the asphalt. We're sort of dual-track training for the Rim2Rim in September and the Shun the Sun Half Marathon in early November. Good times.