Arizona Trail 800 Mile Trek
Sunset on the Northern side of the Catalina’s just North of Tucson and Mt. Lemmon
After living in the Sonoran Desert for over 10 years it was with great JOY that I adventured and navigated what I would consider one of the best long trails on earth… The Arizona Trail! It’s an 800 mile trek going through some of the most pristine and diverse areas I have had the honor of thru- hiking. It was a pretty intense moment in time for me and the world! So many memories wrapped up in the desert! I traveled Northbound from the Mexican border up to the Utah state line including a rim to rim hike thru the Grand Canyon solo and reaching the end of the trail just filthy dirty and in the middle of nowhere! It was so magical and I am so grateful that nature is a wonderful teacher and healer in my life. I started off the trail with a hiking partner that I met while hiking the Appalachian Trail. It was kind of wild time also because COVID started happening right around the start date of the trek and honestly being out in nature was the best place to be! I had to gracefully pause the hike at the end of April because the Grand Canyon was closed for COVID. I only had 100 miles left to finish. In the time I went back to finish the 100 miles my hiking partner had passed away from suicide so I was destined to finish the last 100 miles processing life and loss. It was one of the hardest and toughest times of my life filled with loneliness and sorrow and at the same time my life was filled with so much joy and happiness and gratitude. I had just decided to stay and live in Alaksa during all this transition. All the feels really! The last 100 miles was one of the wildest, most healing treks of all my thru hikes. It was a potent time to ground myself and refocus on who I was as a person and all the love the was constantly surrounding me. One really magical thing that I did not realize at the time was that there was this amazing human also hiking the Arizona Trail, he started 3 days prior to my trek and we never met but we were so close and didn’t even know it! We would end up meeting a year later hiking the Continental Divide Trail in July 2021 and falling in love. I guess it’s true…Hike to the Heart Y’all! EnJOY some photos of my Arizona Trail Thru Hike! I am going to hike it again someday soon!
Live WILD and LOVE deeply,
MOONEY
And just like that the sun rises and the sun falls…… to really live fully you have to surrender to it all and feel all the feels. The last 100 miles of the Arizona trail I completed in October 2020 and at the bottom of the Grand Canyon where it was over 100 degrees. I also had a long 30 mile stretch without water and the only water source was surrounded by bees and I had to dip my cup in there to refill my water and incidentally got stung by a bee on a finger that I was wearing my great grandmas ring ( I never wear rings while I hike so this was a one off situation…) my finger got so swollen immediately that I could not take the ring off. It became a tourniquet. I had to hike 30 miles or more including most of it at night where I saw the tail of a mountain lion and also found a random sprinter van in the middle of nowhere, a glimmer of hope, and woke them up at 2 am for help with my finger and they just so happen to have a tool to cut it off and big hearts to help a stranger out! So random and so WILD! I am here for it all!
What a TREK! A story of love and loss and all the in between which shaped who I am today and how I live my life! Cheers to long distance hiking and soaking it all in!