We spent a week camping in Tucson at Gilbert Ray. It’s a county park that is southwest of the city proper, just outside the entrance to the Saguaro National Park – West.
Gilbert Ray was a very nice campground, although considering the amount of land they have available it was surprising the sites were as close as they were. However, it has the feel of an old campground, so I’m guessing that’s the reason.
We only had power at our site (30a is standard at Gilbert Ray I believe), but they have water spigots dispersed throughout the campground for everyone to use. Our site was pretty nice, and very private with some trees/foliage that we tucked into.
Gilbert Ray was our first run-in with the infamous pack rats in the desert. We had the same one that would start running around right at sunset, and he was quite big. We decided to name him “rat king”. He never bothered us, besides for having him run underneath our chairs on his nightly adventures. We were in his territory after all.
Luckily, while we were in Tucson, Andrea’s aunt/uncle and cousins were in town. We got to hang out with them for a couple days – it’s been over two years since we saw them last!
We went with them for a late-morning hike around Sabino Canyon, and it was a lot of fun catching up with them.
One of the things we heard about Arizona is the sunsets are spectacular. This has been very true, and my apologies if you get tired of the sunset photos – though I never did!
Of course, we got to ride a few trails – mountain biking is our favorite activity. While we were in Tucson, we managed to fit in two rides, one at Sweetwater Preserve and another at the Starr Pass area.
Sweetwater was a great beginner/intermediate trail – perfect for us just getting our biking legs back under us. The views were spectacular, the trail mostly smooth with a fun, intermediate technical climb thrown in. I think this ride was around 7-8 miles.
The Starr Pass area was more towards intermediate/advanced. A fair bit of the riding was technical, both up and down – a total blast! The ride we strung together was around 9-10 miles.
Interspersed with our busy week, we managed to fit in a little hike within Saguaro National Park – but only on the west side. We did the Valley View Overlook Trail. Hopefully next time we are in Tucson we can fit in a little more at the national park – though, with the riding around Sweetwater and Starr Pass, and the hiking we did, we got a pretty good taste of the desert life.
After the hike early in the week at Sabino Canyon, we decided to head back to that area later in the week and hike up Bear Canyon. Within the Sabino/Bear Canyon recreation area, they have a couple trams to move people around – a very interesting set-up. It makes sense, though – with the location so close to Tucson, it gets very busy.
We reserved a tram this time to take us up Bear Canyon where we started the Seven Falls hike. As the name suggests, it leads to a series of falls – a true desert oasis.
Overall, Seven Falls was a beautiful hike. The only unfortunate part was due to timing, we were only able to do it on Saturday morning – therefore it was pretty busy. We ended up hiking a little over 7 miles since we just missed the tram on the way back down and didn’t want to wait another hour.
Tucson was a spectacular destination, and we hope to come back here quite a bit in the years to come. It’s unfortunate Gilbert Ray only allows a 7-day stay, because we could definitely spend more time there.
-Kyle
P.S. – here are some pictures of the current state of the camper – a day-in-the-life series of shots.
