This weekend was once again a hiking weekend, as Brent continues his drive to prep for Mt. Whitney and Barry and I come along for the ride… Or in this case hike.
So Saturday we hopped in Brent’s Jimmy and drove up north of Flagstaff to Kendrick Peak. Relevant info from the Wikipedia article on Kendrick Peak (which I had to write, dammit!) is as follows. “Kendrick Peak (35.4081°N, 111.8507°W) is one of the highest peaks in the San Francisco volcanic field north of the city of Flagstaff in the
U.S. State of Arizona and is located on the Coconino Plateau in Coconino County. Kendrick Peak rises to a height of 10,418 feet above sea level, which makes it the 11th or 12th tallest mountain in Arizona.â€
Yeah, the 12th tallest! I thought for sure it would be higher… Oh well. Humphreys Peak, shown in this photo taken from Kendrick, IS the
highest peak in Arizona, at 12,633 feet.
In any case, we left really early again, this time about 5:30am or so and got to the peak and were ready to hike by 8:45 or so. The trail was quite nice. Much softer on the feet than the Mt. Wilson trail. Relatively fewer rocks, which mean that my feet were only crying by the time we got done and not screaming, like they were last weekend. 
The trail, while being easy on the feet, is hard on the legs. It is pretty much completely an uphill climb the entire way. We pushed hard and got to the top about 11:30 or so. On the way up we had lots of butterflies, which were pretty, but also lots of bees, which were not. However, at least it kept us moving.
At the top we met the fire watcher, who on the weekends are apparently volunteers, not Forest Service personnel. The guy was fairly nice, although I think he didn’t like us hanging about on his tower, but hey, there weren’t any signs and he didn’t kick us off.
After a brief lunch at the top and a bunch of photos (on Flickr for your viewing as usual), we headed back down. Going down was much, much, much easier than going
up, but I was still very glad to get back to the trailhead.
For post hiking celebrations we headed to Flag and hit Flagstaff Brewing for a beer and some lunch before heading back to Phoenix. All in all a lot of good clean, healthy living fun
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