Boulder Canyon Hike


On December 31, 2009 my wife Kristie and I were wanting to take a nice challenging hike with interesting scenery. Once gain we turned to our pile of Arizona Highways magazines and saw a short article on Boulder Canyon and decided to try this hike. The article showed a view of the hike showing Weaver's Needle. We've seen this famous landmark on several of our other hikes and often spot it While driving around the Superstitions which seems to be a draw for me.

The Boulder Canyon trailhead is across the street from the canyon Lake marina. We arrived at about 11:15am and started out on our hike at about 11:30. The entire hike is around 16 miles from the trailhead near Canyon Lake to LaBarge box. We knew that we would not be able to do the entire hike based on our past experiences so we decided up front that we would monitor the terrain and the time to pick a turnaround time so that we could be back at the trailhead by 5pm. This would give us a nice safety margin to get off the trail before dark.

The first mile or so was an easy walk mostly uphill walk leaving Canyon Lake behind us.

We didn't see any other people for the first couple of hours. After that we saw a few groups of mostly two or four people. Several of the hiking groups we saw had dogs with them.

About two miles in the trail turned downward heading towards Boulder Canyon below. We reached the canyon floor and walked a ways but decided to turn back to make sure we made it back to the trailhead before dark.

To be continued...

Total Distance:12.45 km (7.7 mi)
Total Time:5:00:39
Moving Time:3:33:56
Average Speed:2.49 km/h (1.5 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed:3.49 km/h (2.2 mi/h)
Max Speed:53.86 km/h (33.5 mi/h)
Min Elevation:478 m (1567 ft)
Max Elevation:690 m (2264 ft)
Elevation Gain:661 m (2167 ft)
Max Grade:30 %
Min Grade:-5 %
Recorded:Thu Dec 31 11:31:20 MDT 2009

Here's the track we took

 

Last updated Jan 13, 2010

Questions or Comments? Email Me!