Prescott
It’s crazy for me to think that we’ve been camping in Arizona so many times now but until this weekend we still hadn’t gone to Prescott. Although after trying to do so, it made me realize why we hadn’t. There are far more restrictions on camping in Prescott and we couldn’t exactly tell what was allowed and what wasn’t. We did our research ahead of time, but we had two maps with two different rules for dispersed camping. Truthfully, I still am not 100% sure that we were allowed to camp where we did, but one of our maps said we could so we stayed.
Fall camping is TOUGH. Casey and I are both big football fans, so pulling us away from football Sunday is not easy. Casey’s birthday was this week and he wanted to go camping to celebrate so we decided we would go and just try to find a place that had cell service so we could stream the games in the middle of the woods. We landed on Prescott as our destination because it was close enough that the drive isn’t long, and we still had a great chance of finding a spot with service.
So we packed our bags and headed up Saturday morning. We found a dirt road a little past Camp Sky Y on South Senator Highway and followed it in hopes of finding some good camp spots. We soon came to a road closed sign and pulled off to debate on where to go from here. We pulled up the maps and we appeared (based on one of our maps) to be in a dispersed camping area so we decided we would stay right where we were and set up camp.
It started to rain on us so we stayed in the car watching part of the ASU game. Once the rain cleared we set up camp and let Benci run around. He managed to find (what we think were) deer bones all day long no matter how many times we took them away and hid them up high. Our campsite was tucked under some trees but the dirt road gave us an awesome space to play fetch with him to tire him out. We had a few visitors, a couple groups on horseback and a group on ATV’s, but other than that the area was quiet which we loved.
A storm looked to be rolling in so we hurried to cook dinner and get camp ready for the night. Now I know you all are expecting me to say this because I say it every time, but this dinner was EASILY my favorite camp dinner yet. I felt like a gourmet chef, if said chef was left in the woods with limited supplies and limited utensils… ANYWAY. For dinner we had salmon in the hawaiian sweet chili azeka sauce, garlic and herb couscous, and asparagus. We cooked the salmon and asparagus separately in foil packets and it's the easiest way to cook at camp. It makes clean up so quick because all you do is crumple up the foil and toss it. No pans, no mess. I also found my favorite new seasoning trick. Before leaving the house I mixed together butter and a dry rub seasoning. When it came time to cook the asparagus I just grabbed a tablespoon of butter and tossed it on the foil before packaging it up to cook.
After dinner, we hung out around camp until the storm started rolling in and I suddenly (unnecessarily) got panicked about being struck by lightning. So naturally I sat in my chair and googled “What do you do when you’re camping and it's lightning” because I am totally mentally stable and not crazy. The top answer was that you’re supposed to wait it out in your car if at all possible so that is exactly what I made us do. When the lightning got closer we closed everything up and hopped in the car to wait it out. The lightning we saw was BEAUTIFUL. The storm died down and the lightning moved further away and I felt totally safe again so we climbed up into bed. Unfortunately I didn't close everything up as tight has I had thought and the bottom of our bed and 2 of our 3 pillows were SOAKED. Which really sucked because I love pillows so much and if it were up to me I would bring 17 with us and now I had to SHARE ONE with Casey. Not ideal folks, not ideal. It made sleeping that much more uncomfortable as we tried to twist and turn our bodies to avoid the puddles.
We woke up Sunday morning (sore) and I cooked breakfast while Casey played fetch with Benci and set up for his Chargers game. Nothing earth shattering for breakfast this time. I went with the staple of eggs, bacon and potatoes. We watched the (tough) Chargers game before heading home to catch the night games. Lots of pros and cons to the spot, but we would definitely go again.
Pros: Quick drive from Phoenix/Scottsdale, cell service, plenty of tree cover for shade and hanging hammocks/lines, fairly isolated.
Cons: Close to a path so you will have people walking by, cell service (sometimes it's nice to be away from it all) , not a ton of flat ground with a lot of rocks.
