Valentines Weekend
If they gave out camping names like they give out trail names to through hikers, I am confident they would name us Bob Ross. It seems like every week I come here with the same story of “We wanted ABC but got XYZ!”. It always works out, and 90% of the time I believe for the better. But I just can’t help it but chuckle when things go wrong. Happy accidents as Bob would say.
So I guess you can see where this is heading. We wanted to spend Valentine’s weekend in the woods because what screams love more than peeing behind a rock and eating cheese and crackers with your significant other?! #Class. Our plan was to leave first thing Saturday morning and head up to Schneebly Hill for the night.
We ended up not packing a single thing Friday night which significantly delayed us on Saturday. Like I hadn’t even gone grocery shopping to get our food, that’s how behind I was. So I went to the grocery store while Casey got the truck loaded and I had the weirdest experience of my life. I got adopted and totally alpha’d but this older woman. I walked in and she started talking to me about this booth she was running at a flea market downtown next weekend, and next thing I knew we were literally doing our grocery shopping together. At one point I even started walking away to get something different and she said “Ok i’m getting eggs, i’ll be right there!” Weirdest experience of my life. So weird that I just wanted to get out of there and I forgot half of the things I needed. But after 2 trips to the store I was finally back and able to prepare our food for the weekend. I made us a delicious chili chicken roll up meal for dinner which I was able to prepare the majority ahead of time before leaving. It makes cooking at camp so much easier and cleaner.
So we finally headed out around 10am and made it up to Schneebly Hill around 1:30. The second we pull off to the exit we see that the fire road is closed. Being in our little Scottsdale bubble it’s hard to remember that there’s still snow on the group up north in February despite the 75 degree weather at home. Fun fact though, we did find this EXTREMELY helpful link that shows what fire roads are open. There is another way through Sedona to get to the campsite we intended to go to, however it would be a much longer drive and we were worried that by the time we got there we would have came across other road closures. We knew that old faithful, Stoneman Lake, would be open so we headed there since it wasn’t too far away. We had been off-roading around Stoneman before and had marked some sites we thought would be awesome for camping so we pulled one up and drove out.
We came upon a very open (and snowy/muddy) area which was perfect for setting up camp. We got everything set up and feasted on wine, crackers and cheese until dinner. The area was so wide open with no one around and it made for the perfect camp for Benci. I am pretty sure he played fetch for 5 hours straight. There was a perfect fire pit but we did end up in the tent pretty early as it got cold fast once the sun went down.
I woke up not feeling well so Sunday was a quiet day. Benci and Casey went for a hike to see what was around and I stayed around camp. The area was so quiet in fact we only ever saw one car drive by. I have a feeling in other seasons it would be more populated, but this time of year it was perfect. I am glad we got to see a new part of Stoneman Lake.
