Exploring the Explorer Trail

Today dawned sunny and cold.  We decided to hike, rather than bike, to avoid excessive wind chill.  We parked out at Kennedy Park, looking for the Explorer Trail head.  There were signs for the trail head, there was a kiosk showing the trail system with a "you are here"; but nowhere was there an indicator that one should turn right on the gas pipeline right-of-way and then walk 3/4 of a mile to the actual trail.  No, no, nothing like that.  So, we headed up a steep hill which looked like it would be Explorer (but wasn't).  It gave us a spectacular view of the mountains and the city.  That is snow on the mountains.

 

We lost the trail after the overlook, so we walked back down, looked for the trail elsewhere, decided we were not where we should be, went back up the steep hill, and then bushwhacked up the hill some more. Here is Jim surveying all that he sees.
 

 

We walked up to the top of another hill and found this.  It's a memorial to Becky Porter, who lived from 1924 to 1999.  I can't find anything about her on the web.

 

Here is Jim, still looking for the trail.  Later we looked at Google maps some more and found that we were totally off the mark.

 

Then we decided to go look for the Cat Mountain trail head.  As it turned out, we'd been there before but didn't know it because there was no signage.  Here I am, navigating to the trail head with my phone.

 

This is Cat mountain.

 

More of the area.

 

So here we are in the Tucson Mountain Park, it's a beautiful piece of the desert.  However, some asshole has decided to dump empty containers of Honey Bee Cleaner.  It took effort to get these containers to this site.  It would have been easier just to put them in a dumpster in town.  Sometimes I really hate people.

 

It was a good day, we hiked a lot, there was much up down up down, but there was not any finding of trails in which we were interested.