Prescott Circle Trail
In June, I went back to the Prescott Circle Trail with the intent of doing a through hike of it over three days and two nights. I have fallen in love with both backpacking and the Arizona Trail, and one of my long term goals is to eventually hike the whole distance via section hikes, in whatever way I can make that work. The Prescott Circle Trail seemed like a good place for me to give both me and Kris a little sample of what that would be like.
I didn’t end up finishing it. I did two of the three planned days, and both of those days took longer than I had expected them to take. If I had done the planned 20-ish miles on Sunday as I had planned to do, and things went the same as they had gone the two previous days, I was looking at getting home really late, with no time to get the usual weekend errands done (and probably coming home to a wife angry about it all). So I came home early and called it good.
Aside from that, the trip went well. I found out some things about gear that I took that worked and didn’t work for me, figured out some stuff I didn’t need to bring in the future, and discovered that I’d rather be out with other people and not just by myself. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do a solo trip again, but I understand now that I associate the camping at night part of backpacking with socializing with friends, and I missed that a lot.
The one downside to bailing out is that I’m now 0/2 on attempts to do a full circuit of the trail, and that is really bugging me. One of these days in the not-too-distant future, I am going to go out and finally complete it in one go, whether that is backpacking, or running, or whatever. One trip=one circuit.
It was a very Type 2 Fun kind of trip. There were things about it that I didn’t enjoy while I was out there, but after finishing and with some time to think about it since then I have really been missing it. I want to get back out and do another trip like it again soon.
