I spent part of the day hiking Arizona Trail Passage 13 with Jerry and Andrea. It's fairly close to Tucson and the shuttle setup is easy, so we were hiking before 8:30 this morning. Starting from the American Flag Trailhead, Passage 13 is an easy, mostly downhill ramble through the desert. There are some great granite outcrops on this passage that kept things interesting. I also got some good birding in.

The trail goes through Oracle State Park, which I had never been to before, so that was a bonus. In the park, the trail goes by an old windmill that's in really good condition. The trail goes under the highway a couple miles later, and another couple miles from there is the end of the passage.

Since the passage is only 8.3 miles long it was barely after 11 o'clock when we finished the passage, so we spent longer than usual hanging out and chatting before driving home. One of our post-passage rituals is to eat Doritos. (It's the only time I allow myself to eat them, as I'm convinced their heavily laced with crack cocaine.) One of us dropped a fairly big piece of a Dorito on the ground and we had fun watching an industrious ant drag it away to its colony. Eventually we loaded up, retrieved my car and headed home.

We hiked 8.3 miles today.