Today was an amazingly beautiful day, as are most of our hiking days! Today we drove 4 hours to hike Thompson trail, fire road 116 just outside of Showlow/Pinetop, near Big Lake. It was a bit long of. Drive for a 5 miler, but the trail is one of the Arizona Hikers Summer hiking challenge and a group was meeting to tackle it together so we decided to go for it.

This was our first group hie so it was an easy one to get our “feet wet” with so to speak. Lol. This was also the wettest hike we’ve had, we both got our feet a tiny bit wet and muddy. Nothing major though.

The temperatures were a welcomed cool start in the low 60s, probably only reaching a high in the mid 70s, but ending back in the 60s with the cloud cover that came in. The hike was really more like a long walk along a small creek through the woods and some meadows.

On the front end of the hike you’ll encounter the gate… don’t forget to close it behind you, as requested! 🙂

I was most impressed on this hike by all the Iris! They lined the creek all along the way, it was kind of hard to resist taking pictures of all of them. Heehee

At almost he halfway point maybe? Here is an opportunity to climb a little hill (his is where we got most of our elevation gain on this hike, which totaled just over 300 feet by the way), from the top of this hill you can see the creek wind off into the distance for an amazing view. I’m anxious to get back here for a very early morning photo session..

The wildflall along the trail were so beautiful and begging to be photographed.

It really was hard to pick favorites of this view and it was difficult not to stop every 30 feet to record the large scale beauty!

Even in black and white, the majestic beauty is stunning.

I even got two lucky butterfly shots, I was really excited about the orange one! I’ve never captured one of these guys before.

One of the group members captured and shared a few shots of us as well.

I really look forward to our hikes each weekend. The time we are getting together is priceless, not only now, but for our future health and beyond that the memories!

I am planning to come back here and camp one weekend this summer so I can spend some early morning and late evening time photographing this area properly!