Brown's Mountain

Today I hiked Brown's Mountain Summit at Brown's Ranch, where I've taken to hiking in the past week.  I started last Sunday going the full length of Brown's Ranch Road and back, so nice and easy I could probably ride my bike on most of it.  Not sure if I feel like dragging it up there or not yet though (40 min drive).  Then on Saturday (see Saguaro previous post), I did Brown's Ranch to the Upper Ranch Road all the way around...with a Cone Mountain Trail detour that was an oops on my part...but beautiful.  An extra 1.5 miles that day.  So far I've done about a total of 15 at this site and I may check out the couple other McDowell-Sonoran Preserve trailheads I haven't done yet...but I'll definitely be back to this one.

For today, I planned to do Upper Ranch and go by what I'd missed, then head up Brown's Mountain Trail on the north end, ended up cutting through Wrangler Trail to the Brown's Mountain Trail southern end to cut a little bit of time off, then went down the opposite way and traipsed back the north end of Upper Ranch and Brown's Ranch Road to finish.  Definitely need to remember to start using sunscreen (yes in January).  Brown's Mountain Trail is rated moderately difficult but I found it not bad at all, even with my limited hiking experience.  The summit is the same rating but definitely more difficult with steep places and loose rock -- I scooted for some portions to come down and got winded a bit going up.  But it was worth it for the view and peace and quiet (after the family with 10 kids that I followed up left!)

At the summit trail after coming down.

Mountain, ho!