White Tank Mountain Regional Park

To break up the drive from Cottonwood to Yuma we spent a few nights at a new-to-us Phoenix area regional park: White Tank Mountain Regional Park. This park sits on the far western edge of Phoenix, well away from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis...It's 6 or 7 miles to the nearest grocery store...perfect!

The biggest draw for us was the 25 miles of shared use trails and 10 miles of mountain biking on a competitive track, all in the beautiful Sonoran desert.. We did a great 9 mile loop hike one day using the Ford Canyon and Willow Canyon trails, walked a 5 mile loop on the lowland/easy trails and biked the competitive track on our last day.

Sunrise our first morning.
Cool and a little cloudy, perfect for a long hike into the nearby hills.

As we hiked up Ford Canyon we began to understand why it's called White Tank Mountain...white granite boulders line the canyon bottoms creating tanks to hold rain water long after a storm.
See little Hans on the left?

Would these be called cactus hips???

There was some fun scrambling as we continued up the canyon 

It had rained in the last week so we saw dozens of full tanks in the canyon.

The competitive track has some pretty easy trails, though we did not do the Technical Loop.

 

White Tank Mountain Regional Park has 40 water/electric sites. Roads are paved and sites are gravel. Each site has a picnic table and fire pit. Some sites are somewhat slanted and privacy is varied. We always use Google Maps along with the campground map to choose our site and site #31 was excellent. Good privacy with only one neighbor a good distance away on our docking station side.

There is one restroom/shower building for the 40 campsites, and only one shower for men and one for women in that building, fortunately the campground was not even a quarter full. We had okay Verizon signal, it was kind of slow midday. The dump station had two stations and looked pretty new. In fact the water and electric utilities at each site looked pretty new.

This is a nice place to stay in the Phoenix area, comparable to many of the other Regional Parks. We'd stay here again if the West side of Phoenix made sense in our travels.

Lovely site 31.
About 10 feet beyond the rock border is a small wash, great for watching small wildlife.

The huntress in her element.

Gilded Flicker.

Such a lovely site as the evening shadows slowly overtake us.

Cactus Wren.