The year-round hiking season

When planning on going to the US back in 2007, there was, at one point relatively late in the process, a choice between three locations, one of which was Tucson. It had made the list of about 6 or so places to consider for grad school somewhat haphazardly, and only when the choice had boiled down to three did it receive more attention. As always with decisions that you know will shape the rest of your life but are too big to grasp every aspect and potential consequence of, there were intimidatingly many factors to consider about the three places. But one thing stands out in my memory, that made Tucson a whole lot more attractive than it had looked at first glance: a 12 month hiking season.

In lieu of wordy descriptions, some pictures:

Tucson Mountains, January

Cochise Stronghold, February

Babad Doag Trail, March

Mt. Kimball, April

Mt. Wrightson, May

Mt. Lemmon, June

Chiricahua, July

Wilderness of Rocks, August

Hope Camp Trail, September

Aravaipa Canyon, October

Pinaleno Mountains, November

Pima Canyon, December

  
Oh, what a wonderful luxury that was: any odd weekend, we'd pick a place, go to the Map and Flag Center, buy the respective USGS map, gather the equipment, food and water, and off we went! In contrast, I distinctly remember talking to my mother on the phone before one of my visits back to Austria, about going for a hike during the three or four days I was going to be in Admont, and she said: "We'll see once we know about the weather." The what?

Don't get me wrong, I do not need balmy weather and Arizona-type sunshine to go hiking. I come from a family with a long tradition of roaming the great outdoors in all kinds of conditions. Walking through a soaking wet, green forest can be a great experience. But...*sigh*....it is just so much easier to plan a hike for any given weekend, when you know that the chance of an all-day rainstorm is about 1 in 730. When you know that there will be a dry place to sit, you will not get stuck in snow or mud, if it rains, you might get wet, but not miserably cold, and there is just not enough water in the air to create the kind of weather that will make you return having seen absolutely nothing of the landscape because the visibility was as far as the next 5 steps. 

Ok, nothing is perfect, and to be absolutely precise, Tucson has a 7-month prime hiking season and a 5-month secondary hiking season in which you have to plan a tiny bit more - for a somewhat longer drive (up one of the sky islands to escape the oven that the low desert has become) or to get up ridiculously early (ideally to reach the turn-around point of your hike at about sunrise, in the hottest time of the year). Both of these can feel like obstacles when sitting in an air-conditioned house in Tucson at the end of May. But in retrospect, now that I am sitting in a heated apartment in Vienna at the end of May, heading into another rainy, windy, 12-degree Celsius kind of weekend, I am realizing that these things were minor inconveniences at best.