October 17, 2011 - Hike 17

Photo taken from Freeway Overpass

Urban Hike around Gilbert and Higley, Arizona - Approximately 5-6 miles.
















Decided to do an urban hike around my sister's home town of Gilbert and ended up walking through Higley as well.  I started the hike from my sisters house. She lives is an very beautiful neighborhood with well kept yards and the streets are clean and well maintained. I had my phone GPS with me and decided to walk from local park to local park to local park. In my mind it would be an urban park hike. The area was beautiful. There were many samples of nice trees and pretty, fragrant flowers.

Tree about 1/2 mile from sister's house

Fragrant Flowers

As I was about to leave my sister's neighborhood, I came upon the wall that separates the neighborhood from the freeway. Here is where it really began to feel like a true "Urban hike". I love this picture below. I went from well maintained homes with swimming pools to this in a matter of one block.

After crossing the highway, I stopped into the local Walmart to get a bottle of water and ended up getting my hair cut. Go figure, but I had some time and was looking a little scraggly. After the hair cut, I decided to find the park that had that appeared on my phone GPS to have a large lake right in the center. It was only about 3/4 of a mile from Walmart. Below is what I found once I got there. It really was just a large cement pond with a little gazebo and a few ducks.

 After visiting the park, I ended up in a city called Higley. It was not nearly as nice as Gilbert but it had several farms with horses. I found it quite surprising that within one urban hike you can go from such an affluent neighborhood that is well maintained to a small community with not so well maintained farms. Higley was much more interesting though. It had pomegranate trees, big dogs, horses, old barnes, dirt roads and lots of cute kids running around. All in all, this was a very interesting hike.