Mt. Lemmon Arizona – A Drive Through Hail

Hello! This past Labor Day was the perfect day to get outside and have an adventure. I grew up in Tucson, AZ, but had never driven up.the back side of the Catalina Mountains up to the top of Mt. Lemon. It was time!

We packed up the Ranger, which we have affectionately named Seymour, and headed out to the small town of Oracle, Arizona.

Oracle is about an hour north of Tucson on the back side of the Catalina Mountains. Take highway 77 to Oracle and turn on Mt Lemmon Highway. There are so many fun things to do in Oracle :

The Biosphere – A scientific wonder
Zip lining– closed on Mondays
Spelunking in Peppersauce Caves.– wear clothes that can get muddy and bring a light

There would definitely not be time to do all of these and drive to the top of Mt Lemmon, but maybe one would fit in the day if you started early enough.

We parked across from the YMCA camp and loaded into the Ranger. We followed Mt Lemmon Highway and came to Peppersauce Campground.

We drove around the pretty little campground. It looked very inviting. It has a circle type drive so we drove all the way around. We then went right across the dirt highway to drive up to Rice Peak.

Driving to Rice Peak was fairly easy the first five or six miles.

But the final few miles were a bit trickier, with the final climb being very steep and rocky. Fun!

The view from the top of Rice Peak was very pretty.

The rocks almost looked like cement. But I don’t think they were.

It was a great place to take a photo:)

Time to head back down and back to the Mt Lemmon Hwy.

We turned right at the hwy and headed up toward Mt. Lemon. Along the way was a parking lot filled with adventurous people heading into the cave just up the creek canyon.

We didn’t stop. We kept on going up the 20 miles to the top of the Mountain. The views along the way were spectacular

It was so interesting to see the vegetation change from the beautiful desert and rolling hills to the tall, cool pine trees.

At the top of the Mt. is the small town of Summerhaven. We were there on a holiday so it was quite busy. We ate at a nice little restaurant called Sawmill Run.

We were surprised at how good the food was here. They made everything from scratch including the hamburger buns. We each got something different and it all tasted so good!

It was getting late, so it was time to head back down the mountain. It was hard to believe we had gone up 8000 feet! I was glad I had brought a sweat shirt:)

The road was rough but nothing so rocky that a Ranger couldn’t do it. We didn’t see a lot of wild life except for these happy cows in the road.

We were also pleased to see a beautiful rainbow as we were heading down the mountain

But as we kept driving, the storm started to look a bit ominous and foreboding.

We thought we would make it down before the storm, but no, here came the rain.

The rain was bad enough, but then it started to hail! We were out of the trees with no place for cover and were being hit with small hail stones! Thank goodness they weren’t any larger!

Tom was a great driver. He managed to keep driving and got us safely out of the storm. We all were drenched!

The desert looked so clean and smelled so good after the rain:).

We were happy to make it back to the truck safely. We are definitely going to put a folding windshield on the Ranger!