Memorable Memorial Day Outing

As with most Memorial Day weekends, I took a long weekend and extended it into a full week of fishing and camping in the mountains of Arizona. Now most of you may say, Yeah, mountains in Arizona? Well, we were camping just around 9100 feet and the afternoons were in the mid 70s and the nights went down to mid 40s. My flyfishing club always rents a group camp site at Hawley Lake as we have the past few years and before that, we rented Cyclone Lake. As our club has grown, we quickly outgrew the smaller meadow at Cyclone and moved to Hawley, which about five times the size. Lots of room to spread out. While we were camped at Hawley, we fished Christmas Tree Lake - so named because of a tree was cut down from her shore and traipsed across the country, set up and decorated in the White House. I believe this was in the early 60s. Yes, THE White House.

By sundown of Tuesday, we had to relocate so we went to Wynn campground and had the entire campground to ourselves. Primitive camping at its finest. While camped at Wynn, we took off and fished Wednesday at Crescent Lake for some rainbows and in the late afternoon went to fish Lee Valley Reservoir for some native Apache Trout and some Artic Grayling.

On the short ride from the highway up to Wynn Campground, which is all wash board BTW, is when I believe the fridge door came off. Broke the little plastic clip that holds it closed and dumped most of the fridge contents on the floor. What a mess!!

Of course, when we got back to the valley on Thursday, someone had turned on the Phoenix furnace and it was 105 when we pulled into town. I was ready to head right back until mid September.

Bob, Tim, Ron and I have done this for a number of years and we have as much fun sitting around the fire after a long day on the water as we do fishing together. Thanks gentlemen for a relaxing and enjoyable week.