Backpacking Adventure - Day four part three - Feb 28 - Hiking down Romero Canyon

We finally caught glimpses of the most easterly located Romero Pools when we stopped at about 9:30AM for a 20 minute rest. Having covered about 3 miles, we were no longer fresh from the nights rest. But we weren't much fatigued from the hiking. The trail had been downhill all the way, and not too bad in terms of having to boulder-hop over boulders in the trail.

The Romero pools were quite a delight visually, the way the rocks all around the pools had been carved and milled down by the forces of water and ice to form a sort of natural sculpture, with smoothed surfaces, cracks and streamlines in the rock.

This year I had heard on the radio that the Tucson area had received as much rain by the middle of February as by the first of August in 2014. So, all the pools, not unexpectedly had water in them, and the Romero creek had a decent flow.

It seemed like the Romero pools go along the creek for quite a long ways, it seemed perhaps like it went on for a half mile or longer.

There are a lot of visitors to the Romero pools. This location is probably the second most popular visitation site in the Santa Catalina mountains. We saw 1 person the first day of the backpacking trip, we didn't see anybody the 2nd day or the first half of the third day, then in the early afternoon we saw 1 more person at the junction of mount lemmon trail and wilderness of rocks trail, and in the late afternoon we saw 2 more persons up on Romero saddle, and then on the fourth day, we saw probably a dozen people camping near the Romero pools. These folks probably hiked up to the pools for camping Friday night after they got off work.

As it turns out, this fourth day of our backpacking trip was a Saturday, and the Summit hut was having an event that they sponsered, and Hiking up to the Romero pools was part of that event. We began seeing hiker participants in this event starting about half a mile below the Romero pools, and we saw between 50 and 100 hikers or possibly more before we got down to the trailhead.