Backpacking Adventure - Apr 03 - First Day first part - Box Camp Trailhead through the woods

We met with Rick, who kindly offered to provide our ride, and hiked with us for the first mile or so at 11:00AM, and was loaded up into his car by 11:30.

While driving up the highway, we discussed starting up on Mount Lemmon, and then hiking down Lemmon Rock Lookout trail instead of Marshall Gulch, and we were all interested, except when we got there at 1:15PM, the gate up to the observatory was chained and locked. So we would have had to hike up another 1.8 miles, so we scrapped that plan and went back to the original plan to hike from Marshall Gulch.

We got to the trailhead, and unloaded our packs, and got ready to hike, and we couldn't figure out where the trail is. Usually the trail is right at the trailhead. So we walked around for about 20 minutes until we figured that the trail is NOT at the trailhead. The asphault road was chained off at the trailhead, so we decided to hike down the asphault road a ways, because we couldn't figure anything else to do.

We ran into somebody after another 10 minutes of walking down the asphault, and they told us the trail was at the end of the trail. So why didn't the trailhead say that you had to walk down the asphault road for a quarter mile to find the trail. Ug. So we finally got started hiking down the trail at about 2PM.

We hiked up towards Marshall saddle, and got hungry just before we got there, so we ate, and got to the saddle about 30 minutes later. It was all up hill to the saddle, but we stopped briefly as required to catch our breath from time to time.