Gisela, Arizona – An ATV Ride

Our trip from the Northern Gila County Shooting Range, just outside of Payson, to the small town of Gisela was a beautiful trip through mountains, hills, and lower desert.

Here we found awesome views of the many hills and mountains that surround Gisela.

To get to the starting point of this trip you would take Highway 87 to the FS208 road. Follow the 208 east. Find an open pull off before you reach the junction of the 208 and the shooting range road. This is where we offload our quads.

Continue following the 208 until you reach another junction. This junction will give you the option of following the 208 or going left on FS 375.

We noticed on the map a place called "Hole in the Ground" at the end of the 375 road so we decided to take it first.

This road follows a power line and ends at one of the power towers. From this power tower you can see tall mountains and huge canyon areas. This is a place with some awesome views.

After taking in the breathtaking views here, we decided to continue on into Gisela. We backtracked to the junction of 375 and 208. We've had quite a bit of rain lately, so we got to ride through a few running creeks and even a puddle. Fun stuff.

We are now getting into the lower desert areas where we found all kinds of cactus.

The road all the way in to Gisela was pretty decent and I would say that this was a pretty easy, laid back kind of a ride.

We stopped for lunch where we had views of the mountains all around us.

Here is the town of Gisela off in the distance. In the upper, left hand corner of the picture you can see a portion of Tonto Creek.

After lunch we continued on the 208 to 417.

We remembered a bar or store or something when we were in Gisela years ago so we decided to seek it out while we were here.

It's not much anymore, unfortunately. It is a pretty cool looking old building though.

You can get to the community of Gisela by taking a right on the 417 road and driving a little ways until you hit pavement. Then you can explore.

We decided that we wanted to get to an area called "The Narrows", a portion of Tonto Creek. We followed the 417 road all the way around the Hashknife Ranch and the little community there. We were hoping to get close to the creek. Not much luck since all the roads had been completely washed out by the recent rains.

On our way along the 417 road we did see a couple of really cool things though. First, I noticed a hawk of some kind sitting at the very top of a tree and I just had to stop to get a picture. He was too far away to get a very clear picture but this one isn't too bad.

Then I was talking to my husband, Robert, about how I really wanted to get a picture of a crested saguaro one of these days and he said he might be able to get a picture one day when he was working on roads.

I was just thinking about how cool that would be when he said, "There's one right there!"

Of course, I replied, "Yeah, right! Whatever!" LOL.

But, he was right, there it was, the first crested saguaro I had ever seen other than pictures in a magazine. How cool is that?

Crested, or cristate, saguaros are kind of rare. The cresting is caused from the growing tip, fanning out instead of continuing to grow straight. There are different opinions as to why some of the saguaros do this and some don't. Some believe that it is a genetic mutation and others think it is from lightning strike, insect, or freeze damage. Who knows? It's just cool as far as I'm concerned.

Well, since we couldn't get to "The Narrows" because of the roads being washed out we decided to backtrack. On our way back we noticed an old cemetery on the hill above the Hashknife Ranch and had to go and check that out. I learned on the Internet that this is called the "Gisela Pioneer Cemetery".

Here is a grave of one of the many children in the cemetery. I took this picture because of the strange obelisk at the foot of the grave. I know a little about what an obelisk is and what it might represent but I don't understand some of the markings on it. Maybe someone on Gather might know something about it.

This next picture is the side facing the headstone and looks as if there might, at one time, been more to this feature, but it looks as if it has broken off.

Well, after looking for roads that would lead to Tonto Creek, and not finding any, we decided to take a ride through a wash that we knew had to lead in that direction. Finally! We made it. With all the rain, the creek had run very wide so it was a bit of work to get down to the actual water through all the debris. It was well worth it though.

There was a wall of driftwood. This creek must have really been cranking.