Given that I wanted to finish hiking in a place with good transportation options, I decided in Mammoth to defect from the Grand Enchantment Trail to follow a “choose your own adventure”-style route. From Mammoth, I rejoined the Arizona Trail, headed south toward Tucson.

It wasn’t long before I started climbing. Up, up, up. The thermometer flirted with ninety, and I found myself utterly grateful when clouds started rolling in the next morning. The trail continued to wind upward and the landscape shifted around me from cacti to trees.

The first drops of rain fell fat and heavy around four that afternoon. I paused, undecided, as another few hit my face. The last time it had “rained” on this trail, I’d felt maybe twenty raindrops before the hot winds blew the clouds away. This felt different. The clouds above were solid and light gray. The air had a damp chill already.

Within the span of minutes, the few raindrops increased to a steady downpour. I cowered under a red-barked tree and waited. Twenty minutes later I made up my mind: the hills and rain had won this round. I dashed back down the trail twenty yards to where I’d seen a campsite and set up my tent as quickly as possible before huddling inside and listening to the roar of rain hitting my raincover. I couldn’t remember ever hearing rain be quite so loud.

It didn’t let up all night. But inside the tent, I stayed dry, and when the rain drizzled off around six-thirty the next morning, I emerged from my tent to find a world shrouded in cold fog. My fingers went numb just packing up my soggy tent – this was not the desert as I’d known it, and the unexpected chilliness lent a curious charge to the air. It felt mysterious.

I continued climbing up, up. Steep, old dirt roads followed by rocky trails which hugged steep cliffs with edges falling off into the mist. By the time I saw the first white patch in the dirt, I couldn’t even be shocked anymore. It was mid-April in Arizona, in this land of twisted trees and sheer rock faces, deafening rain and blankets of white fog, why wouldn’t there be snow?

Several Arizona Trail hikers passed me, heading North, and all of them had the same report. The rain I’d had last night? Just a little ways further up the trail, at 8000 feet above sea level, the precipitation had fallen as snow.

In the time it took me to finish climbing up, the sun had turned a solid layer into only white patches, but even so, the crunch of snow under my shoes was impossible to ignore. I’d assumed this trail would be all desert. I was wrong.

I reached the highest point of this leg and finally descended, back through forests to rejoin the saguaros, leaving every trace of snow behind until the air cushioned everything with warmth again.

My final night on the trail, I camped on a rocky ledge and watched the sun set brilliantly over the distant lights of Tucson. It was a perfect ending to this adventure.