Sycamore Canyon - July 25th, 2004

Thanks to the report provided to the Tucson RBA by Michael Perrone, Steve Hampton, and Luke Hampton on 7/20/2004 (see below), I hiked solo into Sycamore Canyon on 7/25/2004 hoping to locate the bird.

A *RUFOUS-CAPPED WARBLER was reported again in Sycamore Canyon on the 20th. The bird was 2.19 miles (as the crow flies) from the center of the parking area at Hank and Yank Spring and 2.16 miles from the row of brown posts. This is just upstream from campsite point. The observers placed a kairn on a boulder in the middle of the stream to mark the area. GPS coordinates are as follows: N 31°24.232'W 111°12.299' (Michael Perrone, Steve Hampton, and Luke Hampton).

[NOTE: See one of the bird finding guides for Southeast Arizona for directions to the trailhead via Ruby Rd.]

Having spent the prior evening owling in Miller Canyon and overnighting in Sierra Vista, I had to wake at 3:30 AM to pack up and make the trip to the Canyon, arriving just before 6 AM. I felt that I should have ideally started hiking 45 minutes earlier. I was fortunate to have a failry cool day throughout. The hiking was often rough, but I found that more often than not, a defined trail could be found on either side of the creek bed. The only real challenge came about a mile in where the canyon narrows considerably with steep rock walls and stagnant pools block the trail. There, I was forced to carefully traverse the rock and felt a little anxious that I might slip into the water.

Just prior to the junction with Penasco Canyon which comes in from the left, the hiking becomes more straightforward, although still rocky. Stay right and begin looking for a defined trail on the left (east) side of the streambed. From this trail, I missed the cairn in the streambed but Tucson birder Ethan Beasley (to whom I owe my own eventual sighting of the warblers) corrected that problem with a second cairn adjacent to the first up on the trail. It would now be hard to miss both cairns. It took me about one hour to reach the Penasco Canyon junction and another half hour to reach the cairn (which I didn't know at the time because I missed it).

If you do still miss both cairns you will eventually come to another cairn farther down the canyon. I reached this cairn after about two hours of hiking and took this picture of it not realizing I had overshot my target. I spent an hour and a half waiting patiently and hiking back and forth a half mile in each direction until I gave up at about 9:30 AM. I then met Ethan at about 10:00 AM and he had just seen the warblers about 1/4 mile back. Although he was shooting for the border and had a considerable hike ahead of himself, he went 1/2 hour out of his way to show me the correct spot for observing the warbler. I waited about twenty minutes for the warblers to become active in the trees just upslope from the trail and they stayed active for another twenty minutes or so before receding farther up the slope.

These two rocks are NOT the warbler cairn!

Finally, success! All thanks to Ethan Beasley.

On the way out of the canyon, I practically stepped on a coiled rattlesnake whose rattle came almost too late for me to avoid confrontation. Stay alert in the canyon!