The Agatelady: Adventures and Events: Tonto National Forest, Carefree, Arizona

Last night we camped in the Tonto National Forest, located near Carefree, Arizona -- which is around an hour northeast of Phoenix. Friends, Jill and Gerald, want me to post some of the pictures of us so I am including the pictures from the last day or so in this update. There was no cell signal when we were there, so I did not update the blog this morning. Right now we are in Glendale, AZ at a shopping mall. We are going to go to the movies tonight to see Descendants and will camp here tonight. I drop off the RV in the morning and fly back to Michigan tomorrow.

I'll catch up with some of the other AZ pictures in the next couple of days.

I carefully snapped this picture while driving. It shows Jill and Gerald's RV and some dragoons that welcome you to Carefree, AZ.

We camped in the Tonto National Forest. Here is one of the mountains bathed in sunset glow.

Here are Jill and Gerald, as well as Bruce their dog. They are standing on the top of a small uplifted mound.

And me....

Today we spent the day rockhounding. The first site had some feldspar. While we were looking for specimens, I captured the sun coming through this cactus.

A bee cooperated for this photo.

Another cactus....

And more dragoon boulders.

The next two shots are not completely in focus since I was taking the pictures through the RV's glass window. I'm not sure what type of birds they are, but the first appears to be some type of raptor. He was around 16 to 18 inches tall.

This black bird had amazing red eyes. I was going to go out of the RV to get a shot, but he flew off.

There were lots of happy cacti communities.

Gerald drove their RV 10 miles down a very rugged road to Horseshoe Lake. The AZ rockhound guide said there would be agate and jasper. There was some jasper, but we didn't find any of the translucent black agate that the book said was there. Oh well -- we tried.