We were originally going to hike the Barnhardt trail, but realized at the last minute that this was the same area damaged by the mid-2004 Willow Fire.  Worried about trail erosion, we decided to hike along the Ballantine Trail instead.  In the end, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. 

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any easily accessible maps for Ballantine, except for a very simplified one at 2az.us.  We could probably purchase one from the Tonto National Forest Service, but they’re not downloadable.  So we plucked the trail description from Todd’s and headed on our way.  If you’re Googling, note that Todd spells it “Ballentine,” with two E’s rather than two A’s.

The Ballantine Trail is just east of Highway 87, about 8 miles south of Sunflower.  The trail-head is actually for Pine Creek, which is a 3 mile loop.  Ballantine starts at the 1.5 mile mark and continues East for another 10 miles. 

We didn’t have time to do the full 23 mile round trip, so we just hiked out as far as we could before the clock said we had to return — we haven’t been able to figure out where that was or how far we actually went.  We probably could have gone farther, but we periodically lost the trail and had to back-track to find the cairns we missed, hidden in the undergrowth. 

The undergrowth was thick, especially along the stream-bed.  Being late spring, just about everything was in bloom!  The undergrowth may have also been heavier than normal because most of the trees had burned and died in a fire a couple years ago.  Everywhere we hiked, there was scarring from fire — on both trees and cactus.  I learned afterwards that a forest fire had swept through this region in 2005. 

Although Ballantine had burned more recently than Barnhardt, erosion didn’t seem to be an issue.  The cactus and trees were burnt, but smaller plants were bursting out everywhere.  I suspect it’ll be the same for the Barnhardt Trail area.

Pictures (click for larger versions):