It's about that time when all the "snow birds" start flocking out of southern Arizona because the fast rising temperature makes it unbearable to venture outdoors. To escape the 99° F (37°C) heat, we ventured up to Mount Lemmon where it is always 20° cooler. Plus, we thought it would be a nice to take our "nephew" Rocco on a mini-adventure since we were watching him for the weekend.

The Catalina Highway, which runs through Mount Lemmon, was recently designated as the Sky Island Parkway. Sky islands are "mountains that are isolated by surrounding lowlands of a dramatically different environment". Basically if you get lost in the Santa Catalina's, you will want to travel up because that's where all the life is. At least, according to Bear Grylls. He did an episode in Arizona's Sky Islands (Season 6, Episode 1 Arizona Sky Islands).

We had a late start in the day and didn't plan a long adventure because husband injured his foot a few weeks back and it is slow to recover. This is why we haven't had many adventures lately... we want his foot to recover by the time we leave for our Caribbean adventure in 2.5 weeks! The Marshall Gulch area of Mount Lemmon is a great place to explore for shorter hikes.

OH MY GOSH IT'S WATER! If you haven't been in southern AZ, then you don't know how exciting it is to find natural, running water in this area.

Rocco was scared when we gave him a bath on Friday... so it was a little surprising when he jumped right into the stream! I think he was just pretending to be scared in the bath so we'd give him half a bag of Pupperoni Sticks. He's a trickster.

Doesn't this look so picturesque? Almost feels like we're not in southern Arizona.

The trick to getting your dog (husband) to look at the camera is to fake a sneeze right before you snap the picture.

Neither of us were ready to have our picture taken!

Homemade trail mix!

Man to man talk.