Adventure Blog

For our last Art Hike of 2022 we visited one of my favorite hikes: Seven Falls in Bear Canyon. I love recommending this hike to people visiting Tucson because you get a little bit of everything: desert landscape, plenty of saguaros, canyon views, many, many creek crossings, and of course a waterfall at the end!

October's Art Hike was full of beautiful fall colors! Bear Wallow on Mt Lemmon is my favorite place for fall colors when the autumn season comes to Arizona. This unofficial trail is one of the top 5 places to find fall colors in Arizona according to Arizona Highways Magazine.

I'd just finished reading Wynne Brown's biography of Sara Plummer Lemmon called "The Forgotten Botanist" and was reminded that Sara and her husband JG Lemmon spent a lot of time botanizing the Huachucas, an Arizona Sky Island I'd never visited before! I looked on a map and quickly started planning my trip there.

Our August Art Hike allowed us to explore the Bigelow Trail after an incredible week of monsoons in Tucson. The Santa Catalina Mountains have been gobbling up all of this rain, turning the mountains lush and green, and sending huge amounts of water down to the thirsty washes and desert below.

This month's Art Hike took us to one of my favorite areas of the Catalinas: Bear Wallow. I love this trail because it's fairly flat so it's accessible to most people and you get a lot of "bang for your buck" in terms of beauty. Gorgeous aspens, conifers, ferns and wildflowers can be found along this trail. 

For June's Art Hike we headed back up Mt Lemmon to one of my favorite trails: Marshall Gulch. We got incredibly lucky with some cloud cover because this trail can get warm in the sun. We had another great group come out to hike and paint, some new faces and some who joined us last month.

Last month I hosted the very first Arizona Art Hike with The Kula Academy! I've wanted to do something like this for years, to finally combine my paint brushes and my hiking boots was a dream come true. It's kind of why I went with the name Brushes and Boots.

For living so close to Saguaro National Park, I don't make it there as much as I should. The Park is split into two districts, East and West, on either side of Tucson. The East district is 10 minutes from my home.

I haven't visited Sabino Canyon this much in years but this spring it's been calling my name! It's popular for a reason. I was delighted with how many blooming wildflowers and cacti I saw during this hike. Spring has sprung in the Sonoran Desert!

If you want to hike in Saguaro National Park but don't want to drive all the way into the Park, I have a not-so-secret secret to share with you: the Broadway Trailhead.

The last few years I've taken a solo birthday trip around the end of September, beginning of October. It's one of my favorite traditions and I love...

Four years ago this week I left my beloved city of Chicago and headed west with Tucson, AZ as my final destination. Rather than drive the 1,800 miles straight through over 3 days I decided to make an adventure out of it and planned a week long, solo road trip for myself. I crammed a lot into 7 days and definitely need to go back to some of these stops! It was a great introduction to the Southwest and I know there's still so much more for me to discover here.