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| - Let's take this hike one step at a time...
First, the only parking there is will be found at the Echo Canyon trailhead start. Considering the popularity of the hike there is no where near enough parking to accommodate everyone who wants to go on the trail and as everyone seems to note in the reviews there is ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING AVAILABLE in the surrounding area -- AS IN ZERO. The secret, however, seems to be patient. Yes, patient. If you hit the round about at the entrance and the lot is closed find a place to make a 5 minute tour of and circle back. What they do is open up the lot after a certain number of people leave and on our second attempt around the circle we got in. Since we seemed to be on the tail end of the allotment that entered we actually did not find an empty slot waiting for us. Rather we had to wait for someone else to leave and given the number of people active on the trail this only took around 5 minutes.
From the start I was surprised with how little support there is to be found. Bathrooms, yes, just about anything else, no. If there was a trail guide outside of the one post we found along the trail I did not see it. Nor did I see anyone on the trail itself. This is a far cry from a rather extensive support system in place at the, say, Pinnacle Peak hike in Scottsdale.
The first part of the trail is like pretty much any hike you would imagine but from there the climb starts. At first you have the steep trek with the hand rail and that soon turns into what seems like a never ending pile of large rocks. This is a full range of movement hike. There is no way you are going to get very far if you have anything close to what could be called a knee problem.
Unless you have a wondrous mountain goat like capability yourself part of the fun of this hike is seeing the people wiz by you who do. There was one part in our ascent where I was just starting to feel a little bit accomplished as I completed one of hand rail segments only to have a woman with an infant strapped to her front gracefully blow past us. Wow...
Making it to the top is an amazing experience. Though we took the time to enjoy the feat of making it that far that emotion quickly turned into the realization that now we had to make it down -- and guess what? -- not that we needed it but there is ZERO cell service at the peak!
Since I knew Uber was in the area we made the call to keep going and thus started our decent down the Cholla Trail which seemed like a joke just getting off the peak. As in if I did not see people coming up from that trail I would have no idea how to get down that way.
It was a completely different experience on the Cholla side with a number of areas being very difficult to descend. I thought about which way would be better to go up vs. down and I still do not know what the best answer is.
Getting to the trail end was a joy. It is literally in a residential neighborhood where we walked to the nearest intersection and then called an Uber car to pick us up. 7 minutes later we were taking the 7 minute drive back to our car to celebrate the end of a great day of hiking.
I guess on a final note -- I laugh at the Yelp question of "Good for Kids?" Well, it depends. There were some amazingly young kids on this trek. Some who looked like they are being pushed way to far and others who might need to rescue their parents. So, to answer this question it is going to depend 100% on the extreme ability of your kids to face this kind of challenge.
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