On a mostly cloudy morning in late July, eight Arizona Trailblazers meet near the launch ramp area of Willow Springs Lake, one of the seven Rim Lakes on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. Our goal today is to kayak as much of the lake as possible before any potential thunderstorms make their appearance over the lake.

Vita carefully maneuvers her paddleboard.
[photo by Mohammed]

We start prepping our kayaks for launch as quickly as possible. John and I are transporting both of our kayaks on the roof-mounted kayak brackets of his Jeep for the first time as a practice run for the club’s upcoming Lake Powell trip. So it’s going to take us a little longer to get our kayaks ready to launch. For one reason or another, though, we invariably never seem to get started as soon as I would like to on these trips. There are always delays of one kind or another. And even though most of us arrive at the lake well before 9:00 AM, it’s past 9:20 by the time we slide our kayaks into the water. With clouds overhead, a cool breeze out of the southwest, and the air temperature hovering at 77 degrees, this has all the makings for another perfect day of kayaking.

Although at a casual glance it doesn’t really seem that much larger, at 158 surface acres Willow Springs Lake is almost three times the size of nearby Woods Canyon Lake, at 55 surface acres. Both lakes are 7,500 feet above sea level and offer a cool and refreshing retreat from the blazing hot deserts of Southern Arizona.

However, today the lake has shrunk somewhat in size since the water level is down almost ten vertical feet. Because of that, we can no longer kayak into certain areas of the lake that are now sitting high and dry. Also sitting high and dry is the lake’s main launch ramp. And numerous potential take-out points along the shoreline are now little more than large mud bogs, making it a challenge to find a good place to go ashore.

Willow Springs Lake was originally created in 1966, primarily as a recreational trout fishing lake, by the Arizona Game & Fish Department. With no permanent inflows of water from natural sources like springs or creeks, the only water source for this lake is snow melt, thus the unusual moniker for an Arizona lake: “The Lake Made of Snow”. Unfortunately, with Arizona’s ongoing drought conditions, both rainfall and especially snowfall in the high country have diminished over the years, thus reducing the sole water source for Willow Springs Lake and resulting in dropping water levels in the lake.

As with all the Rim Lakes, the shoreline is surrounded by a heavy forest cover of Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, aspen, and several species of oak.

By 11:15 some of us are starting to get a little hungry, especially since we all had to get up pretty early to make the long drive to the lake. We start looking for a good location to beach our kayaks and get out for a well-deserved rest and lunch break. We had earlier passed a promising sandy shoreline, but that’s too far away to go back now so we paddle into another long arm of the lake and finally settle on what looks to be a fairly good take-out point with plenty of large rock shelves for seating.

But looks can sometimes be deceiving, and several of us get mired down in deep mud as we exit our kayaks. The mud is trying to suck my left shoe off, but after struggling for a minute or two I finally manage to extract it from the quagmire and get safely ashore.

So far the weather is still looking good, with the sun occasionally trying to poke through the cloud cover but never quite succeeding. And, thankfully, no signs of thunderstorm activity yet.

After a relaxing lunch and snack break we get back into our kayaks and head back out on the lake. We had earlier spotted a large osprey nest in the very top of a tall dead Ponderosa pine tree, where they prefer to build their nests. And although there were several ospreys circling around in the area then, we didn’t see any activity in the nest. Passing the nest once again on the way back to the launch area, we see what appears to be a juvenile osprey testing its flight wings on the nest. But it could also be an adult bird bringing a meal back for its chicks.

It’s too hard to tell from this far away. But there’s certainly a lot of osprey activity on the lake today. At one point we see four of them circling high overhead in search of fish just beneath the surface.

Several of us make a brief stop at the dam, before heading back to the launch area and calling it a day. From here the group splits up, with half heading back home and half of us opting to stop in Payson for a delicious Thai meal at the Ayothaya Thai Café, where we’ve stopped several times in the past after Rim area hikes. Here, Mohammed and I swap interesting stories, with his being a lot more interesting than mine. John and I had spent about 15 minutes looking for my lost prescription sunglasses and were just about to take off, when I finally discovered them perched precariously on the hood of his Jeep. Had I not spotted them at the last second, they would have slid unseen off the hood and into the street and likely been run over and crushed.

While Mohammed was driving to the restaurant he saw a large bright orange pack bounce off the back of a truck ahead of him and land in the street. He tried to attract the attention of the driver by flashing his lights and hitting his horn, but the driver just kept on going, even speeding up to get away at one point.

A short madcap chase ensued from there, with speeds up to 85 mph. For safety reasons, Mohammed finally gave up, turned back, and retrieved the pack, still lying in the middle of the street with traffic going around it.

After lunch Mohammed opened the pack to see what was inside, including any possible ID, so he could return the pack to its owner. The first item was a hard plastic safety helmet and then what appeared to be climbing gear.