Treasures and other surprises

July 18-20 second of four posts

On Saturday morning, we headed into Yarnell, as we do every Saturday morning, for donuts at the Cornerstone Bakery. This cute and incredibly popular bakery is famous for its donuts, which are light and fluffy buttermilk gems glazed with chocolate or maple, or dusted in sugar. We get the chocolate. The bakery also sells house-made cinnamon rolls the size of a dinner plate, brownies, brownies, cookies, huge blueberry muffins and chocolate muffins with cream cheese centers. Breakfast sandwiches served on sourdough biscuits or traditional breakfasts are also served on the weekends.

After our donut run, we decided to do a little exploring, and turned off on a little road not far from the ranch entrance. It turned out to be a dry creek bed, and got rocky and narrow enough that we began to doubt the wisdom of our decision. The creek bed was a mile long and connected the ranch road with Sorrel Ranch Road. Our neighbors, the Stowes, said it used to be the only way to get to the ranch. We found this odd cluster of plastic palms at about the half-way mark. 

Once inside the ranch, we explored some roads we hadn't tried before. We were impressed by the sheer size of phase 3, which was much larger and more diverse than we realized. We had bought extra donuts for Sunday's breakfast and I started to think we would need them that day.

We found this wonderful spot, on an 18-acre parcel, with a windmill and a well for sale for about $240,000. A cluster of cattle huddled under a nearby tree staring mournfully at us as we passed.

Our biggest surprise was this amazing pond!

Gerald even discovered some valuable artifacts, but left them for the next explorers.