Pyeatte Draw Road & the Grey Hairstreak

April 20, 2026 — Day 27

Houston Mesa Optional Horse Campground, Tonto National Forest, Payson, AZ

Today was to be an adventure. We were going to drive the Pyeatta Draw road, before you start googling nobody knows who Pyeatta was and a Draw is just a narrow rocky ravine. Googling will show you immense wet rocks, like this.

SO much can wrong in that picture. This is not the trail we were on. We were on the parallel fire roads which shares the same name that the off-road community calls the Cheater Road. We don’t care, we had fun.

But first we had to get there, it was 5 scenic paved miles to the turn off, which we had missed and had to bang a U-ey.

Much nicer than that thing above!

Maybe we pulled in here to see if it was a Pokestop? Maybe we wanted to show you the cool iron cutout in the sign? We’re not telling.

Soon we were on dirt and found the first of very many side roads. Many of them had tent or van campers in there. We even scoped out a few that Clifford would fit in, and more importantly, not get stuck in. At the first sign of nasty rocks, we stopped, and saw some birds.

We stopped, got out, tried to get IDs, I think at this spot we heard 2 life birds, but hearing doesn’t count in our books.

Sadness at one campsite, I think we had lunch here.

Soon another off-shoot starting to climb. Could we get a few?

Susan found a very large hoof print, cow or elk. We’ll pretend it was elk. Oh look, an elk!

We are always a bit surprised when the dirt, or rocks, change color. Everything is mostly grey back home.

It is hard to see, but this is the only difficult obstacle on this part of the trail, and it wasn’t that difficult. But since we were wheeling alone Paul got out to see what was around the corner. (susan here: I HAD pictures of Paul going around the corner to check things out but *ahem* experienced “a technical glitch.” And that’s all we’re going to say about that day’s photos. 😉)

We crossed a mountain bike trail, but it looked pretty rugged and it certainly had a lot of elevation gain. (susan here: apparently around these parts people either don’t like bicycles or signs. Or, perhaps both!)

There was this purple flower, Paul took some photos. It was so bright it was hard to tell what the camera was seeing. And he certainly was happy for auto-focus. Much to his surprise he found a Grey Hairstreak butterfly in the shot.

It almost doesn’t look real.

We soon grew bored of the road, there is only so much dirt road one can do. We’ll still had to get back, so we turned around and headed home.