Charles Hester
Now that fall and winter are here, the SaddleBrooke Ranch Hiking Club (SBRHC) is back to a busy schedule of hikes. Since our Southern Arizona temperatures have cooled down, SBRHC guides have been leading hikes in the local area, ranging from easy, flat, short-distance hikes to challenging hikes featuring longer distances and tougher terrain. There’s definitely a hike for almost everyone.
The SBRHC now has a website! The site is at sites.google.com/view/sbr-hiking-club. We highly recommend that you bookmark the URL and refer back to it for club news. The site is only in its infancy at this time, and currently features only three sections: (1) Hiking calendar; (2) Club documents; (3) Photographs from previous hikes. We plan to turn this site into a portal for club news, announcements, trail and equipment reviews, and other items. Please check back as we add content to the site.
The club has a bit of membership housekeeping to discuss. Some members have mentioned to us that they are not consistently receiving club announcements via email. As you may know, the club was forced to move away from GroupWorks for club news when GroupWorks went away. After a long search for an alternative, the club found that there was no perfect solution, much less anything that did all the things GroupWorks did. The club transitioned to Google Groups for communicating with club members.
Unfortunately Google Groups is not perfect. When sending messages to members, one hitch we have found is this: Messages sent to our members with Gmail addresses appear to correctly go into their inboxes. However, many members who have email addresses other than Gmail—Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, and many others—have been reporting that our messages are going into their Junk or SPAM folder. If you are not receiving club announcements, please check your Junk or SPAM folder. Also, please note that hike announcements do not come from the main SBRHC email address ([email protected]), but instead from the person who will be guiding the hiking. If you have a non-Gmail address, and you are not receiving club announcements, please check your Junk/SPAM folder. Also, you can go to sites.google.com/view/sbr-hiking-club and look for upcoming hikes and club news there.