Due to the weather forecast of the waters of March descending on southern California for the weekend, I made the decision to hike up Picacho Peak instead. The park had a lot of visitors due to the wildflowers being out on the park – most of the visitors were either there for the wildflowers or for the hiking or for some of them, both the wildflowers and hiking. Due to a late start the hike was an afternoon adventure. Initially I thought the hike would need to be called off due to the overcast clouds and a few seconds of raindrops, but after a while since the rain never came I decided to proceed with the plan to turn back should I hear lightning.  The hunch turned out to be correct since later in the hike the weather cleared up.  There were a lot of people out on the trail although there were times when I saw no other hiker. This hike is comparable to Zion's Angel's Landing and Yosemite's Half Dome cables but I think when compared to Angel's Landing, this one was more difficult. For this hike, after leaving the saddle I put on my gloves for most of the remainder of the hike due to the cable sections and it was gloves on steel on the cable sections.  Also there were parts in the cable sections where I had to carefully plan my way up or down in order to keep at a minimum three points of contact with the ground or rock. Due to the write up about the cables I decided not to bring my trekking poles on this hike. While that decision proved helpful on the cables, the absence of my trekking poles made the descent much more difficult in the non-cable sections and there were times I wished I had brought them anyway. In spite of all that I made it to the summit and the views were worth the trip.  During the hike, Air Rescue and the Fire Personnel showed up to rescue a hiker. I didn't see a hiker in distress on the trail however, a couple of returning hikers who passed me on the way down told me that the couple who was sitting by the trail below the summit were the ones the Rescue Team had gone up for – apparently one of them was having trouble and had called to be picked up but otherwise did not appear to be in trouble and did not ask any of the hikers on the trail to inform the rescue team. From what I heard the person was picked up by the chopper and successfully rescued although the fire vehicles were still parked in the trailhead parking lot.