Hiking in Pima County

The climate around Tucson is desert. They get around 12 inches of rain a year, and most everywhere you look, it looks like this:

 

Which does not mean it is not conducive for hiking. As I mentioned in a previous post, we took an early morning hike the first morning we were here, and have taken several more over the past couple of days. I wish we would be staying longer, as we would have hiked more. The first day here was very hot, about 99 degrees F, but today it was very pleasant, no hotter than 85.

But it is dry, dry, dry. You need to carry water, and drink it, hot or not.

The payoff is high, though. This is the only place in the world where saguaro (saw-war-oh) cactus grow. They grow slowly, and they are amazingly strange. At night, I think that they get up and wander about the mountains. 

Like we did during the day.

We did have some luck with wildlife. As I showed in a previous post, we saw a coyote near the house.

We also saw Cactus Wrens:


and plenty of Gila Woodpeckers, Black Headed Grosbeaks, White Wing Doves (who sing a song that sounds like they're singing), Black Vultures, Verdins, Hummingbirds, Crows (though maybe Ravens), Collared Lizards, and a couple of Ring Tail Cats. 

The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold.

But this area has been occupied for a long time. On one of our hikes, more petroglyphs were promised.

Here are the more obvious ones:


Very easy to access, and the Hohokums had a sense of style.


But there was another hike were most of the comments on Alltrails were: "I can't seen any petroglyphs! There are no signs pointing them out!" People. Sheesh

We saw these up on the canyon walls:


and we saw this old Miner's Cabin, too.



More petroglyphs (look behind Doreen. She is there for scale)


and more
and more. With me for scale.

And though I was sorely tempted, I did NOT touch them.


On the walls:
Close up:
More. What does it mean?

That is where we spotted them. I think we were the first people to see them in 1,000 years.


But more typically, this is how our hikes looked:


The saguaros are used for many animals. The gila woodpeckers dig the holes, and then other animals take them over.

Close up.
We are sad to leave this place.
But it is better to leave when you want to stay, than stay when you want to leave.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 18, 2021 at 1:09 PM

    Beautiful. At least it is not raining like it has been here.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home again home again

Image
 17 days, 8 cities, 3,400 miles later, and we are home again. Lulu was very happy to see us, even though she was very well taken care of by our friends. I think she will be missing our vacation as much as we did. But for now she is content to have us home. It was great fun to see graffiti that came from WWII, and more images (below) that came from thousands of years before that. We met people at the peak of their careers, choosing Marfa as a place to be while they make their bones in the journalism or art worlds. I hope they don't feel locked down. I met an old friend who lived out his career as what we used to call a Tramp Miner, and is now retired to Silver City, NM, a place I almost moved to when I was 24. We saw amazing things that you read about your whole life, like the Petrified Forest, and realize that yes, you should see things like this at least once. Or twice There are amazing things that get preserved in a county that gets no rain. Like a thousand year old meteor crater
Read more

Seminole Canyon Rim Hike to the Rio Grande and back

Image
We like hiking. Especially where we don't run into many people, and we can expect to see unusual things. But sometimes we bite off more than we anticipate. We can chew it, I guess, because we always do. The interesting thing here is that we decided that it was worth an 8 mile hike in the desert to see something we had no idea existed a month ago. At the end of this hike, where the Seminole Canyon meets the Rio Grande, there is a HUGE pictograph of a panther. Only viewable via this hike right now, because of the water level of the Rio Grande (otherwise they offer boat tours) Here was our route (tracked using Alltrails)  We thought it was 4 miles round trip... So we started out with great aplomb. It was sunny, but not hot. That is a good thing, as there was no shade for the first five miles. The views were great. And after the first five minutes, we did not see one other person. Seminole Canyon: Interesting fossils in the rocks: Getting close to the Rio Grande: That's the Rio Gra
Read more

Tucson

Image
  The last time I was in Tucson it was Spring Break of 1980, and I was here for the College World Series of Mining Schools. We were competing in a number of categories, from what I remember they were: Hand Mucking, Hand Drilling, Jack Leg Drilling, Rail Setting, and Beer Drinking. The schools that made it to the competition were University of Arizona School of Mines (of course, the host school since they won the year before), Colorado School of Mines, Montana School of Mines, South Dakota School of Mines, Missouri School of Mines (that's in Rolla, in case you were wondering). Of those, only CSM and SDSM offer undergraduate Mining Engineering degrees. Sic transit gloria mundi .  UW placed last, scoring points only in the beer drinking. We had driven straight through from Madison to Tucson in the head of our department's station wagon. (Thank you, and RIP, Dr Bob Heins) There were 5 of us (as I recall) and it was not a calm bunch. I was the President of the Mining Club (because,
Read more