Reply
The Pima County Public Library is after my own heart. This month, I wrote in the Desert Leaf about the PCPL Librarian Files, a resource for local information that Tucsonans may have difficulty locating any other way. I love my …
Category Archives: Arizona
Somewhere below 5,000 feet, you notice the saguaros are gone, replaced by oak grasslands and twenty foot agaves in bloom. Another thousand feet and you enter Bear Canyon and feel the cool from Arizona sycamores and alligator junipers. Further up the canyon, you notice the piney vanilla scent of huge ponderosas, their green crowns spiking the now intense blue sky. Breathe deep. Stand on the pedals. Stretch your back and shoulders. Push a little. Feel the burn, the joy of your body, working as it should. A canyon wren’s liquid descending song cheers you on.
Leftover snow with underlying ice made the going a tad slow in places. Seven miles and 3,000 vertical feet to Linda Vista, a good hike for my feet. Nice to be breathing in the fresh scents of the desert plants and stimulating conversation with friends. A new trail for me. Maybe next time,after the ice melts, The Finger, a thousand or so feet higher.
Recently Claire and I were lucky enough to catch a hike guided by the park paleontologist and an interpretive ranger. The short, two mile or so, hike took us away from the road and interpretive signs and into the washes and flats where dinosaurs died 225 million years ago in the late Triassic Period. We found pieces of bone and Claire even found an intact tooth. The stark landscape adds to the mystery and amazement of the realization that you are holding a thing, that was once part of a living Stagonolepis so long ago. Nothing like science to put one’s lifespan into perspective.
Just another spring day in Tucson. We rode our usual mid day 24 mile bike ride to Saguaro National Park, around the one way loop road, and back. After two days of unusual cool rain, the day was in the mid 80’s and the usual bright sun.
After a wet El Nino winter, the annual brittlebush and ocotillo are blooming strong, with other cactus just beginning a two month bloom.
A group of Tucson cycling friends rode a loop from Patagonia to the U.S. Mexico border and back to Patagonia recently. The loop is 50 miles, about 40 of it on dirt roads. It takes in mining ghost towns nestled in oak covered hills, and a broad expanse of high grassland ranches.
This is one of my favorite times of the year in the desert, flowing water, many colored blossoms, green foliage, cactus looking fat and happy, beginning to bud, and the Arizona sycamores and cottonwoods Shadow and boots, seven fallsbursting with green.
The Wave permit area on Bureau of Land Management Coyote Buttes wilderness area in Northern Arizona. I would like to have had a person in the photo for scale, but the sides were way too steep, including the place where I was standing.
Claire’s fresh from the oven multi-grain (no knead recipe) bread, Gorgonzola, avocado, tomato, a salad with raspberry vinaigrette and pecans.