Livin' in a Desert Paradise - In and Around Tucson AZ


Jim captured these views sometime ago, and I am just getting around to posting them.  Taken between spring 2011 and late summer 2012.  Here are views from some of our favorite places.  

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These were taken from Windy Point, a rest stop and vista half way up to the Mount Lemmon ski resort… if you squint, you can see Tucson in the haze just beyond the ridge.
Tucson, down in the bowl of a volcano, is at 2500 ft. above sea level.  This picture was taken at about 4000 ft. above that.  Look closely, can you find the section of highway ¼ of the way up from
the lower left-hand corner?





Me, from behind…



150+ ft. drop off that rock ledge at the bottom right hand corner…  I can’t lie, I’m not as close to the edge as it looks…



Again, that’s Tucson nestled down in the bottom of the bowl.





Some mother and her two kids enjoying the sunset.


  
This is the road going past Roosevelt Lake, about 40 miles east of Phoenix… notice all the traffic?  It’s there, see it, there’s another car on the road…




You can see how Arizona deals with highway safety… this is a 45 mph speed limit road, if you forget to Stop, that’s only a 100 foot sheer drop to the water just past that yellow reflective road sign…







Ventana Canyon – I used to rent an apartment a half-mile from the trailhead that leads here.  Somebody left their decorative rock in the foreground, there…






Catalina State Park on the far side of town.  Just on the other side of that ridge at the horizon, is a lot more nothing…





You can go a couple miles up into the trails around Tucson and not see another human being the entire time.  The Sonoran Desert is populated by coyotes, javelin, bobcats, cougars, bear, mule deer, white tail deer, prong-horn antelope, Sonoran Big Horn sheep, lots of snakes, lots of big insects… some of which are quite nasty (Centruroides – the only one of over 56 species of scorpions in AZ that is considered to render the single potentially fatal insect sting of North America; the Sonoran Recluse – whose bite can cause blood poisoning, MRSA infection, sepsis, and tissue necrosis; Tarantula Hawk – a  strikingly-beautiful  2” long wasp with what is considered the second most excruciating sting of any insect; and, the 8” long giant desert centipede).  I have the equivalent of a month in the mountain trails, and haven’t seen any of the aforementioned critters, except white tailed deer, lots of zebra tailed lizards, a horny toad, and one, cute, little, terrified rattlesnake.  I wanted to give the poor little guy a hug, but, I didn’t think he’d appreciate it much… Jaguars have been photographed about 50 miles east of here.

There were three incidents of a curious cougar following folks around in Sabino Canyon (the next one east of Ventana) a couple years ago… and, in spite of the fact that they have occasionally been caught sun bathing in people’s lawn chairs next to the pool in the high rent district, there haven’t been any serious incidents…  however, every year two or three people die of heat stroke on the local trails, and a few others need to be airlifted out, usually Ventana, because it’s the most difficult and rugged of the trails frequented by tourists… usually out-of-towners who, like the folk wanting to pet the alligators… don’t know what the hell they are doing.  Remember, the elevation is about 5000 ft up in the trails, temps can be over a hundred, and the humidity is about 5%... requiring consuming a minimum of one liter per hour of water. 
We DO NOT go up into the trails without each of us taking our own personal Camel Pack with 3 litres of water and minimal emergency/survival/first aid equipment.  Bev’s phone does not get T-Mobile service in Ventana Canyon, at all, and there are black-out zones where my Verizon doesn’t work either. 


JB



















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