Tucson

A first-person perspective

All day, desert broom seeds were in the air everywhere, streaming by in a persistent light breeze from the southeast. Tucson was a chilly 42 degrees in the pre-dawn morning, but less cold in the starting line, sheltered by the downtown skyscrapers. I thought that I'd be early, arriving at 6am, but by the time I got to the start, thousands and thousands of cyclists were already queued up, filling solid four or five city blocks. I squeezed into a spot in the 'Bronze' block. It seemed appropriate: in 1992, I'd done the 10th annual El Tour de Tucson in 7 hours 38 minutes [the best riders do it in under 4.5 hours], good enough for the 'Bronze' category [I think they've since changed the medal ranges]. Back then, it was a couple of miles longer, and went clockwise around the city.

So it was a little bit of a trip down memory lane as well--distant memories, faded by 17 years, almost half my life, and encountered in reverse. The dry Santa Cruz river crossing, complete with a Mariachi band serenading us. The dry Sabino Creek crossing at Canyon Ranch. The long stretch of Tangerine Road, thankfully now a descent.

Midway between these two rides, sagging like an overburdened hammock, the late 90's and early aught's, I had been pretty out of shape: over 170 lbs, high cholesterol, lacking energy. Now, after a few years of running seriously and a year or so of cycling, I feel in better shape than ever: most of those extra L.B.s had been dropped, cholesterol cleaned up... probably could do it in 6.5 hours, I hoped.

7am, dawn, rider #201 was ready to go. The start was given. But there were so many riders ahead, it was four or five long minutes before we could even start moving. We joked. "I'd just be a hazard up front," said the guy next to me. "I'm a hazard back here," I replied.

But eventually, we did get started, slowly, the streets packed curb-to-curb with riders. We covered the first few blocks at a walking pace. One rider a little ahead went down but popped back up unhurt.

"Never been done before." That's how Mr. X of Tucson's X Hiking Club described his intrepid plan to hike the steep Blackett's trail, blaze through dense desert to Thimble Peak, then descend through the perilous Seven Falls back to the base of Sabino Canyon. [For the record, he puts together a full range of hikes from beginner/training to... this].

For nearly ten straight hours we (he, Wafer and I) were scrambling up and down steep, near-vertical chutes. That's when we weren't hopping across boulders, traversing slide-rock above waterfalls, dodging tumbling boulders ("ROCK!") or plowing through desert scrub and cacti (in Sonora, what looks barren from far away always turns out to be a thicket of dry, stickery plants). We surprised two white-tailed deer who took off, climbing the ledges like mountain goats.

And, to reach the summit, a small rock climb (plenty of holds) then, ultimately, a 15-foot ledge with a fixed rope. A few years ago I would have been too chickenisht to tackle that. A few years ago I wouldn't have been fit enought to do all that in a day. As it was, I felt like I'd spent an evening in a Syrian prison... but it was worth it!

Check out Wafer's photoset on Flickr, with some good video of us crossing the Falls on page 2.

Check out Mr. X's videos (indexed below) and photos.

• Thimble
• Scramble
• Crevasse
• Negotiation
• Sabino
• Brush
• Slope
• Feet
• Ridge
• Rockslide
• Cliff-Out
• 45-Degrees
• Cactus
• Video
• Rock
• Dirt
• Steep
• Hallucination
• Route
• Wash
• Near-Vertical
• Canyon
• Exhausted
• Snow
• Crack
• Piece-O-Cake
• Summit
• 360
• Descent
• Jump
• Hop
• Falls
• Down

Update: Here's the GPS data you can open in Google Earth. It doesn't always line up with the terrain, but that is to be expected.

Mary turned me on to the botanical splendor of hedgehog cacti. Last year, I hiked a few miles in the Cactus Forest area of Saguaro National Park (East) to photograph a bunch of them for her (since she'd be unable to do the hike). It was mid-April, probably a little late to catch the best show, but there were still many good ones in shadier areas. It was thick with the suckers, every few steps brought a new one into view. Below is a montage of the shots I took, click it for a larger version (3.7 MB).

But first, an image of a rattler that I very nearly stepped on during the hike!

The X Hiking Club folks are a lot of fun, eXtremely avid hikers, and not content to stick to the standard routes. Here's a Flickr set of our Blackett's Ridge/Phoneline Hike/Scramble/Bushwhack in Sabino Canyon. And here's my photo gallery of the hike.

Last weekend, I joined a hike organized by the Rincon Group of the Sierra Club, to the summit of Mt. Fagan in the Santa Ritas south of Tucson.

Lainie Levick, a board member of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas was on the hike, and talked about the efforts to prevent a proposed copper mine out there.

Check out my photo gallery for pics and comments.

So the (University of) Arizona Wildcat accidentally re-published a comic the morning after the election. It's by an African-American cartoonist and is based upon a real incident. It features "the N word" (partly obfuscated) and sends an important message about the casual racism that is still not too hard to find in the U.S.

Due to some snafu, it was published last Wednesday instead of a few weeks ago. A lot of people are very upset. It's probably appropriate that they fire the editor... don't they do a read-through?

The Tucson Museum o' fArt has a great display of Maynard Dixon paintings, one of the great painters of the American West, and former Tucson resident (he died in 1946). Lots of amazing works, many set in Tucson or parts of Arizona and New Mexico. You've probably seen a lot of these paintings, even if you can't recall any of them. His impressionistic style was well-suited to the desert southwest, where photos often can't fully convey the experience of epic scenery.

One of my favorites was 'Sky and Sandstone' (it does not look like any of the postage-stamp scans on the web), with Navajo (or Apache) riders against the background of a stark blue desert sky. The sky is a smooth gradient from deep azure down to turquoise above the sandstone on which they stand. The interesting thing is that he put most of the color variation down in a corner, in pockets of sandstone.

Another fascinating technique is employed in 'Corral Dust', which is a typical ranch scene, but he really managed to capture the look of dust, which must have been quite a technical challenge. From up close, it just looks like a large, mostly featureless splotch, but if you step back, your eyes start filling in details.

The show runs through 2/15 and is free the first sunday of each month.

Local band Calexico hosted a benefit for Mariachi Aztlan (Pueblo High School) on Friday evening at Tucson's Rialto Theatre. It featured performances not only from Salvador Duran, a Mexican folk-singer, from the core of Calexico, singer Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, from the current 5-member incarnation of Calexico, from Mariachi Aztlan and also the professional group Mariachi Luz de Luna, but it also featured performances from various combinations of the above! It was an incredible, unique concert experience, and outstanding in every way. The benefit will help Mariachi Aztlan go to Washington D.C. and perform at the nation's Fourth of July event.

Joey Burns is a good singer and, unexpectedly for me at least, he's exceptional live. Calexico played their most popular songs, Quattro (World Drifts In) and Crystal Frontier and an amazing cover of Bob Dylan's Goin' to Acalpulco. The first two songs that Joey & John played (by themselves) were new. With only two instruments, they had a stripped-down elegance; tales of lonesome desert highways (I think he name-dropped the Triple-T Truckstop) and melancholy. With the full band they played a number of songs I'm not familiar with (but hopefully will soon), songs that seemed to start in the desert or the city but spun out into galactic space jams that unfortunately, in all but one case, seemed to end too soon.

An appropriately raucous Guero Canelo was a "tip o' the hat" to us locals. Joey intro'd it by saying "we mentioned the name of this song to some of the newer kids here [in Mariachi Aztlan] and they immediately got hungry... but it wasn't for food." (???)

Guitarist Nick Luca sang lead on one of his own songs (One Way Ticket?), the lyrics were pretty bad, like a 1st-time song-writing effort, but it was a nice change.

I was really impressed by Mariachi Aztlan. I'm not familiar with much mariachi music, but they made it sound fresh and re-invigorated. Plus it was cool to see so many musicians (six guitarists, six violins, two horns?) going all-out at once, and rotating around to highlight different sections. Their band leader, Johnny Contreras, introducing the seniors first, remarked that a few had graduated just the night before, but they still sounded great! One interesting departure was a version of Frank Sinatra's My Way, very well sung (in English), forming kind of a window into forty years of cross-cultural musical strands woven into a uniquely Tucsonan pattern.

Later, seeing Mariachi Luz de Luna was somewhat of a contrast, with highly polished and perfected mariachi classics. All the performers got on stage for a finale, a cover of Neil Young's Heart of Gold, it was wild to see dozens of musicians contributing to that all at once.

"Chuparosa" means hummingbird or, in this case, a common name for justicia california, a flowering shrub that hummingbirds prefer. Chuparosa is literally 'rose-sucker', like "Chupacabra" is 'goat-sucker'.

They typically bloom in early spring. Here is the one in front of the Flandrau Planetarium on the UofA campus, as of last week, when it was in full bloom. The Tohono Chul botanical garden on the northwest side has a similar one. We purchased one there about 18 months ago (pictured below). The hard freeze in December of 2006 killed all the leaves, I was bummed, thinking it was a goner. But it has since come back. Actually, it started blooming one year later. It has a long way to go; you can barely see the flowers in this thumbnail image!

You'll find them in a variety of places around town. There's some by the UofA medical library, and on Tucson Blvd. west of the Rincon Market. I think these are really cool-looking plants, not just for the deep red flowers, but for how they contrast with the light-green spindly branches.

They will cease blooming very soon, check 'em out while you can.

This is Sammy, a Chihuahua (that we actually got back in January). Mary was looking for a small long-haired female puppy. Sammy is a seven-year-old small short-haired male. But it turned out he was just what we wanted in a new dog.

The Animal League of Green Valley is an excellent place to adopt a pet. Unlike "the pound", their dogs and cats are not mostly strays or sick. Rather, I think most of them may be from older folks who kick the bucket (Green Valley is a large retirement community). In the case of Sammy however, his owner could not keep him because of deployment overseas.

But what a great dog! He's exceptionally well-trained, playful, with no bad habits. Well, he does get kind of freaked when we leave for even short errands, but we're working on that.

Yesterday I hiked from the Broadway Trailhead in Saguaro East up past Garwood Dam and Steel Tank to Bridal Wreath Falls. A storm front was moving in, leading to all sorts of weather. That's right, weather... something we don't often experience here in Tucson. It went from cloudy and overcast to mostly sunny to drizzle to rainstorm to cloudy again to snow flurries by the time I reached the falls. Then, on the way back, all of that plus a brief spate of hail. It made for an incredible day of hiking. Wildflowers were everywhere and I went crazy with the camera. Hedgehog cacti and other mammalaria were not blooming yet, though some had buds... I'd give it another couple of weeks.

Here's Garwood Dam, a tiny way up the "bajada" at the base of the Rincons. This is really easy to get to, just about 3 miles from the end of Broadway, mostly along the Pink Hill Trail, named for its noticeably redder (richer in iron oxides) soil. In fact a large group of hikers were there at the same time.

A little farther along is "Steel Tank" where a community of goldfish have remained for a couple of decades (after the Park Service removed them and, the story goes, outcry led them to be re-stocked).

This image is in a small canyon above the Dam along the Carillo trail. The Falls were a little disappointing, being only a trickle; there was a little water running in places much lower down, so my hopes had been up. It can be reached by a much shorter hike from the Speedway trailhead (Douglas Springs trail), but I finally made it there from Broadway (a little closer to our house), making for a 13-mile roundtrip hike.

Saturday I nailed up the seven 4' x 8' redwood lattice panels, and our rebuilt trellis was complete. The old one had been falling apart and barely standing; poorly anchored and becoming unstable. This one is anchored in concrete piers (2' deep), with metal braces bolted into the posts, and has plywood along the top to hold everything together. Hopefully the bouganvillas will have a big spring and summer and cover that space back up.

Total cost was around $250. And it was actually a lot of fun!

The cassias are in full flower once again, they have been for a couple of weeks, officially heralding the start of spring [in my book]. One of our neighbors hates them with a passion, and even admitted that when our house was for sale, she thought seriously about coming over and ripping it out! C'mon, what's not to like?!?

Okay, maybe it just sits there looking shrubby 48 weeks out of the year, but doesn't it make up for it in a spectacular way?

It took five months or so, but the first anti-Lute [Olsen] editorial I've seen recently appeared, on the front page of the Daily Wildcat no less. I want to congratulate the author (Daily Wildcat senior sports editor Michael Schwartz) for taking such a brave stance. He's probably already been tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail, for daring to condemn Lute for his "lack of class."

I do think it lacks class. Here we have the State's highest paid employee taking an eight-month leave of absence for personal reasons, specifically saying that it was not health-related, but now apparently admitting that it was health-related (although he did file for divorce in that time period). But as he continues to draw his three-quarters of a million dollar annual salary [and with the interim coach, Kevin O'Neill, now drawing a nearly equivalent salary], courtesy of Arizona taxpayers, I think we have a right to just a little bit of transparency. Either that, or he should have stepped down. I'm fully in favor of leaves of absence when needed, and of not being forced to make your private matters public, but with a duration this long and this costly, I don't think Lute did the right thing.

Spring is busting out all over. Many things are blooming already, more are just getting set to pop. I went out to take photos of some of the things in are garden, getting all up in their bidness... here is the gallery. This one of a cholla ("staghorn cholla?") is my favorite.

This story about the shortage of farm workers simply must be listened to.

According to the report, in Cochise county (AZ), farmers need to double their labor force to bring in the crops reliably each season. Cochise county begins not too far from where I live, and stretches down to the border with Mexico. They're bringing in undocumented workers so the harvests won't spoil, playing cat and mouse with the Border Patrol. This is a compelling argument why we should boost our immigration quota with Mexico dramatically; something I've felt strongly about for years.

Conditions, the story makes clear, are not so good for these workers. An "Anne Frank existence" of hidden living quarters and secret roads, living out their lives as a racial subclass right here in America. Sure, they probably wouldn't be here if it weren't an improvement, but the point is, it is terribly un-American that this situation should continue.

Here in the city of Tucson, it's obvious there is a similar (though not as severe) labor shortage. Within several miles of our house, there are numerous construction sites advertising "workers wanted". Throughout the city, "now hiring" is not uncommon at various retail or fast food places ( of course a high turnover rate is standard practice in that industry). In-fill continues all around, the exurbs are exploding; we're now the fastest growing state in the nation. It's high time we re-examined our absurdly low (if not outright racist) immigration policies.

From last month's snow, here is a panoramic image. It links to the full resolution JPG (a 5 MB PNG is also available).

'Moonlight May Be Beneficial To Sick' is the headline of a news article today, the third I've seen in recent months regarding an eccentric Tucson millionare's construction of a moonbean collector, claimed to heal the sick.

I guess nobody told him that moonlight is just reflected sunlight! The whole thing is absolutely daft and it aggravates me that this 2 million dollars could have been spent on something useful, like say, cancer research.

I can't believe that this project, which they are now calling the "Interstellar Light Collector" (revealing their complete ignorance), is reported so uncritically. What a joke!

Sunday evening it began to snow, and by twilight it was sticking. I've only seen that once before, in 1990, during my first year at the UofA, which was only a light dusting.

Out here on the eastside, we received at least an inch... so I got up before sunrise to take a set of pictures from around the neighborhood.

By sunset on Monday it had mostly melted.

During our five plus months with no measurable rain, these agave plants in our front yard got all brown and crispy. I thought maybe there was a chance they were still alive, but they looked dead, brown and toasty. Mary believed they were dead, and I finally had to give up hope. We removed a bunch of them in a place where we've put in a "Chuparosa" (justica californica). But after a couple of rains, the one s we left are all back, healthy, and shooting up stalks! Take a look...