Tucson

Reluctantly leaving the quiet and solitude of Organ Pipe NM, we headed for Tucson for a week.  We camped again in the desert, but this time just over the pass was the huge sprawl of Tucson and surroundings.  There was so much to do in Tucson, we felt that we had barely scratched the surface.

The first three days we visited the historic mission, a very interesting and beautiful cave and the historic town of Tombstone.  We also visited nearby Saguaro National Park and did a short hike. I'll get to everything else we did in the next post!

The oldest European building in Arizona is the San Xavier mission on the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation.  Built in 1797 on the site of the original mission church (built in 1692), this church is still an active Catholic church today.  It has been beautifully restored inside and out.

Leaving the mission, we headed to Kartchner Caverns State Park, about an hour east of Tucson.  This park protects a cavern system discovered in the 70's by two amateur spelunkers and kept secret for decades.  After much negotiation between the land owners and the state, it came under the Arizona park system.  Many more years were spent developing the cave for visitors and protecting the intact cave ecosystem inside.  Touring the cave, one must pass through about five airlocks, carry nothing with you and touch nothing.  This is a wet cave and the formations are still dripping and forming.  No cameras are allowed inside, but here is a shot from Wikipedia:

"Kartchner Big Room" by Mike Lewis - Own work. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kartchner_Big_Room.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Kartchner_Big_Room.jpg

Leaving Kartchner we headed to Tombstone for a night tour and some dinner.  When we arrived around 5 O'clock  most things were closing up and we kind of had the place to ourselves.  The old part of town is maintained as an Old West town and there is truly a lot of history here (not to mention movies done in or about Tombstone).  I thought it looked coolest at night with most of the tourist gone!

After this grueling day, we were in recovery mode the next day, but we did manage to visit and hike a bit in Saguaro National Park, just a few miles from our campground.  They have a site with nearly 1000 petroglyphs from the Hohokam people who had a thriving culture in the Sonoran desert from 750 to 1450.  These petroglyphs are believed to be about 800 years old.

This picnic structure was built by the CCC in the 30's like so much of our National Park infrastructure.

Organ Pipe National Monument

Down in far southern Arizona on the Mexican border is one of the most remote national parks in the states.  Created by Roosevelt in 1937, the park was still seeing mining a grazing activity until 95% of it was declared a wilderness area in 1977. The effects of mining and grazing can still be seen all around the park, but it is returning to its natural state and was declared an International Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations in 1976 as an excellent example of the Sonoran desert ecosystem. Much of the park was closed from 2003 to 2014 due to safety concerns around illegal smuggling activity after a park ranger was killed by smugglers in the desert.  Now it is all open again and the ranger and Border Patrol presence is everywhere, so it is quite safe.

We camped here for a week and took advantage of the hiking and scenic drives in the park.  We took a ranger shuttle one day, driving right by the border fence and through some nasty dirt roads, to a trailhead where we could hike back 5 miles to the campground. This was a great way to experience the solitude and beauty of this remote place.  I took a ton of pictures here, some of which are below.

The full moon setting on the desert

The Organ Pipe Cactus is common in Mexico, but only grows in a few places in the U.S.  It grows to 15 feet tall and can live over 150 years. It blooms at night and is pollinated by one species of bat.

The Saguaro cactus is common everywhere in Arizona and has come to symbolize the state.  They can grow to 40 or more feet tall!

In the desert, the "Belt of Venus" is very obvious at sunrise and sunset. The blue band is the earth's shadow and the ping band above it is the sun's rays hitting the atmosphere above the shadow.

The cactus wren lives on and around cactus its whole life and somehow manages not to get stuck!

We took a 20-mile loop drive to the nearby Ajo mountains for a short hike and very beautiful desert scenery.  The Sonoran desert is the greenest and most lush desert in the world.

On our 5-mile hike, we visited the site of the Victoria Mine, which operated into the 70's. This is what is left of the mine store building.

Our campground was a long way from anywhere,  The mountains in this shot are in Mexico.

Yuma

We had never been to Yuma, Arizona and didn't know much about it.  I had low expectations, and for the most part that was appropriate.  But Yuma had its interesting aspects and I'll try to cover a few on this post.

First of all, I wasn't aware of the historical importance of Yuma to the settlement of the West.  Perched right on the border with Mexico and on the banks of the Colorado River, Yuma was a vital supply link for much of the West.  The Colorado 150 years ago was subject to huge floods.  At times the river was a mile wide.  Yuma was built on the site of the narrowest crossing point for hundreds of miles.  Ferries operated to take settlers and supplies across.  Yuma is also just 100 miles from the Gulf of California, and before it was so heavily dammed, the Colorado flowed right to the Gulf. Today it peters out in Mexico and never reaches the sea.  So in 1880, If one wanted to ship gold from Colorado to San Francisco, one could put it on wagons and send it across the Rockies and Sierras and the Nevada desert and maybe it would get there in a few months.  OR, one could put it on a steamship on the Colorado River to the Gulf of California and a sailing ship could get it to San Francisco in a week or two.

Today, Yuma's biggest attraction is its territorial prison.  We visited that and it was very interesting.  It was a weird combination of enlightened management--they had a library and tried to educate and train the prisoners in a trade, they had electricity and running water when the town of Yuma had neither--and cruel, inhuman punishments.  Most visitors' favorite part of the prison is the so-called "dark cell" where prisoners where punished by being chained in a 5-foot-high cage inside a stone room with no light for days or even weeks at a time. It is hard to imagine how they kept their sanity.

Gate to the main cell block at the Yuma prison

Each 8 x 10 foot cell housed five prisoners

While in Yuma, we also took a ride out to the desert to see a ghost town and mine museum.  When the BLM created the 655,000 acre Kofa Wildlife Refuge into a wilderness area, many old buildings were going to be destroyed.  One man decided to save them and install them at the site of an old mining area (and fairly large town) called Castle Dome.  Today, there are over 40 period buildings, many filled with artifacts from the mining era, and several mine shafts, mine structures and mining artifacts all scattered over a large area.  We spent several hours there exploring and then photographed the sunset from the desert.

This mine shaft was over 200 feet deep, but it was safely closed with a grate

The desert scenery around Castle Dome Mines was spectacular

Full moon rising

The Imperial Dunes of California

After spending a year plus touring California, we were finally poised to move east to spend months in Arizona, Utah, Nevada and eventually Colorado.  Our last few days in California were spent in Winterhaven, just across the Colorado River from Yuma, Arizona.  More on Yuma in the next post.

The coolest thing about Winterhaven, besides being near Yuma, was it's proximity to California's largest dunes complex.  Roughly 40 miles long by about 20 miles wide, the Imperial dunes are an amaazing phenomenon of nature.  The early settlers on their way to California by the southern route had to traverse this incredible sea of sand, and, having traversed about 200 feet of it myself, I am absolutely astonished that they were able to get across it.  In the early 20th century, a wooden road was built that floated on the sand and cars and wagons used that to get across.  Incredibly tedious and dangerous it was, and often cars drove off the road to their peril. Today Interstate 8 crosses the dunes and cars traverse them in 20 minutes. Here is a picture of a small segment of this wooden road still preserved:

Another interesting aspect of the dunes is that they extend south into Mexico and Winterhaven is right on the border.  The 12-foot-high border fence that has been constructed to control illegal immigration is quite close to the road that passes through the dunes.  Here are a couple of shots of the dunes with the border fence running through.

The dunes are a real wonder of nature.  Several hundred feet high and almost devoid of vegetation, they are incredibly beautiful, especially at sunrise and sunset.  We caught them at sunset with the almost full moon rising and I think the pictures speak for themselves!

One minor problem.  The Bureau of Land Management, who controls this stretch of land, has seen fit to only preserve a quarter or so as wilderness.  So instead of a quiet place to feel small and contemplate this miraculous natural phenomenon, every weekend it turns into a huge Nascar track for off-road vehicles.  Luckily we were there during the off season on a weekday, so we only saw a couple.