Hackberry Springs

    To the east of Mesa - the Phoenix suburb where we are for the this winter - lies the Superstition Mountains. They are part of the Tonto National Forest and there are numerous hiking trails in these mountains. The trails range from easy to extremely difficult and short to lenghty. Monday, January 21 our Mesa Regal hiking group of 30 people hiked the Hackberry Springs Trail from the trailhead at First Water. It was an easy to moderate hike of 9.2km.

   Our leader, Bruce, stops to tell us about the mound ahead of us. It is an ancient Hohokam Indian burial mound - if we looked closely, we may find some pottery shards - then again, after many hikers, there may not be any left!
  Jack is checking his new GPS watch.

   


In the distance, we can see Weaver's Needle - a well known landmark in the Superstitions.

The trail is not all level!

This is the first of two different group of horseback riders that we meet on the trail. They are bigger, so we politely move over for them. Since they covered the trail we are now walking on, we are the ones to have to skirt around "road apples".

Another one of Arizona's earthquake early warning signs!

We stop for our lunch at the base of this looming rock wall. Hackberry Spring is here and because of the water, there are many of these deciduous hackberry trees - their leaves now down because of winter. Lots of other vegetation abounds here and we see signs that javalinas (desert "pigs") have been digging at the base of bushes and trees to get tender roots.

This is the spring as it comes out of the mountain
Nearby in the soft mud, we saw pawprints that look to us to be those of a bobcat.

After we have had a 20 minute rest and a snack, we make our way now along the streambed.

Some of the boulders are a fair size and we have to pick our way around and over them for the next mile or so, still finding a fair number of water pools and a trickily stream.

We came upon the remnants of an old ranching operation out here in the hills. Cattle sheds, an old windmill and a ramp for loading the steers onto trucks for transport are all that are left. That and lots of bullet holes in the old tin roof!!

  The stream bed flattens out and we will follow this for another mile, then we meet the beginning of the loop of our hike. This has been a "balloon" hike with a start and finish on a common trail and a loop to Hackberry Springs and back. The weather was great - a high of 80F after a cool start to the morning and some shade along the way. Good company and lots of conversation as we hiked!

Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum

Just a few miles from the Saguaro National Park is the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Part botanical garden with a huge variety of desert plants, and part zoo with animals native to the Sonoran desert, this made an interesting afternoon for Jack and I. We had our lunch in the Ocitillo Cafe and then meandered the zoo.

                                                    


                                                           First stop was a walk in Aviary
                                                                   Black headed Grosbeak

Big horn sheep are often seen on mountain sides in Arizona - they can make their way up the steepest slopes where you wonder how they can find a foothold!

The coatamundi takes a drink on a hot afternoon

Prairie Dogs

Organ Pipe Cactus grow in a cluster from one base point.

Javalinas or pecccaries are the wild pigs of the south west. They have the same snouts and shapes of the domestic pig but add to that their tusks and cranky nature and you will not want to get in their way. They will eat anything but this afternoon, this pair just wants to nap in the shade.

This was the closest we got the the real coyotes in their natural area. I think they were also taking a nap -----

                     Jack thought he should do it, too,
                          under this ramada!

But we decided that this would be a better way to refresh ourselves before we drove back to Phoenix. After leaving the park at 4pm, we passed Old Tucson Studios, a working lot for making Western movies that does daily gun fight shows and has lots of western theme activities. But that was for another day. We took Gate's Pass Road that winds it's way between mountains to 3200' and a pass giving access to downtown Tucson and the I 10 expressway back to our RV home in Mesa where we arrived just as the sun set at 6pm. A fun and interesting day!!

Saugaro National Park

The cold spell is well and gone and we are out exploring Arizona - something Jack and I love to do. Friday, January 18, after phoning and singing "Happy Birthday" to my sister Jacque in Michigan, we headed by car to Tucson - a two hour drive south of Mesa.

The giant saguaro cactus is the state symbolof Arizona and this area has one of the highest concentrations of these cacti. They grow only in the Sonoran desert  which takes in most of northern Mexico and a small part of south western Arizona and the far south of California and the Baja peninsula.

     

This saguaro points the way to the .25mile Nature Trail with many explanation boards about the life cycle of the saguaros and other desert plants.

 Saguaros often begin life in the protected area around another plant. Because they grow so slowly from seeds of the flowers that bloom in June at the top of the plant, being protected helps them survive the hot summers and monsoon rains that come periodically. This saguaro is probably 15 - 20 years old. They grow for about 75 years before they begin to put out arms. Some saguaros can have as many as 40 arms. When it rains, they swell their ribs with water to keep them alive until the next rain. Their life span is about 200 years. When they die, their strong woody ribs make good walking sticks.

       

Saguaro spines

Some saguaros have very interesting shapes!!!! While most "arms" grow upward, this giant' arms have made lovely graceful downward curves.

Taliesin West

On Thursday, January 17, we drove to Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix, to visit Taliesin West. This is the winter home and architectural school established by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s. He bought this property in 1937 including the hillside and several hundred acres. He then built a home of stone, cement and canvas and brought students here to study his architectural designs. When he built low buildings and set them down the hillside instead of on top of the hill, he explained that the "brow" not the top was a more pleasing place to build. Taliesin is Welsh for "shining brow".

To this day, there is an architectural school on the campus - students spend half of the year in Arizona and the other half in Wisconsin at Taliesin East.
All the buildings are set low to the ground and blend in with the surroundings. Building lines are long and linear.

The rock walls are rough concrete and rocks taken directly from the hillside - no cutting of rocks was done - the most flat side was placed in the form and concrete poured around it.  When Taliesin was built, there was no glass - only canvas was used to protect from the elements - but remember this was a winter desert place for Mr Wright and his students so not much protection was needed. Many rooms have fireplaces for cool evenings.

Mrs. Wright's bedroom as well as her husband's next door, overlooked an inner courtyard.

Many sculptures are found all around the site - this one of mother and children is in the "breezeway" - an open area between buildings that provides wonderful shade and cooling breezes in a hot environment.

One of the last places on our tour was this six sided pool - cool, refreshing and so typical of Frank Lloyd Wright designs.

Desert Botanical Gardens

It is a cloudy and cool day but we are with good friends, Dan and Barb Bloem, to visit the Botanical Gardens here in Phoenix. We love to come here and see what is new and what is familiar and what is blooming at this time of the year. At the entrance, there remains a glass sculpture by Dale Chihully whose creations found places throughout the gardens in 2010.

  Scattered throughout the gardens this year are sculptures by Carolina Escobar entitled "Whispers of the New World" . I think each person will have their own interpretation of what they see.

But there were flowers, too.

One of the most interesting sculptures was of the Four Seasons by Philip Haas - depicted in flowers, gourds and seeds of each season.







                                                                             Spring

Summer

Autumn

                                                                                 Winter



It's always interesting to visit the Botanical Gardens - so we
bought a one year membership - it will pay for itself on our
third visit and is good for 250 other Botanical Gardens across
the US and Canada - including the Royal Botanical Gardens
in Hamilton, Ontario - right near home!