2006/02 Southwest USA trip (NM-AZ) - Sonoran Desert |
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We were out of feet by late afternoon and we left to go find a new campsite on the west side of Tucson. I got my passes crossed, and headed up Starr Pass instead of Gates Pass, so we got lost in suburban Tucson for a while, but we eventually found our way to Tucson Mountain Park. The Gilbert Ray campground is 
located between the mountains and, on this day, a beautiful sunset to the west. The desert smelled strongly from the few showers of rain. I 
went for a walk along a nearby stream bed and a great horned owl came sailing silently along behind me and over my head. I felt the flap of its wings and sympathized with the mice in the owl’s path.
Friday February 10th
We awoke to the sound of chickens, but they turned out to be quail, which seemed to be about as bright as most of the species. If this wasn’t a park, they’d be breakfast. There were also doves, thrashers, and cactus wrens. The wrens seem to be able to 
perch on any cactus no matter how ferocious its spines.
The park includes the Sonoran Desert Museum, which we left for another day, and Old Tucson, a movie set recreation of the old town. We’d considered taking a look even though it is a fake, but the $15 entrance fee soon changed our minds. I guess it’s classed as a theme park, and you are expected to spend all day there. Instead, we went to nearby Saginaw Hill, an abandoned copper mine apparently a good place to find malachite and other copper minerals. We found the mine easily but it was surrounded by a new barbed wire fence and “private” and “contaminated site” signs, so we didn’t get to do any mining. There is a new school just a couple of miles down the road, so I suspect that some of the locals thought that an old mine wasn’t a great playground for their kids.
After these two disappointments, we made an early start for our trip across the Sonoran Desert to Organ Pipe Cactus national monument. The desert is mainly flat but we passed some tall mountains, including Kitt Peak, home of a gaggle of observatories. We passed thousands and thousands of saguaros. They seem to be doing better in the south than the ones in the north around Phoenix that I’d seen over a decade ago. Up there a lot were damaged by gunfire. There’s an urban legend about the guy that shot one and then died when it fell on and crushed him.
Most of the land we crossed belongs to the Indians of the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. I’d never heard of the tribe, but I guess they used to be known as the Papago (Spanish for the bean eaters) until they changed from their Spanish name back to the original Indian words. The main town is Sells, a scruffy looking place with a fence between the road and the town’s buildings. It wasn’t clear who was being protected from whom. The fence had trapped thousands of plastic bags, so it felt like we were driving through a tunnel of garbage.