With two sites in the greater Tucson area, we set up for a two night stay. I always prefer the multi-night stays on these runs, as means a little bit of relaxation compared to the point-to-point running that seems to make up the majority of our trips. It makes the mornings a little easier too, as we aren't forced to repack everything, and to trudge it back out to the car.

Today's sites were in different portions of the Saguaro National Park, flanking Tucson in the west and east. It was also a Saturday, and getting cooperation from the local folks, especially at federal sites, can be a tad problematic on weekends. We'd picked a hotel on the east side just minutes from the eastern site, but true to form, when we reached the site, the weekend team had not been told we'd be there. At many sites this wouldn't have been a problem, but at both of today's sites we needed acces keys. Maybe the operator had left the key at the western site. Sigh. Back into the car, and the better part of an hour to the western park. No, no key here. Grrrr. Fortunately, when we described what we were up to, they were able to dig up a master key we could use. Whew! Off to the site we went to do our business.

Pretty country, and the weather continues to be delightful, with lovely blue skies. It was beginning to dawn on me that the Sonoran Desert is quite a bit lusher than its Mojave counterpart to the north. Part of this seems to do with temperature, as this country doesn't have the consistent winter freezes of Mojave. I also suspect that there is a little more water available to life here, with more consistent monsoon rains during the summer from year to year. But the amount of plant life in this park also told me that something else is in play. Even elsewhere here in the Sonoran Desert, the plant life gets sparser down in the unprotected flatlands. I suspect that the entire desert was far more thick with plant life prior to the coming of cattle to these lands. Some of the placards at the visitor centers confirm this - cattle disturb the root systems of the saguaro and other cactuses, and they've got to graze on something, so there go some of the other plant systems. It is only here in the areas long set aside from ranching uses where something like the original configurations exist. At least, that is my suspicion.

My perceptions may also be affected by the season. It is clearly spring here in the desert, and it is very green this year. I don't know if they've had a weather pattern or precipitation especially conducive to the plant life, or if this is just the usual place it finds itself in this time of year, but there's a lot of things growing out here just now. And though it doesn't approach the riotous springtime outbreaks of the Antelope Valley in California, there are some nice wildflowers going on just about now.

I also noticed the bones of a dead saguaro. I found the structural details interesting, the fleshy outer layer we see is supported by a core of strong woody posts. Cool.

We finished the first site in rapid fashion, and made our way back once again to the east side, where we threw ourselves on the mercy of the crew there, who managed to round up a law enforcement guy with a master key to give us access. And so yet another site was dispatched for the year. Go us!

I've been through Tucson before many years ago, and though I'd known Phoenix had grown crazily, I'd not realized Tucson had also grown similarly. I'm not entirely sure what it is bringing people to these desert towns. Certainly it can be beautiful in the winter, especially if the alternative is someplace in the chilly Midwest, so I'm sure some of the growth comes from transplanted snowbirds using it as their base of operations. But the place surely doesn't empty with the coming of the ovenlike temps of summer (and fall, and late spring), and I can't imagine what it must be like to return to a car in a parking lot after a couple hours of shopping. I'm surprised people don't return to find the interiors of their cars have just melted into a gooey mess of former seats, upholstery, and dashboard pieces. In any event, I do not recognize anything here; in the intervening years it has become a different city entirely.

I did forget that Tucson is the location of Davis-Monathan Air Force Base. This is one of the primary places old air force planes are sent when they are no longer needed/no longer affordable. Driving along the periphery of the base is a sort of aviation time passage, as one views a veritable history of aircraft. I especially enjoyed seeing ranks of planes that just aren't seen anywhere anymore, such as F-4s, long since replaced by more modern aircraft. Sadder are the planes that would seem to still be of use based on our current needs - there are way too many A-10s here, for instance. That is one of the best airplanes ever fielded for ground support, but since the Air Force is run by fighter jockeys, and bomber pilots, they've never been particularly interested in low slow aircraft used to protect the ground pounders. They say their new expensive toys can get the job done, but whenever it comes down to it, the pricey super planes are always deemed too risky to be used in real firefights. Alas.

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We bivouacked in the town of Sierra Vista, a midsized town at the gates of Ft. Huachuca, an army base that seems to house a number of smaller Army outfits. I realized I'd seen many mentions of this base in the pages of Aviation Week, as they are hosting a test of a tethered aerostat, a sort of moored mini-blimp that lofts a radar set to a great height so that it can have a lasting view of the surrounding terrain. In this specific case, I think the idea is to be on the lookout for smugglers and such trying to cross the nearby border into the U.S., or at least to demonstrate the utility of blimps for this purpose. I should have recalled this, as when we blew into town the previous evening, I'd noted a pair of red running lights high in the sky that seemed to be way too near the zenith to be any mountain top radio tower. When I spotted the white whale hanging in the sky in the morning, it all came back to me.

Our mission for the day was to venture to the border town of Douglas, tucked down in the lower right corner of Arizona, and do maintenance on an urban site located there. Normally, we'd have stayed in that town to have a short run to the site, but there seemed to be better available accommodations in Sierra Vista. We made our way across the desert to our destination. This part of Arizona seemed to follow the same desert planform I'm more familiar with from Nevada, a series of smallish north-south mountain ranges separated by dry graben valleys. Crossing the main such range that separated us from Douglas, we dropped into the small town of Bisbee, which was unexpectedly alluring to my eye. The small towns of Nevada have always seemed so ramshackle and run down to me, definitely not places that would interest me as potential spots to live. Perhaps because I'd never even considered that any spot in southern Arizona might approach livability, suddenly coming upon an inviting little mountain town was an unexpected treat.

We made two passes through Bisbee, one on our way to the site, and one upon our return, and were able to make a short pass through the main street on the return run. Bisbee is the town Placerville really wants to be in its secret heart. Placerville fails, I think, because it is trying to be too many things at once. It wants to use its heritage to its advantage to attract the tourist trade, but its proximity to Sacramento also makes it a sort of bedroom community, which has a completely different set of priorities. Also, the outlooks of the towns seem to be quite different as well. Placerville's growth came from people escaping the grittier aspects of urban problems, i.e. people who were largely leaving the big city to escape things like bussing and such. Bisbee, on the other hand, after losing its mainstay mining industry in the 70's, made perhaps the only choice available to it, to completely base its future on tourism. In doing so, they were happy to accept all comers, and in the years since, it has managed to mutate into a high-end tourist destination, with small art shops, and other forces that have essentially gentrified the place. As a result, it has more of an air similar to a Santa Fe than a place like Placerville has ever been able to muster.

Just south of Bisbee, a little further down valley in which the town resides, there is the remants of a huge open pit copper mine. Apparently, Arizona is absolutely thick with copper mines, as we keep coming across them. The mine in Bisbee has been shut down since 75, but the immovable infrastructure remains, as does the thousand foot pit from which the ore was taken, and a little further down the valley, the massive tailings left over after processing. The sheer amount of human effort that went purely into the task of just moving this stuff around is, frankly, a little breathtaking. The road we were on skirted the pit, but we could only see partway down into its depth. On our return leg, we stopped at a place where we could actually see the bottom. The rock into which it was cut was apparently very structurally sound, as it supported very steep sides. It would have been a perfect place from which to launch a hang glider, presuming one had a plan for gaining altitude apres launch, as the only alternative would then be to fly a spiral of increasing tightness until one finally made like a lawn dart into the pretty blue lake at the bottom of the pit. As a technologist, the sheer logistics of making a place like this work has a certain attraction to me.

Not much to say about the town of Douglas, though it is interesting to wander through a town where everything seems to be embossed with one's name. It struck me as a sleepy border town - apparently the town on the Mexican side of the border is larger. They certainly have a very serious fence running along the border.

On our return run, we routed through a place I wanted to see from the moment I first realized our trip would take us through its vicinity: Tombstone, Arizona. It turns out we really needn't have bothered, as there really isn't much to the place. Granted, we were on a schedule that more or less meant all we could do was make a driving pass through the place. Perhaps if we'd had a half day it would have been interesting to walk its streets, but really, given the magnitude of the legend that has grown up around the place, the reality of the actual physical location leaves something to be desired.

First of all, as one might suspect from looking at the map, Tombstone is located in a rather desolate part of southern Arizona. So, if you had the idea from one movie or another of a mountain town, or a town with trees, or indeed, a town with anything other than parched and roasted scrubland surrounding it, you might as well ditch that meme from the start.

Nowadays, Tombstone lives purely off of its reputation, which is to say, it is a tourist trap. There is a core that is built to resemble an old west town, with raised wooden sidewalks covered with an overhang.. There does appear to be a few points of interest that I might have taken in had I the time, such as a tour of a old silver mine there (mining being the raison d'etre of Tombstone in the first place) that would appeal to my tech interests. Less interesting to me were the signs proclaiming the scheduled gunfights that are apparently staged throughout the day in the street there. Me thinks doth tries too hard, yes I do. I prefer my own imagination to the forced stuff, thank you very much. Ah well, at least I can now say I've been there, and I can scoff my way through the next viewing of a movie on the subject. I'm here, huckleberry.

More interesting to me was something else I was beginning to notice as we journeyed about the miles there in the border country. Shortly after departing north out of Tombstone, we ran through our first Border Patrol crossing of the day. We'd seen another the previous evening running into Sierra Vista, but I'd not thought anything of it. But I'd begun to notice the sheer number of Border Patrol vehicles plying the roads of the region. It seemed like we were seeing one of their trucks about every ten minutes or so, either parked by the side of the road, or passing in the opposite direction of our own travel. Coming out of Douglas, we could see the thin dark line of the border fence, topped with the glint of coils of barbed wire, and along it, the occasional dust of patrolling trucks. There are towers out in the desert, too far from the road to make smart spots for cell towers, but just right for cameras to scan the countryside. It began to struck me the sheer number of personnel that we now have manning our southern border. Now maybe they're doing something important, and maybe not. Certainly there are drawbacks to having a porous border, but at the end of the day, one has to balance the costs of such porosity with the equally intimidating costs of maintaining a permanent standing army of federal employees along the entireity of the southern border. I for one suspect there is probably a better way, but the politicians seem content to do the easy thing, and to stage the theater of security rather than actually thinking through how to solve the real problems we face. Et tu, TSA.

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Getting ready in Globe to start our run south to our next site, I found a correction from my Dad to my previous post. My Grandmother, it turns out, did not teach in Globe. She attended grade school in Globe before the First World War! Riding to school on a donkey, no less! I had to stop to fit my head around that concept. Way back in the Oughts, at the dawn of the century, this woman rode across this landscape, this landscape to which the the Gunfight at the OK Corral (not much more than a hundred fifty miles away, in fact) was a recent event of living memory, not some Hollywood-ized make-believe legend. She would go on in her life to attend the Olympics in Berlin in 1936, probably seeing Hitler with her own eyes. And then she'd go on to see man land on the moon. What an absolutely incredible span! I often think we're living our lives at breakneck speeds in terms of societal change, but I wonder sometimes if perhaps that one generation really strode across the biggest abyss - we at least have learned to expect everything to change in dazzling ways, and even so, is the gulf between the world of my youth and now nearly so great as a similar period covering the first half of the Twentieth Century?

Anyway, enough of my lollygagging, there's air quality measurements to be made! And so we were off, southbound.Dropping out of the mountainous high country surrounding Globe, we ventured back into the desert proper. We passed through Stafford, which I was disappointed not really to recognize. I know I'd been here at least once to visit a set of relatives (my grandmother's older brother, in fact), but that would have been back in the very late '70s, and I guess my place memory doesn't retain things that long. (Perhaps this is the secret to why our brains do not explode when faced with the great changes and advancements that cover the spans of our lives - we just simply can't remember back far enough to when the differences would really intrude!)

Our destination for the day was a place I'd had no idea even existed before I began doing the legwork prep for this mission: Chiricahua National Monument. This is really the neatest part of this job, having the opportunity to be exposed to these small jewels strewn across the country that I might not otherwise ever realize were there. To begin with, here is today's office:

Having not done my research, I still had no idea what this park was about, as this monitoring station is situation just outside the entrance. It was a lovely day, breezy, and not too warm, though the landscape does give one the impression that the full onslaught of summer heat has been just temporarily gone away for a brief vacation, and is expected back momentarily.

Some hours later, having completed our tasks, we took a brief jaunt up into the park just to see what the place was about. Nothing as breathtaking as something like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, but a nifty place nonetheless. It seems that some million years back, a local volcano got really serious over a period of time, churning out layer after layer of volcanic ash, forming layers that eventually built up to some thousands of feet thick. After the volcano went into remission, the elements went to work on the thick blanket, mineralizing it into a type of igneous rock. But the same water that helped cement the ash into rock also began to fracture it as well, especially as the land got bent by various pressures of uplift and tilting. The newly minted rock though didn't crumble, it began to fracture along very specific lines, beginning with vertical planes, and then horizontally along the various sublayers demarcating the original ash flows themselves. And finally, erosion cleft channels into these layers, exposing what had been wrought by all these different ingredients. To wit:

The entire park is a landscape of this sort of columworks. In places, you see only the tops of the structures, making hillsides of terraces and steps. But along the main road into the park, you drive through a heavily wooded canyon, through breaks in which are revealed these amazing walls that look nothing so much like someone laboriously made stacks of tiled boulders into these fanciful spires. As usual, the pictures do not give justice to their actual presence. And like when I was at Jarbridge in Northern Nevada last summer, I wondered how Tolkien, living as he did in England, ever conceived of such landscapes, since this particular one was so obviously just waiting for some Numenorian race to come along and craft these into an intimidating army of thousand foot high warriors, wizards, and elves, magically imbued to stand watch over the border of some powerful land.

In any event, we spent only a little time in this park, just enough to take some snaps, and do a very preliminary recon of somewhere I'd like to visit again sometime. It's becoming a very long list. After leaving the park, we made our way generally westward towards the town of Sierra Vista to get ready for the next day's exciting adventure in cleaning particulate samplers.

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Field Day 2: The Superstitions

We did two sites today, starting out of Mesa/Phoenix and on the road by 7, very unDouglike. The first site was in a state park in a place called Queen Valley. The desert is much greener than I thought it would be. This might be the usual state of things for this time of year; after all, it has been at least fhirty years since I last ventured this way, so I'm not nearly as familiar with this landscape as I am with the Mohave and Great Basin deserts. But I know there was a storm through not long before I visited in December that dropped snow on the environs, so my suspicion is that it is a wetter than usual year for the area, and the plant life is responding correspondingly.

After a difficult first site, we crossed the Superstition Range over to Globe, weirdly named as it is one of the least metropolitan areas I can think of. Well, ok, yeah, I guess Tonopah would be worse. Huge copper mine here, they've really reshaped the landscape here with all the digging and repackaging of tailings, but there didn't seem to be a huge amount of activity, so I don't know if the thing is actually in operation or not.

Our second stop today was a site called Tonto, overlooking one of Phoenix's main water supply reservoir. As a Californian, I was a little chagrined to see the thing - I thought we'd stolen all their water fair and square. I guess we're not quite as slick as I thought we were at the game, harumph. We just barely squeaked through in time, finishing up just about sundown, then it was back to Globe to crash. Curious little town, I wonder what it was like when my Grandmother taught grade school here, way back before WWII. I'll bet it was really tiny back then. For now though, it was a very nice twilight.

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Now that the northern world is starting to warm up again, and the days begin to lengthen into useable days, it's time for the crack Air Quality Group maintenance teams to venture back forth into the world on our early season maintenance loops. This morning finds me high above Vegas in rather bumpy skies, headed back to Phoenix to begin a week-long loop to the southern reaches of Arizona. Now that we've ditched the jerky skier guy we had last summer, we've got a really great group now, and I'm happy to venture out into the field with any of my teammates. For this loop, I've drawn Michael, a trooper who very kindly put up with my incessant yammering as I went slightly out of my skull on a stupid skilift to get to a high mountain site last fall in Washington state. I really dislike chair lifts, especially coming back down.

But hey, there'll be no lifts this time, we'll be fully desert for this go round. Today we hit Phoenix to take care of a little plumbing I wasn't able to finish during my week there in December, but then we're straight back out of town to line up for our next day. Tomorrow, Queen Valley east of Phoenix, then up to a mountain site called Tonto. Then we drop south and a bit east, through Globe and Wilcox to a set of mountains along the border with New Mexico. Next day, its all the way to the border to my namesake site at Douglas, and then working our way up (past Tombstone!) to Tucson for a pair of sites flanking that berg. And finally, back to the border again for a final site in a national monument, before rolling back up to Phoenix to finish the loop, and back to base. It should be a pleasant run, and I'm looking forward to the run, and getting some nice photography in. Stay tuned!

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