Wednesday

Traffic Jam in the Forest



15. The south rim & the Grand Canyon National P.







A sidewalk followed the canyon along with paved and fenced vistas jutting out. Parking lots and a jammed road carried alongside the sidewalk. Most puddled at the nearest vista, others puttered along in the hot puffing traffic from one point to another. The view was unreal, painted on, too much to take, endless. With all the struggling people, cameras, and cheer, it felt another roadside attraction.



We'd planned a hike into the canyon for the night, only we had no permits. We stopped at the ranger station. "Permits for tonight were purchased 7 months ago." Beaten and distgusted we re-iterated 64 down to 40 and then took the old route 66 from Seligman to the Hualapai Native American reservation.



(Hagel and I built 6 playgrounds for the Hualapai in 2005. We spent a month at the Grand Canyon Carverns Inn while we worked. A 2000lb. ground sloth had fallen into the caverns and starved out over 11000 year ago. We saw the frantic claw prints scrapped into the limestone.




We also hiked down to the Havasupai reservation in the bottom of the canyon where 500 foot waterfalls fall into blue pools, the hiking trails tunnel right into the canyon rock, the mail is packed in on mules, and the porta toliets are dropped in by copter)



We stopped at the G.C. Cavens for gas:



checked out a chain-linked-caged fiberglass buffalo in a residential front yard:





then revisited the graffiti & weed ridden playstructures of 2005:







we took the 2 lane highway throught the Hualapai Res. to the Havasu Canyon Hilltop parklot at the canyon. As I vaguely understand it, the national park land of autos was once the land of the Havasupai. The tribe was relocated here along Havasu creek, their ancestral petroglyps remain below the vistas and sunglasses.





the sun went and we truck slept on the rim.

State Stats:

Arizona is the 6th largest state and the 20th most populous (just over 5 million). The residents are called Arizonans. The highest point is 12,633'. Its called the Grand Canyon State. The bird is the cactus wren, the flower--the Saguaro cactus blossom, the tree--Palo verde. AZ became united in 1912, the last of the contiguous states to do so (number 48).

Tuesday

Steel & Plastic



14. Kaibab, Flagstaff, & 3 tower trees



Up 17 from phoenix through the shortgrassandshrub highlands--> the Agua-Fria National Forest--> the Kaibab Nat. Forest--> and into Flagstaff.



We perused the town & found a pondersosa pine cell-tower planted behind the BigLots. They'd wrapped the trunk in a molded/painted bark-foam that had chipped and peeled yellow under the weather. The based bolted to a square concrete slab next to the Sonic grease bin.



Another Pine tower stood off I-40 outside of flagstaff.



and another

Saturday

Carnegia gigantea





13. Saguaro National (West)



Heat hung in the valley, we made the visitor's center and grabbed a map of the park.



Hagel and I did a 5 or 6 mile hike up to a peak in the evening then walked down among the monstrous cacti columns in the coming dark.




This shaking rattler s'd up at the foot of the trail. I assumed it a western diamondback, but the mojave rattlesnake apparently looks quite similar. The white stripes near the shaker stretch wider than the black stripes on the mojave.



From the U.S. forest service pamphlet and a park newspaper, I gathered info-tidbits on the saguaro catus (Carnegia gigantea). A saguaro takes about 150 years to reach the highest heights (up to fifty feet tall), it takes around 100yrs to make 50feet. The roots grow shallow but can extend out as long as the plant is tall. One plant can slurp up 200 gallons of water in a single rainfall. The wavy ribs of the cactus swell to handle excess water and the waxy skin exterior restricts water loss. The cactus tissue is around 85% water, a large plant can weigh 16,000 pounds or more.







100 flowers bloom on each plant over a four week period. The flowers bloom white and yellow in the night. They close the following day around noon. Bats and birds pollinate the plants amid this gap of time. The saguaro produces 40million seeds in a lifetime, one of which will likely reach maturity. Gila woodpeckers peck out holes & gilded flickers, cactus wrens, elf owls, mice, snakes, and spiders settle in.





We made a tensite park after dark at the Gilbert Ray Camp. The full mooned brightened, the coyotes yipped, and we did some video of ants climbing in and out of their massive mound in the Sonoran desert earth.



Rolling northwest toward Phoenix the struggling saguaros stood with the help of crutches along highway 10.


Tuesday

international wildlife museum of Tuscon





11. International Wildlife Museum

The International Wildlife Museum of Tucson rests in the western residential hills of the city. It houses an enormity of dioramas, animal wholes, animal parts, animals eating, walking, swimming, flying. Skin and foam and fur suspended in an exquisitely simulated afterlife of valiant action and pleasant rest.







At the start of exhibits a didactic describing goals and intentions of The Safari Club the Safari club:

"One of SCI/F’s primary goals is to attain sustainable-use management of wildlife resources combined with community based wildlife management. SCI/F spends millions of dollars annually on conservation in two ways. SCI chapters carry out local conservation projects with money that they raised themselves, augmented in many cases by SCI matching grants. The SCI conservation committee carries out regional and global conservation programs coordinated through our Washington D.C. office.

SCI/F’s global conservation activities included programs to combat the decline in the mule deer population and the disease problems in Midwestern white-tailed deer, research on jaguar habitat requirements In southern Mexico, grizzly and black bear management work in Canada, research on the stratus of European brown bears, conservation and management of Asian wild sheep, cheetah conservation in Namibia, the establishment of model wildlife conservation programs sustained by hunting activities in Siberia, and the analysis of the scientific issues affecting hunting and wildlife conservation.

The series of exhibits to be presented here will highlight individual projects that are significant in terms of the money granted by the SCI chapters, the biological importance of the investigations, and the impact the project had on conserving wildlife and protecting the right to hunt."












The Museum also holds the recreated family room of the big game hunter and Safari club founder C.J. McElroy. McElroy bagged the largest trophy specimens to bag then had them stuffed and stuck in his living room. The I.W.M recreates McElroy's living room to house the kills.



The atmosphere shift of the McElroy room lured some visitors in for short periods, others only peeked, but the majority hung around for quite awhile. Most of the creature displays were traditional hunting head-mounts as opposed to the full-body natural history specimens of the museum. The bulk were large horned males. Each creature hung above a small brass plate engraved with the species name. The animals were dramatically lit, and what I surmise to be African music beat and fluted about the room.

I took a fairly short video that hopefully gives a sense of the space and the sounds:






The room holds 350+ animal mounts in total. African specimens, goats & sheep from both Asia and North America, deer species of Europe, Asia, of N. America., wild cattle, elephants, rhinos, and hippos.















The McElroy room encouraged my thoughts to consider how one might direct their life in way of career, hobby, practice, obsession. I thought about how McElroy killed 350plus monumental mammals from around the world in his lifetime and how a guy in Darwin, Minnesota made the world's largest ball of twine in his. I thought about the impact of a single human.

In Paul Martin's "Twilight of the Mammoths" he discusses the overkill theory of extinctions of the Late Pleistocene mega fauna. Martin believes that the earliest HomoSapiens to arrive in North America, the Clovis people, were responsible for the destruction of mega fauna species, the mammoths, the mastodons, the giant sloths. I learned about the international wildlife museum from Martin. His book, mentioned above, was released in the McElroy room of the the International Wildlife Museum.















A short climbing drive west brought Corey and I over the Tucson Mountains into the Saguaro National Park West.