December 4th, 2010: Added the fifth state I’ve trod in during my training for Le Grand Raid. Eric is the younger of my two stepsons and landed in Phoenix after graduating college a couple years ago. He works long hours and doesn’t get much opportunity to strike out and explore his back yard. By now you know I am a big fan of exploration, so each December I try to get out for a long weekend so we can check out his neighborhood.
This year we opted to head south to Tucson, where we checked out Biosphere 2 and Saguaro National Park. It was a brilliant adventure and I found Tucson to be an inviting destination.
Biosphere 2 outside of Tucson, AZ
The Biosphere is the self-contained environment where they sealed four women and four men inside for two years back in the early nineties. A lot of lessons were learned (the human inhabitant’s diet was mainly vegetables, but they had chickens, goats and pigs, and even raised tilapia in a simulated ocean environment), but a subsequent mission turned out to be a disastrous soap opera and had to be terminated early. Today the facility is not really a biosphere because it isn’t sealed off, but remains an active research lab and is quite interesting to check out!
The next day we hiked about four miles in Saguaro National Park. You are probably familiar with saguaro cactus – these guys get really big and are the archetype of prickly plant life. Their existence is pretty much limited to the Sonoran Desert, which sweeps through Mexico and Arizona, but there is slightly more rainfall around Tucson so the saguaro grow REALLY big here and the magnificent stands here urged the establishment of a National Park.
Oddly enough, Saguaro National Park is divided and exists on either side of Tucson. Eric and I tackled the western half because it was on the way back to Phoenix. There is a wonderful variety of cacti here and we learned to identify quite a few varieties, thought the majestic saguaro were obviously the show stopper. They are enormous and it is so much fun imagining vignettes based upon the poses they strike.
These guys are waving hello to us!
What I mean by that is that it is easy to visualize images from how the arms of one or more saguaro are presented (not unlike what you can do with clouds in the sky). It is difficult to fathom that saguaro don’t sprout arms until they’re at least seventy five years old! It was with great respect that we savored the trails through this splendid national park.
But all too soon it was time to head back to Phoenix. I was scheduled for a six mile run today, and Eric showed me his excellent running route which is a 2.3 mile loop. The road his apartment complex sits on is actually a circle so you just circumnavigate. Temperature was in the seventies and it was so comfortable running that I completed three loops, an excellent way to add the fifth US State trained in during preparation for Le Grand Raid.
One of the splendid vistas at Saguaro National Park
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