This is where I live

Last Thursday and Friday were vacation days from school for the girls, and since I always check the school calendar before scheduling myself for my second job, I mostly had the days off as well. On Thursday I was looking through the newspaper and saw the national park on the east side of town was offering a ranger-led hike with the theme of Cowboys of the R** Valley. Since C & E have been learning all about cowboys, I knew it was the perfect activity. Friday morning we met at the visitors' center/ranger station at 9:00, then drove to the starting point about 7 miles farther along the perimeter of the park toward the south, then into the park from the south side. [GWP, when we went there, we stayed in the vicinity of the ranger station on the west side of the park.] I thought since most schools were out that day the group would be a bunch of mothers and children, but it wasn't. We were the only family with children and most of the other six hikers were older adults.

Here was our first awesome vista:

Kind of full of cacti, huh? Those cacti are called saguaro and it's not pronounced as you'd think, it's pronounced /suh hwah roh/. Just so you don't feel stupid by pronouncing it /suh gwar oh/. ;-)

The ranger pointed out lots of interesting nature things as well as told the history of the area. This picture shows a nurse tree:

Baby saguaros grow best when they are beneath an overhanging tree such as this mesquite. Usually by the time the cactus is big, the tree has died, but sometimes you can still see the relationship.

Our hike was about 1.3 miles along a pretty good trail. Our turnaround point was this old windmill:

It was put up more than a hundred years ago and it drew water and put it into the two large tanks for a long time. It was kind of jarring to see it there because the old homesteads are long, long gone, and really, the only sign that people once lived there are the fact that the saguaros are mostly about 80-110 years old in that area (taken down by the homesteaders desperate to meet their quota of livestock to prove up their 160, then 640 acres, and then trampled underfoot by said livestock), naturally regrown since the homesteaders left, and a very few remaining stream bed changes made by the settlers trying to change the rain runoff.

My girls were real troupers and had a great time out on the trail. Me too.