ContrastMar 18, 2012
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Another bee in flight from Catalina. Note the pollen
From our hike at Fort McDowell on Saturday
From our Saturday hike also
| Our current location at McDowell Mountain Park offers us a lot to explore. We have participated in a couple of Ranger led hikes to learn about how this area was settled and the flora and fauna. We hiked out to the Pemberton Homestead site first settled in the early 1900’s. It was a 33,000-acre cattle ranch operated by Henry Pemberton, his wife and 2 daughters -stark living conditions in those days. The history of the family, and stories about Henry’s accidental death, his wife’s marriage to Henry’s best friend, her additional income jobs, her second husbands work as a Hollywood stunt man, and his tutoring of John Wayne’s cowboy skills were fascinating. Our next hike was more focused on the plant and animals in this area. Our guide -(Ranger Amy) – identified all the plants we encountered as well as whether they were edible or not. We picked wolfberries which are in the goji berry family. The ripe one’s were sweet and similar to a tomato. We also ate some small red Chuparosa flowers that tasted like a cucumber. Ranger Amy also explained how to harvest and cook buds from a Cholla cactus – apparently they taste like asparagus. We spotted a few cactus in bloom, desert buckwheat, mormon tea bush, and even found a bird nest deep in a cactus plant. The weather for both hikes was nice with temps near 80, and man did that change. On Saturday night the weather abruptly change from sunny and warm to cloudy and rather cold. We had high winds which had Chabago rockin’ and rollin’ and made sleep near impossible. Some time after 2 the rain started and it continued until around 9. A local weather observation station showed .70 inches of rain between midnight and 10 AM. The last measurable rain was back in early December so this was needed. The clouds lifted a bit around 2 PM so we were able to see that snow now covers all the mountain tops to the north. We read that Sedona and north got lots of snow and they had to close the road. An old friend from my Amdahl days in California and his wife are in Sedona and he posted snowy pictures this morning. The contrast in weather conditions is actually fun to observe first hand. It remains very windy, with rain occasionally falling and a high of only 50 forecast for today and tomorrow. On the upside it should hit 75 on Wednesday and we do look forward to experiencing that as well. |
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