The Arizona Circuit: Mesa, AZ and Phoenix, AZ (Part 5)

June 18, 2015

I ended up in Mesa, AZ because of an oil change I'd scheduled earlier in the week when I didn't understand Arizona geography. Couchsurfing had once again come to the rescue and I had made plans to stay with Jade that night. So, with lodging taken care of, I set to work planning out the rest of my day in Phoenix, AZ. With the help of the internet, I found the Arizona Archery Club and the Lesbian Social Network.

Arizona Archery Club

The Arizona Archery Club turned out to be a nice hike up to the north Phoenix metro area 45 minutes away. But, 45 minutes and $11 later ($10 for shooting and $1 for the target), I was on the range shooting for the first time since archery league ended in April. It felt overpriced to shoot at the Arizona Archery Club because it only costs $5 to shoot at BWANA in Little Canada, MN, but I thought it would be interesting to shoot somewhere completely different. I'm pleased to report that range culture seems to be the same in Arizona as it is in Minnesota, unlike the turn signal culture which is almost non-existent in Arizona.

There weren't many people at the range so I set up next to an older man shooting a beautiful Hoyt target bow. Sometimes I feel a strange sense of comradery with other target shooters, but mostly I like to check out their bow setups and admire the beautiful colors. For being a sport filled with gun loving, animal killing, bro men, men really go out of their way to have extremely color coordinated equipment down to their shoes and hats.

I really like archery because there are a hundred things to know and a hundred more things to learn. As such, the man next to me taught me that if you're shooting arrows at one of those compressed foam bales, you can loosen your arrows by giving them a small twist until you hear a click and they come right out! This really worked and I'm surprised I didn't know this, and I've been shooting on compressed foam bales for years! If you ever go to an archery range, don't trust the guys that talk too much and are full of male bravado. The best shooters generally don't say much unless you ask. The quiet guy shooting next to you might well have been a national champ during their heyday.

Jade joined me at the range and I gave her the lowdown on archery. I tried to show off a little but my bow arm was pretty tired by then and my shots weren’t going off as well. I’m not sure how I’m going to get in enough practice to shoot the Vegas tournament next year while traveling around. On top of not having a regular place to practice, paying $10+ a session might price me out of the sport.

A company logo does not a business deduction make

Lesbian Social Network

One of the things I've been doing when entering a new metropolitan area is performing an internet search on the name of the city and some combination of LGBT terms to see if there's anything that comes up. Generally, the hits are for the city's Pride event, which is not particularly helpful since that tends to be a yearly event. However, my search in the Phoenix area yielded several Meetup groups which sounded fairly interesting.

The Lesbian Social Network is a group that advertises a way to meet people outside of the bar scene. It's organized by a woman named Sherrie. She’s been running the group every Friday for the last twelve years. I'm always a little apprehensive about entering queer social spaces probably due to some residual internalized phobia of being gay. But, I was stoked to see what this group had to offer since it was and queer event in a state which tried to pass anti-gay legislation.

The group turned out to be fairly mixed (most of the group looked 40+) with myself being on the younger side. We watched the movie Girl Play which is a comedic movie about lesbian relationships. After the movie was over, we sat around and chatted. I really enjoyed talking to the older women and hearing about their experiences being gay in Arizona. The overall sentiment was that they enjoyed hanging out Friday nights because they created a space in which they could just be themselves without any fear, a sentiment I can definitely appreciate and relate to. It's not that most people need to flash rainbows and strut their stuff in public. In fact, you'd never even think these women were gay if you saw them out in public. There's just a sense of relief and freedom that comes with not forcing yourself to hold anything back, even if talking about being gay never comes up in conversation.

At the end of the night, I met a girl named Courtney who told me about many things including West Hollywood Pride in Los Angeles. She told me that it was called WeHo Pride and if you called it anything else, you were clearly an outsider. Hearing about LA Pride started a series of events which I will chronicle in a later post. But, for now, I will tell you that I definitely learned a lot about the queer happenings in the southwest from Courtney.

This was the first night I stayed up much later than my newly assumed bed time of sunset. And, to top the whole night off, I accidentally let Jade's dog out. To my horror, the dog rushed passed me as I was opening the door and started running all around the neighborhood. My stomach dropped when I realized I was not going to be able to lure the dog back without Jade's help. Jade works the graveyard shift and she'd barely gotten any sleep that "night" since she was out at the archery range with me. Thankfully, she was able to coax the dog back almost immediately. Jade was surprisingly very relaxed about the situation and even reprimanded me for not having woken her up sooner. Phew!

The Arizona Circuit: Saguaro National Park (Part 4)

June 12, 2015

Tucson is a college town. As much as I found it entertaining to listen to frat boys whine about having to open Grinder accounts and students peppering job recruiters with their accomplishments, I was glad to get out of the city for the day. My mission: to see the nation’s largest cacti.

Saguaro National Park is split into two parts on both the east and west side of Tucson. To the east is the Rincon Mountain District and to the west is the Tucson Mountain District. The main difference between the districts according to the park ranger was that the west side had more saguaro, however the east side had more saguaro with branching arms. According to Yasmin, the east side was also a really nice place to take a bike ride.

Not knowing much about either side before heading out, I decided to go to the Tucson Mountain District. It’s a good thing the roads to the park twist around enough to merit a 25-35 mph speed limit because once you get closer to the park, you start seeing saguaro pop up all over and instantly you have an urge to be “that tourist”. It’s a good thing there weren’t that many people on the road.

At the park, I joined volunteer naturalist Bob Perrill on a guided nature hike. What plant lover would say no to a two hour lesson in desert botany from a guy who worked his entire career in field biology? I have since been on several guided hikes in other parks and I haven’t met anyone as knowledgeable as he was in respect to the biomes they were speaking about.

Here are some highlights about a handful of desert plants I became acquainted with:

The saguaro--

They take forever to grow and you probably won't even see them above other low lying desert plants until they are over 30 years old.
Saguaro generally survive their early years due to the help of a "nursing" plant. These plants, often palo verde, provide shade and shelter from predators during their early years.
Saguaros have "ribs".
You can tell a saguaro was hit by lightning by the way the arms blow off. When lightning hits a saguaro, the water inside instantly boils and the cactus explodes!
The flowers are night blooming and only open for about 14-16 hours which means there is a very small window for pollinators to get the job done.

Such a big plant with such little flowers

The palo verde--

Palo verde means green stick. The stick is green because there is chlorophyll in the branches which help with photosynthesis even when the tree has no leaves.
Many plants in the desert are legumes (related to the pea family). Palo verde is one of them which means it helps fix nitrogen in the ground (super important for the health of the soil). You can tell by the bean-like fruits it makes.
Palo verde are one of the targets of the parasitic mistletoe. Mistletoe comes from the Greek "thief" and "tree"...

The cholla--

There are many kinds of cholla in the Sonoran Desert. At Saguaro National Park, the main varieties include: jumping, teddy-bear, and pencil cholla.
Cholla also have a skeletal frame inside.
The spines on the cholla are full of reverse facing barbs which make it nearly impossible to remove once imbeded. To remove, it's best to use a fine-toothed comb.

The Arizona Circuit: Couchsurfing To The Rescue (Part 3)

June 11, 2015

Show Low, AZ to Tucson, AZ

Scrub and more scrub. I’m not sure what the Rand McNally staff was thinking when they said the drive from Petrified Forest National Park to Show Low was a “scenic” one. There were some small towns along the way which were so run down I wondered whether anyone still lived there. I did notice that no matter how run down a town was, the local church was always immaculate as if they had been constructed yesterday.

To my dismay, I was unable to find a spot to camp in the National Forest around Show Low and around 9pm gave up and slept in the parking lot of a Holiday Express. It’s probably one of the hardest things to find parking in a small town since you can’t park in the neighborhoods because everyone knows the vehicles that belong and there are no Walmarts (which people suggest to me is the panacea of car living). Luckily, I have not had to resort to mega store parking lots yet. I’ll be posting something later concerning places to overnight park for free.

Figuring I didn’t want to make that mistake again, I left Show Low for Tucson and got to work figuring out what to do next at Bently’s Coffee and Tea. Once again, it appeared I would not be able to camp in the National Forest since the closest spots seemed 1.5 hours away. I couldn’t camp out in Tucson as the weather was topping the 90s. What to do?

I turned to Couchsurfing and immediately sent out requests to hosts. Yasmin was gracious enough to host me at the last minute. We went to dinner at Penca where I was introduced to Chiles en Nogada which is a specialty of the city of Puebla. The dish is made up of green poblano chiles stuffed with a picadillo and covered in a walnut crème sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. The colors are supposed to represent the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag making the dish patriotic as well. Dinner was followed by a tour around downtown Tucson. Yasmin was a wonderful host and incredible to talk to. Hit her up if you end up in the Tucson area.

Thanks to Yasmin, I was able to visit Saguaro National Park with ease! Up next: The Arizona Circuit: Saguaro National Park (Part 4).

The Arizona Circuit: Petrified Forest National Park (Part 2)

June 8, 2015

Heading east out of Flagstaff was initially intriguing as I was getting to see the Arizona desert landscape for the first time while it wasn’t raining. You get a pretty view of the San Francisco Mountain peak in your rearview mirror for a very long time. However, once that disappears, you’re stuck with miles and miles of desert scrub until you get to Petrified Forest National Park!

There are two main sections of the park which straddle the north and south sides of Interstate 40. The northern section houses the Painted Desert while the southern portion has some ruins, petroglyphs, and of course, the petrified wood. I started with the northern portion as I figured I’d swing down south near Show Low, AZ and try my hand at finding a camping spot in the National Forest.

The Painted Desert is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I feel like I will be using the word “amazing” a lot and apologize ahead of time—thesaurus be damned. While the petrified wood is fun to look at and very interesting in concept, the views of the Painted Desert are like Badlands National Park on steroids. If you were a child of the 80s, or a parent of a child of the 80s, you may also be reminded of Land Before Time movies. The place looks so vast and ancient, you can’t help but imagine the time of the dinosaurs. In fact, the Visitor Center would love to tell you all about dinosaurs and from which era each of the striations in the exposed rock came from.

The Petrified Forest section is the aftermath of what happened to a bunch of trees that fell into the water, then were buried, then filled with silica, and finally exposed by the wind about 200 million years ago. Even though you are never supposed to take stuff from National Parks, massive amounts of petrified wood have been taken from the park. I remember visiting the park when I was a child and hearing that at the rate the wood was being taken, the park would lose all its petrified wood by such and such date. Luckily, there is still petrified wood to behold, and if you want some everlasting-harder-than-rock wood, you can buy some legally from people who found it on their own private property.

The Arizona Circuit: Walnut Canyon National Monument (Part 1)

June 8, 2015

What is the best way to start your personal solo travel adventure? By following a recommendation from a complete stranger on the internet.

As part of my overall research and planning for this adventure, I’d been compiling a list of random places around North America which sounded nice to visit. Two of those places were Walnut Canyon National Monument and Meteor Crater. So, that’s exactly where I headed off from Flagstaff.

Walnut Canyon National Monument

Walnut Canyon is located a short jaunt east of Flagstaff. Remembering nothing about what made Walnut Canyon special, I was quickly informed at the visitor center that the reason I was supposed to be there was to hike around the canyon and see the cliff dwelling ruins. Excellent!

If you are expecting the cliff dwellings to resemble the ruins at Mesa Verde National Park, you will be sorely disappointed. However, that’s not to say Walnut Canyon isn’t worth visiting, especially if you have a fascination with dilapidated housing. I’m floored at how many people I’ve met thus far who have an obsession with photographing old abandoned buildings. Let me rephrase, Walnut Canyon is incredibly beautiful and you should go.

Upon exiting the visitor center, you are afforded one of the most spectacular views of the canyon. I was delighted until I figured out why the hordes of children on a school field trip were completely beat and whining. In order to get to the cliff dwellings, you had to descend quite a way into the canyon, which meant you would eventually have to come back the way you came. I decided to think of it as good training for the hike I’m planning to do in the Grand Canyon.

Personally, the most interesting thing for me were the canyon walls. The walls look like they were formed by volcanic rock which melted like ice cream.

The walls were actually formed by wind. Apparently, the etchings in different directions are a historical record of which way the wind was blowing at different times.

In addition to the cliff walls, some of the plants seemed to be influenced by the wind.

And, to get you primed for the mass amount of plant photos I'm bound to post, here is a look into the first desert plants I encountered:

Meteor Crater

I should have known from the looks of the ten billboards leading to the crater that it was just a tourist trap. On entering the visitor center, the lady sadly informed me the tour had just departed, but that there would be another that day. Of all the things I could spend my money on, paying money to see a large hole in the ground was not going to be one of them.