time

I mentioned in my last post that my plans to travel back to New Orleans on New Year's Day had changed. Through some cosmic bank error, I received an email from the airline changing my flight from the 1st to the 3rd. Two extra days with Mike in the desert have been pretty wonderful.

After rushing around like a madwoman for two weeks, it's been nice to just relax. My brain has been all sorts of confused about time zones. It doesn't help that we are less than three miles from the time zone boundary. It also really doesn't help that as of tomorrow, I will have been in all four continental US time zones in nine days (Eastern time at home in New Jersey, Mountain time in Arizona and Utah, Pacific time in Nevada and California, Central time in Louisiana).

The extra time in Arizona allowed me to be part of something Mike and I have been planning for a while-- acquiring a small friend for our beloved Red. She's never been an only cat before, and we thought she might like a playmate since Mike is at school all day. Mike and I went looking for a cat before I knew about the flight change, and it was love at first cat when we saw this little guy in the shelter:



He had a holding period of a week after his Christmas Eve dropoff. We imagine he was a nixed Christmas present. We picked him up today, and he has been an absolute love. He only stopped purring when he fell asleep and when we bathed him, but that's about it.



We named him Palo Verde after the state tree of Arizona! But we've been calling him green cat, our little pal, orange cat, stripey baby cat, etc.

I fly back to New Orleans in the morning, and get back to work saving the wetlands, but will very much enjoying a little more time hanging out with Mike, Red and green cat first.


Red Oak, the state tree of New Jersey!

Volunteers of America

I've been volunteering with NRCS for a little more than a year now. It's been basically awesome. I've been getting tons of experience, they've been getting free help, I've been getting free training. I want to work for them. What I'm doing in New Orleans will help prepare me for that as I continue volunteering (more on NOLA soon, promise). This past week was National Volunteer Week, and I received sweet letters and cards and swag and gifts from some of the offices I've been spending time with. They also had me write an article to appear on the state's volunteer info site, and eventually also on the national volunteer showcase. They edited me down, but here's what I had to say (no matter how many times I rewrote it, I never felt like my enthusiasm was properly conveyed. Please, ask me about how much I love NRCS sometime)--

I joined the Earth Team about a year ago to gain more experience in conservation fieldwork while looking for full-time work after grad school. With a background in Geography, I only knew that I wanted to help the environment for a living, but wasn’t really sure how to do that. I was immediately met with a lot of great ideas and opportunities. What started as helping one office with occasional conservation planning and clerical work became an awesome adventure in over 200 hours of greatly varied fieldwork through four different offices (so far!). It’s been really exciting to see so many different places and practices.

I started in New Jersey’s Freehold Service Center. I went with the staff for many conservation planning meetings, helping with surveys, mapping and GIS, and spot checks. I occasionally visited the Columbus Service Center to gain experience with engineering surveys. New Jersey has so much diversity in such a small area, so I was already exposed to a wide variety of projects focused on drainage, irrigation, cover crops, wetlands rehabilitation and wildlife habitats. It’s been very interesting to see the different environments and how conservation practices are adjusted to accommodate them.

In the fall, I was working in northern New Jersey a few days a week, so I decided to call the Hackettstown Service Center to continue my volunteering. I was taking a soil science course at the time, so I got involved with soil investigations all over northern New Jersey, including rural and urban environments. This has really helped me create a broader foundation (literally!) for understanding conservation issues. I’ve been able to help with soil evaluations as well as some outreach, helping lead a fieldtrip for college students and proctor the upcoming Envirothon.

After exploring conservation all over New Jersey, I found myself in Arizona for a few months, so what did I do? Found my nearest NRCS office! Through the Kingman Field Office, I was able to see a completely different side of conservation in the desert of northwestern Arizona. It was certainly eye-opening to see how farming, ranching and conservation take place in such an arid environment, especially compared to the practices I’ve become familiar with in New Jersey. I assisted with Natural Resource Inventory and learned about the desert’s biodiversity. I also helped with surveying on reservation land to prevent erosion of the dry, sandy ground under the rare but heavy rainfall. I mostly assisted with rangeland management projects, spot checking invasive species control and fencing projects.

Since I’ve been back in New Jersey, I’ve been back to helping with more familiar work in soil investigations and conservation planning, as well as some office work. The field is definitely more exciting for me, but I don’t mind assisting with filing and mailings—it’s good to know the background work involved in conservation, and I’m also happy to help out the agency that has given me the opportunity to see so many different ways that conservation is being done. I’m moving to New Orleans in the fall to work for a year, and I’m definitely looking forward to getting in touch with NRCS in Southern Louisiana!

Cactus League

If you're interested in the baseball itself, you might be more interested in what Mike has to say about this trip:
The 8 year old inside me screamed!

But even I, the very casual baseball fan, have plenty to say about visiting spring training in Phoenix.

First, Phoenix is ridiculous. When you consider that about 25% of the state's population lives in Phoenix, and about 50% of the state's population lives in the "metro area", it's no wonder that this was the first traffic I've seen since arriving in Arizona in early January. My dad lived here before he moved back to NJ and met my mom and lived happily ever after, but he was confident that the place I was describing was WAY built up since he lived there over 30 years ago. Still, despite the traffic, it was great to drive around all week and get to know the area a little. We also went and saw the house my dad lived in, which was pretty amusing for me.

Second, the drive from Bullhead City to Phoenix was really pretty. I've driven as far on that route as Wikieup, but after that stretch of huge ranches, Route 93 leads into saguaro cacti and Joshua tree "forest" before heading into the sprawl of Surprise, Sun City and all of the -dales outside of Phoenix.

Tree of the trip: Joshua trees! in bloom!

So, baseball. blah blah blah sports blah blah baseball. No, just kidding, I actually have things to say. I actually like sports. People forget that often, because I don't particularly care for watching TV.

Monday night: Reds @ Rockies, Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Scottsdale. The park was pretty sweet, set up in a way that we were able to stand behind the bullpen all night and chat with the players. We chatted with Arroyo while he warmed up, and hoped Todd Frazier would come by so we could yell all sorts of Toms River love at him... but no such luck. I adored the organ pipe cacti around the park.

Tuesday: Cubs vs. Rangers, Hohokum, Mesa. I almost became a Cubs fan because they kept playing Blues Brothers songs between the innings over the loudspeakers. Actually, I was pretty excited about the ballpark music in general, as it seems Hohokum features an actual human being playing the organ. It was a great game, though lawn seats are intense in the Phoenix sun.

Tuesday night: Giants @ Mariners, Peoria. We were so exhausted from the long afternoon in the sun (the beers probably didn't help), so we only made it about halfway through the game.

Wedensday: Dodgers vs. Royals, Surprise Stadium. An increase in sunscreen and decrease in beer lead to us feeling a lot more awake, but we decided one game was enough. Not that I really had much a stake in any of these games, but man is it great just enjoying a game on a beautiful day and not really care who wins.

Thursday: White Sox vs. Brewers, Camelback Ranch, Glendale. Free parking! I think this was my favorite park. There was something aesthetically pleasing about the fact that the seats matched the sand. The lawn was particularly steep, so not only did we have a great view, but we also had the added entertainment of a bunch of small children repeatedly running up and rolling down the hill.

All right, all right. I didn't actually say much about the baseball games themselves, but I did really enjoy this. The last major league game I went to was a very, very rainy Mets @ Nationals game the day I finished my first year of college in 2005. Dad and I stopped and enjoyed watching a few innings of ball and a field crew tripping over themselves trying to get the tarp out before driving back to New Jersey.

Good trip. I do like a good ball game, live and in person, so five of those was a sweet way to wrap up spring break.

Arizona, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Arizona, Utah

Brian had a flight out of Vegas on Wednesday (March 13) and the Smithbauers had a flight tour of Lake Powell and Antelope Canyon, so Mike and I drove from Flagstaff, Arizona to Kanab, Utah via Las Vegas, Nevada, which involved a lot of weaving in and out of states on weirdly beautiful highways.

Going from Flag to Vegas was weird, losing the beautiful snow cover as we went down in elevation, back into the juniper-pinyon elevation before the high grasslands and eventually the scrubby desert. It was probably in the teens when we woke up in Flagstaff, and kind of toasty once we got back to the Mohave Valley and Desert on our way up to Vegas. We hit the In-N-Out Burger, whose veggie burger is stupid (a hamburger minus the beef, so a bun, lettuce, tomato and onion) but whose fries and grilled cheese are adequate enough. That was the most local cultural thing we could think of.

The drive continued on through ALL of Clark County, Nevada, which is way bigger than I thought (Nevada, which is more than 12.5 times the size of New Jersey, has only 16 counties, while NJ has 21). It is all desert and passes through some wide open empty reservation land (Moapa).

Back into Arizona, I-15 passes through the Virgin River Gorge and over the Virgin River seven times. It was stunning. There is little in the way of geologic lead-up to the gorge, nor did I have any idea it was coming despite my frequent staring at maps, so I was in absolutely awe when we got there. For an interstate highway, it sure has views. We drove through more reservation land (Kaibab-Paiute) and saw a few gas stations and rest stops but little else.

Then Utah (the first time!). More little gas stations and rest stops till we got to Washington, then Hurricane (why is it even called that?!), before hooking a right and heading back into Arizona, through Navajo land before heading back into Utah.

We stayed in Kanab, which seemed like a sleepy little tourist stop (in the middle of the Golden Circle of national parks, including Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion). Most of the main roads were under construction, but we had a great meal at a Mexican restaurant across the street from our hotel. Even in town, we had a nice view of the beautiful mountains, which would only get better as we carried on to more national parks for the rest of the week...

happy returns

To kick off Katy and Mike's spring breaks (and Brian's vacation and my general tagging along), we took a grand tour of Mohave County. We started with a drive to Oatman, where the burros were out in large numbers, including several babies (which we've taken to calling burritos) ranging from three weeks to about three months. We even caught the daily gun fight for once!

We took Old Route 66 to Topock on our way to Lake Havasu, where we stopped to see the London Bridge, walk along the water, and visit Barley Brothers. It was a lovely drive through the desert. It has "rained" (mostly been overcast and damp, more so than downpour, although the last time the skies deluged on Mohave County) all of three times since I've been here, which has lead to a lot of weird desert grasses growing, and all of the cacti and brush looking less dead, and... a rainbow of wildflowers have sprung up!

After a grand tour of where Mike's been living for the past nine months, we headed east to the Grand Canyon. It had snowed all weekend until we left Bullhead City, so we were greeted with a glorious, heavy, wet snow hanging onto the ponderosa pines in Kaibab National Forest (and thankfully, clear roads!). It was pretty cool to see the difference between summer canyon and winter canyon. The snow made everything very pretty, and it wasn't too cold out to walk around a bit. We mostly strolled along the south rim trail, catching sunset at Yaki Point, which was new for me.

On Monday (March 11), we went to Sunset Crater and Wupatki. Mike and I visited Sunset Crater Volcano in January, but this time we hiked a bit more and also explored the pueblo ruins. This pair of national parks was nuts. It was snow covered at Sunset Crater, but not the slightest evidence of snow up in Wupatki. The views were incredible, as were the hikes-- a very steep stroll up the side of a volcano cone, and a repeat of the good loop around the a'a.

The next day, we took all of Mike's people to Sedona. Katy, Brian, Mike and I hiked the perimeter of Red Rock State Park, like Mike and I did in January. It's such a beautiful park with great views. Hiking all of the trails is just the right amount of challenging-- a good workout, but not so hard that you can't do anything else for the rest of the day. It was nice to repeat this park, too, but we also managed to get in one more trail than we did last time (the Kisva trail along the creek). 

It was so cool to show Katy, Brian, and Mike's aunt and uncle around these parks that we liked so much. I never get sick of looking at these crazy rocks, either. It was nice to be able to add new elements to things we already enjoyed, too. This all served as a good foundation for the rest of the week in Utah!

Mojave Desert

We've taken to adding a prefix to anything we (Mike, his fellow teachers and I) don't understand: "weird desert ______". It's fitting, especially given some of the crazy and beautiful things I saw in the Mojave Desert last weekend.

Last Saturday, a few of us went to Joshua Tree National Park. The drive there down CA-95 was nauseating, not in appearance, but in the up and down and up and down and up and down of the road. We're not even talking serious mountains here, just a road that dipped and rolled with a horizon that looks deceptively flat. I'm to blame for the route though. I picked it because Google Maps suggested it took the same amount of time as the bigger highway, and figured it'd be more scenic. It was actually really interesting to look at-- desert as far as you could see, which I'm learning includes a lot of weird desert plants, more than I ever would have guessed. The southwest is actually not like the Sahara, I've learned.

Something we thought was especially interesting was that as we paralleled the train tracks, was this intricate sort of graffiti made out of sticks and different colored rocks. People's initials, dates, names, images. I've never really seen that before.

California Route 62 drives along the edge of Joshua Tree National Park for a while, but not one Joshua Tree was spotted until we were well within the other side of the park near Twentynine Palms, CA. They are almost Dr. Seuss like. I can only imagine their weird shapes are a long-perfected adaptation to windthrow or something, knowing that root systems and branches have some balance to them. The weirder looking their crowns, perhaps the weirder looking and more anchored the roots? I don't know. They were really bizarre but very, very cool to stare at as we hiked and visited different parts of the park.

In addition to weird desert trees, the geology in the park was pretty weird looking. Everything was smooth and rounded and curved, as though a child was given some green, brown and grey crayons and told to invent a new planet. It was very beautiful, but kind of eery. I've never seen anything else like this place.

We stayed in Barstow, and the next day, Mike, Dustin, Hannah and I headed to Death Valley National Park. My ears rejoiced as we hit sea level, and despite how hot it was at -282 feet (close to 90 degrees till the sun began to decline), it was a really cool place. You can see snow capped Telescope Peak (part of the range that Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental US is in) from the salt flats in Badwater Basin (the lowest point in the US). There were mountains in every color, a stunning natural bridge, weird salt formations, and of course, weird desert plants. I was amazed at how much was growing in the park (not much, but more than nothing).

After a good rest in Pahrump, NV (another weird desert gambling town) we spent the next day meandering back to Bullhead City, with a stop at Red Rock Canyon just outside of Las Vegas. This place was really beautiful, and really unexpected. For one, the desert heading into Vegas seems so barren and empty (although we were proven wrong later, there are way more plants, including Joshua Trees, visible when you drive south from Vegas during daylight); the desert in this park had a lot of weird desert plants, and even some wild horses. Again, the rocks came in every color, and the wind erosion created some really great rock scrambles. We were able to sit pretty high on top of some red rocks and have a great view of the place.

The drive back to Bullhead City was pretty direct, but like I said, we saw way more plants than we knew were there. Having only flown into Vegas at night, I've seen some of the brush by the road, but it mostly looks like you're on the moon when you drive through the Mojave Desert. It turns out, the incredible darkness of the desert is hiding all sorts of yucca, Joshua trees, distant mountains, and other weird desert things. Really cool. Well, warm, it is February, and it is up over 60 degrees most days already...

Won't you get hip to this timely tip:

Get your kicks on Route 66!



I've been meaning to take one of the "primitive roads" in the area for a while, just to explore the desert a little. I've also been curious about more of Old Route 66, so it was all too perfect when my Grandma Day mailed me an article that she thought I'd like (I love when she does this): The Mystique of Route 66 from Smithsonian Magazine. (That article is really great, and I've been to most of those places in Arizona.) Consider me inspired.

I've driven some of Old Route 66 before, up to Peach Springs and the entire length of it in Illinois. I definitely dig it as a slice of Americana, but I think today's adventure really kind of solidified my affinity for this road.

Today I took a primitive road from Bullhead City to Oatman, and hopped on Old Route 66 (a BLM Backcountry Byway!) for just about 30 miles of hairpin turns and switchbacks through high desert and desert valley. It was a really pretty drive, and I barely saw anyone until the road paralleled the Santa Fe Railroad and wound into Kingman. There's not much out there-- a little general store about halfway along that advertised sodas and souvenirs and had a port-a-potty in the parking lot, an assisted living home (really just a small ranch house), several long lines of mailboxes with no homes in sight, countless "primitive roads", and a lot of desert plants thanks to the recent rain (or snow, depending on the elevation).

I actually came back to town via Old 66 too, but it felt way shorter despite stopping more. There were a few pullouts along the way, including one that had some old steps carved into the side of a stony hill-- I clearly stopped to climb up and check the view (it was lovely). Back in Oatman, the burros were down from the mountains, and I enjoyed seeing them again, especially the little baby guy, who's bulked up a lot! I paid a little more attention to the rest of Oatman now that I've been there a few times. I have a new favorite road--


View Larger Map

You probably can't read that sign, but it says Snob Hill Road. Really. In a tiny, sparsely populated village with mostly rundown trailers, Snob Hill. I laughed.

Now I really want to drive more of Old Route 66, The Mother Road. Obvious short-term solution: from Oatman to the California border (Needles), which would include driving through the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge. I felt pretty darn American, driving down the road, Coca-Cola in hand, listening to Ray Charles sing "America the Beautiful".

The Geography of Cousins

These thoughts occurred to me a few weeks after arriving in Arizona:

Almost all of my cousins (and there are more than 30, including in-laws) live in New Jersey. Well, almost all of my family (including aunts, uncles, grandparents and my immediate family, that puts the count well over 60) lives in New Jersey. And until very recently, I'd lived there for all but college (four wonderful years in Virginia!).

I always liked New Jersey, but something about being teased about my "homeland" in college, and then returning back to NJ into a graduate program in which hardly anyone else was from NJ, made me really defensive about my love of my home. I think the actor Zach Braff said it well, "I think when you come from a place that's made fun of your whole life... and you love it, you get defensive, and you want to sing its praises to people. I love New Jersey. I think it's made me who I am."

So back to my cousins-- there are very few who live outside of New Jersey: the Virginia cousins, the Kentucky cousin and her family, and I have another Virginia cousin and her family who I haven't seen in a long time, and a cousin in Tennessee with his family who I haven't seen in even longer, and a couple of cousins right over the border into Pennsylvania. But yeah, a lot of family in New Jersey.

Thanks to the marvelous internet and my lot of free time, I've been able to talk to some of my cousins (and a lot of other wonderful people in a lot of places!) more lately. But I think about that, and I think about how I label them by where they are in my head, and wonder, wait a second... am I the Arizona cousin?

Good grief, that can't be right. No. Can't be. I've been here a month now, but it's not like I've got an Arizona license, or changed my address or anything. And goodness knows I've got proof I'm from New Jersey.

 

Or I like this one better that my older brother edited:

(Hey, I'm not the only one whose love of New Jersey is... strong.)

I'm probably not the Arizona cousin, because it hasn't been that long and it isn't forever. Also, I'm the cousin who routinely gets asked where I'm off to next, so I'm not even sure I'm the/a New Jersey cousin so much as the nomadic relative that no one can particularly keep track of.

I guess what I realized through this stream of consciousness is, my sense of place is out of whack these days. "Sense of place" is one of those squishy geography things that I was terrified to teach in Human Geography last fall, but turned out to be one of the best conversations we had in class all semester. The term "place" implies some sort of charisma or meaning or uniqueness to it, giving it a more particular definition than the more vague "space" or the only spatially specific "location". (See, I learned things too when I taught.) On the other hand is "placelessness" which is what happens when the uniqueness of a place is replaced with repetitive, uninteresting, indistinguishable scenery, thus losing its meaning.

So my out of whack sense of place is coming from feeling this great love for and connection with New Jersey, and not being there, and not feeling such a personal attachment to Arizona, but being here. I mean, Arizona has been a pretty cool adventure so far (NRCS outings, London Bridge, tree rocks, red rocks, volcanic rocks, burros, new environments to explore and ask questions about in general). But it's not home, and knowing that it's only temporary is really going to prevent me from getting used to it and feeling any sort of settled here.

And I can't think of it as more than temporary because both Mike and I prefer the east coast. We like our families. We like our friends. We like the ocean and the forests. But in the meantime, here we are. I like to think that I'll figure out what's next for me soon, and then we can figure out what to do as a team.


And in the meantime, I'm pretty sure I'm not the Arizona cousin, but rather the cousin who is in Arizona... for now. But there are a lot of really exciting possibilities for the future, and I probably don't even know half of them. And that's kind of exciting in and of itself, but that unknown is also kind of affecting my personal sense of place. I guess that's not an entirely bad thing though. It's kind of become its own adventure, figuring out what my adventure is going to be...

Oatman

About 15 miles southeast of Bullhead City is "the ghost town that just won't die"-- Oatman, Arizona.

Of course, it takes way longer to get there than you'd think. There are two options: it's 13 miles down the road from Mike's school (which is about a half hour away) (so 27 miles/45 minutes total), or there's an unpaved county highway directly from Bullhead City that's 10.5 miles shorter but takes almost an hour, according to Google maps. We took the paved route, but it still felt like we were driving to another time and place altogether.

It's a pretty clear view from Mike's school to the mountains to the east, so we were wondering where this little town would pop up. Turns out it was hidden behind a small ridge after the road we were on connected with Old US-66... having driven across it across Illinois and elsewhere around Arizona, I've seen some of the bigger, more developed parts, but man, it is just a windy little road that is barely paved when it goes through Oatman. I imagine driving the whole thing would be really cool and interesting though.

It was a quiet morning out in Oatman. We probably saw 8-10 burros wandering around, apparently descendents of the beasts of burden brought to the area by early settlers. The town was named for one settler in particular, Olive Oatman, whose life was for some reason spared when the rest of her family was killed by one of the local tribes. She was traded to the Mohave people, who tattooed her face and apparently treated her fairly well, and was eventually traded back to a white fort for some blankets and horses.

We had an early "lunch" of fry bread and Sarsaparilla at a little inn in town, and just wandered up and down the main street to see the burros and people watch a little. It's a quiet tourist area. We were also there on the early side. Passed a lot of cars heading in that direction as we went back to Bullhead to do some grocery shopping. It was a nice change of scenery though, and I loved loved loved the little baby burro (burrito?):

 

I know it looks dead, but it was just napping.

I think I might go back via the dirt road next time I have the car...

a grand little tour

Sorry not sorry for talking about science at about the 3:50 mark. Sci five!

a'a-wesome: even more cool rocks!

Flagstaff was about 16° Fahrenheit (that's about -9° Celcius, if you were wondering) on Monday morning.

We bundled up in as many layers as possible (only having brought so many warm clothes to Arizona) and embarked on a search for breakfast.We had stopped in Flagstaff for coffee on our way to Sedona on Sunday and every coffee place we could find was closed. Monday though-- no problem. We found a little place called White Dove Coffee Shop, which had great coffee and tea and breakfast burritos. I'm not fully human until I eat in the morning, so after that, the adventures could begin.

We decided to take advantage of free National Parks admission to celebrate MLK Day and went up to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument to explore a little bit. This fit in perfectly with the rest of the weekend's theme of COOL ROCKS: volcanic rocks! A'a! The greatest scrabble word of all time, right there in front of me. We only hiked one trail because it was really cold out, and there was a lot of ice and little guarantee that the trails would be ok, but it was really beautiful. I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition of lava fields-- rocks that were laid down by hot, violent volcanic explosions-- and the fresh, clean, sparkling, peaceful snow covering the park.

Disappointing: you can't hike up the side of the volcano anymore, too many people doing that caused too much erosion. Still, you can look up 1000 feet at it and just imagine what it must have been like about 900 years ago, all melty and exploding. Kind of cool.

Good weekend. Tree rocks, sedimentary rocks, red rocks, volcanic rocks. You could say the weekend rocked. ha ha.

more colorful rocks

On Sunday morning, we returned to Petrified Forest National Park to look at the Painted Desert in the morning light. Amazing. The hills were all shades of red and pink, and the park was empty (so even quieter and more peaceful). We stopped by the few overlooks we didn't check out on Saturday, and caught some great views of petrified forests. Incredible stuff.

After leaving Petrified Forest/Painted Desert and meandering through Holbrook (where we'd stayed the night before), a town that doesn't have much besides a railroad crossing and a LOT of dinosaur statues, we intended to visit Meteor Crater and check out Flagstaff. We stopped at Meteor Crater only to discover that it's not particularly cheap to get in. Could we have afforded it? Probably. Did we want to? No. We were offended by the blatant ripping off of tourists, so we continued on our merry way, and on a whim decided to check out Sedona instead.

Still got to see a big hole in the ground!

Sedona is absolutely lovely. It was pretty chilly in Flagstaff, looking so nice and wintery with pine trees and snow. We began the drive from Flag to Sedona and were happily surprised to find that the squiggly lines on Google maps was a gorgeous, winding road down into Oak Creek Canyon.


View Larger Map

The temperature jumped and it felt like spring. We enjoyed having the windows down and driving through the cute downtown area of Sedona, full of fun looking shops and restaurants. We decided to go to Red Rock State Park (over Slide Rock State Park, and good that we did, because apparently the main attraction there is playing in the river, which it wasn't quite warm enough for). That was a good whimsical decision.

Red Rock State Park is full of really great trails, and obviously, red rocks. They are beautifully maintained without being paved and excessively manufactured looking. We basically hiked the perimeter of the trails, probably 3-4 miles. It was beautiful. Stunning views, cool lizards and birds, bobcat scat (which we proudly identified correctly using our own logic of, it's fuzzy, so something that eats other fuzzy things, and it looks like cat poop), lots of cacti and trees, with a little stream running through (SO nice to be by water).

We stopped by a brewery in town and had a flight of samples of some great stuff before having dinner at a sandwich place and heading up to Flagstaff for the night. That windy road was less fun at night, but the infinite number of stars and the moonlight glowing on the snow as we gained elevation was pretty cool.

Petrified Forest

Rocks! Trees that are rocks! Rocks that used to be trees!

!!!!!!!!!!!

We began the long weekend (thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for your good work for our world) at Petrified Forest National Park, a place that Mike mentioned he passed on his original drive west in July. He suggested maybe I'd be interested in going there sometime?

TREES THAT ARE ROCKS!

I really loved this park. The biggest impression Arizona has made on me so far is that everything is just so wide, so expansive, so vast-- Petrified Forest was no exception, but in a very different way than I've seen before. Grasslands as far as you could see, occasionally interrupted by a cluster of badland hills, with the Painted Desert around the northern edges. I think what made it feel so immense to me was the fact that I-40/old US-66 and the Santa Fe Railroad bisected the park, but you could watch a train with 100 cars go by and barely hear it. There was nothing for the sound to bounce off. It was sort of eerily quiet, but really peaceful.

We stopped and hiked a lot of the trails in the park. Most of them were reasonably short and accessible. The drives in between the trails were stunning, too, with amazing views of the badlands-- the stripes of sedimentation were really obviously and really cool colors. Grasslands as far as you could see with little specks of Painted Desert, badlands and petrified wood everywhere. So lovely.

The park sadly closes before sunset, but we got to stare at the Painted Desert in the northern end of the park as the sun got lower in the sky, and it was pretty awesome to see the colors just pop. Amazing reds and pinks and blues and greens, with the pale washed out grasses and the big, blue sky. Pretty awesome.

I just love petrified wood. I think it's really cool. Here are at least five reasons why:
1. They are trees and rocks at the same time! That right there is practically my top ten favorite things!
2. It's really pretty.
3. So many different colors from so many different minerals.
4. SCIENCE!
5. There are probably some good metaphors about living things that are somewhat frozen in time or things that are solid that also had life at one time or something. Very poetic, I tell you.
6. Did you know that it requires a diamond saw or dynamite to cut petrified wood? That stuff is serious business.
7. Petrified wood has so many interesting things to say about the geographic environment that it's in, and it's easy to see how that has changed, which is really cool (for example, a lot of the tree rocks we saw in the park were conifers. Conifers! It's all grasslands now with an occasional juniper and maybe another tree or two!).

Well, I got carried away with that. I would keep going on, except most of my reasons would probably just be me stuttering about how much I enjoy trees and rocks and trees that are rocks. It's true though.

Tree of the day: obviously, the ones that are now rocks

So, Petrified Forest? A raving success. That is a lovely park. It was a pretty beautiful day.

Your tax dollars at work!

Today was my first experience driving a government vehicle! I felt especially inspired and capable after catching this episode of Duck Dynasty last night...

You know, I really enjoy that show.

Where did I go in the Chevy Silverado? Wikieup, Arizona:


View Larger Map

a small stop on the way to somewhere else. Presumably Phoenix. It took me an hour to get there from Kingman, and I saw maybe two vehicles and zero other things besides tumbleweed and open range on the way.

I met with a local (and my goodness is that a relative term in a place like Wikieup-- I'll come back to that) rancher who is building a cattle fence for NRCS, his wife, and a District Conservationist who needed more fence check experience. This was my first fence, too. We met at the trading post (seriously! the trading post! which is nearly the only thing there!) and jumped into one truck and spent two and a half hours driving on dirt roads around an enormous ranch, occasionally stopping to take GPS points and pictures to verify that the fence was put in as contracted. It was a beautiful, straight fence. They put the barbed wire at certain heights in different regions, depending on whether antelope are present or not (to make it easier for antelope but more difficult for cattle to sneak out). blah blah blah I like this stuff but you probably don't care whatever dream job!

So to give you an idea of "local"-- this man's got ranches all over the state, but lives somewhere outside of Wikieup. His daughter attends school in Wikieup, which is about 40 minutes drive from home. There are 27 students and 3 teachers in that school-- grades are combined K-2, 3-5 and 6-8. When she goes to high school, she'll have to take the bus an hour to Kingman. The fence we were checking today? 5.5 miles, and it was all within the ranch's borders-- NRCS doesn't built border fences, just partition fences to help with grazing management.

Drove back to Bullhead City and stopped to take this photo, because I think it says a lot about where I am.

 

Quiet evening. Our friend Eric is here visiting. He's in Las Vegas for work this week. This weekend's trip (Petrified Forest and Painted Desert!) is being augmented by Meteor Crater, as per the brilliant suggestion of one of Mike's coworkers! Yessss!

the pinyons up north

Today: field work at 5800+ feet at 19°.

I really, really, really love volunteering with NRCS (I think I'd love working for them more, but I'll take what I can get for now). Today's field work took us up to the Hualapai Reservation to Peach Springs, Arizona, which I visited in August. After a soil and water conservation district meeting, we drove up into the open rangeland north of town to spot check some conservation procedures. Apparently juniper is invasive here, so the object of this practice was to cut down/remove all junipers under 16 inches dbh (diameter at breast height, a common forestry measurement). The dbh limitation was because there were apparently some complaints about removing old growth (aka big trees).

So our job was to drive around the plot in question and spot check if there were any small junipers left. Even though it was open rangeland as far as the eye could see, it was kind of challenging, because juniper and pinyon look roughly the same from a distance in the bright, bright sun. We ended up getting out a few times to measure out 1/10 acre and count the species of trees. It was really cold and windy! Overall though, success. There were just a few small junipers that needed to be taken care of still.

Driving to and from Hualapai from and to Kingman was pretty incredible. I just can't get over the enormous vistas here. Unfortunately, they make me kind of dizzy*, but it's pretty beautiful. I also saw my first instance of "blowing dust" today, from a ranch that NRCS is working with because it is like the Dustbowl there. Seriously, the fences get so clogged with tumbleweed and blowing dust that the cattle can just climb over it. So that's not good, but it was still really interesting to see.

No antelope, no burro, so that was disappointing, but I've only been here ten days, with more fieldwork and adventures ahead--
Tomorrow: field work in Wikieup, and driving a government vehicle for the first time!
This weekend: Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, Meteor Crater and Flagstaff

*So it turns out that carsickness is a type of vertigo, which is exacerbated at high elevations. Fun!

London Bridge: desensitizing your parents

Yesterday, while on my way to the London Bridge, I sent my parents a text, "Going to see the London Bridge!" which didn't illicit much of a response from either of them. Mom replied, "!!!" and Dad replied, "is falling down, falling down."

That's it?! No shock, no awe?

Either I have totally desensitized my parents to my habits of slightly unpredictably geography, or they knew that the original London Bridge is, in fact, in Arizona. It's not falling down, it's in Lake Havasu City!

We drove down yesterday, just to check out the town. It was a nice day trip. We had to drive into California to get there, and took Old Route 66 a few miles through the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (which looks like the rest of the desert but maybe has a little more sage brush and the Palo Verde trees don't look quite as manicured).

Lake Havasu City is just a big town at the edge of the desert by some water. It was founded in 1963 by a rich guy who then bought London Bridge when it was being replaced in England a few years later. Apparently, says Wikipedia, the London Bridge is the second most visited tourist attraction in Arizona, behind the Grand Canyon. Um, neat. So what's number 3? I need to add that to my to-do list.

Seriously though, my mind is blown that there are such new towns in this country, although I guess the rest of the world views pretty much our whole country that way. Just interesting.

Havasu was a good trip though. After many miles of open range with many signs warning of wild burros crossing (didn't see any though), we came upon the city. At first it mostly just appeared to be sprawly, but since there's nothing else around for miles, I guess that's understandable. The area around London Bridge was a nice riverwalk with lots of shops that we didn't really go in, and lots of nice ducks.

One of the reasons we decided to go down there was Mud Shark Brewery, but before we got there, we stumbled upon Barley Brothers Brewery. Both were excellent. Full review here.

All in all, a lovely day trip.

first week rundown

This is my seventh day in Arizona. So far I have:

• gotten my brain into this time zone
• begun Arboriculture and Urban Forestry online (the irony of taking those in the desert)
• signed up for two Coursera classes
• learned how to operate a French press
• cold brewed coffee (this was entirely too strong, but the right flavor, so I'll keep working on it)
• gone for long walks every morning
• completed two of three days of week 1 of the Couch to 5k program with Mike (on a scale from couch to 5k, I am probably somewhere in the middle, although the hills and altitude may have set me back a bit)
• did a soil texture analysis (Carrizo-Riverwash complex: loamy sand! Let me know if you want to see my lab report.)
• caught up on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Prairie Home Companion
• applied to over 800 jobs (this is not an exaggeration, but this includes 702 openings around the country within the same announcement and four other announcements with over a dozen openings-- I guess it makes more sense to tell you I applied to 14 jobs this week)
• spent a lot of time on facebook and Google Reader
• Skyped with Mom and Dad
• read half of the 12th book in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (love love love these books)
• spent yesterday morning with NRCS on Mojave Nation land checking out cropland deficiencies (mostly due to irrigation systems that were inundated with sand)
• Yes, it turns out there is cropland in the desert. Alfalfa mostly, and some cotton. They have sheep grazing nearby here. They do floodgate irrigation by the Colorado River. It's kind of bizarre to see a swath of green in the desert. 

It's "chilly" here this morning. Yesterday's weather:

 

Blowing dust?! This apparently brought some kind of "cold front". I'm excited to do field work with NRCS at much higher elevations next week, where the high is expected to be well below freezing. Arizona?!

the last few days

My last few days in New Jersey were a whirlwind of seeing family and friends, a last minute field trip with NRCS to look at glacial landscapes, dog/apartment sitting at my brother's, and putting off packing as long as possible. It went quickly, and there were so many people and places I wanted to see, but I'll be back.

These last few days in Arizona (well, first few!), I have mostly been a lazy bum trying to recover from the time zone change. For as much as I love traveling, I am actually pretty terrible at it. Only two hours difference, and I feel like a complete zombie.

I have a lot of small projects that I'm going to be working on while I'm out here: applying for jobs, taking two courses online through Bottineau (Urban Forestry and Arboriculture! good thing it's two tree courses, and there are about two trees in all of Mohave County...), learning to bake bread, learning how to operate a French press and cold brew coffee, getting better at running, probably other things.

This morning I took a nice long walk to scope out a running route. I got sort of lost in the sense that I didn't end up where I meant to, but didn't really not know where I was. It was a nice walk, despite how windy it is-- it does actually get cold in the desert at night, so it was a chilly morning here, and the "breeze" (yeah right, NOAA) was really howling in my ears. I might give myself a few days to get used to the altitude before I actually start running. It's about a 1050 foot difference, which is really not much, but consider the fact that I grew up pretty much at sea level. My ears pop constantly when driving around NJ. My ears pop when I go down the street here.

During my walk, I was lamenting the vegetation. I was just really missing the smell of something green. It just smells like sand here. But, I was feeling thankful for the beautiful views of mountains that completely surround this place. I do miss a lot of things about home, but I'll find little things here to get excited about, too.

Suggestions for projects, new things to learn, and things to look for are welcome... in fact, encouraged!

1475 pictures later...

The rest of my southwestern expedition was good. After sleeping like rocks, we woke up and drove west on I-40 through forests, mountains and fields, with our first stop at Dunkin Donuts in Kingman, AZ.There are not many Dunkin Donuts in Arizona, in fact, Dunkin Donuts and Google were both incredibly confused about this one existing at all. If we hadn't seen the sign on the highway, we wouldn't have known.

We drove back down through the mountains to the desert, passing by the occasional trailer or shack on our way to Hoover Dam. Fascinating landscape. So apparently there is this history of forestry and mining in the region, but I don't understand why someone would just build a tiny house in the middle of the desert with nothing and no one for many miles. I mean, I saw outhouses. Legit outhouses. And not all of these places were connected to the power lines. Very interesting.

Lots of cactus.

We arrived at Hoover Dam in the middle of the day, and were very disappointed at how much money we were fooled into spending just to see the thing up close. We paid for parking-- ok, reasonable. But then we were charged to enter the visitor center, with no real clue that you didn't have to go through there just to visit the dam. We just wanted to walk across the damn dam. It was impressive though, tons and tons and tons of concrete and so much water backed up behind it. I kind of hate the ecological impact of something like that, but it is kind of impressive. Lake Mead is mind blowingly large.

We drove to Vegas with a stop at Del Taco, which was very tasty. We stayed at Circus Circus-- really nice room for super cheap, probably because they expected us to throw all of our money into their machines. Free parking, too. We took a cab down to the main part of the strip, spending the evening being exhausted by over-stimulation, but it was cool to see the lights and fountains and madness.

I'm home in New Jersey now, and have survived the first day of classes at both William Paterson and Rutgers Brookdale. I'm excited about teaching again but I definitely have my work cut out for me. I have a few small outings planned but will pretty much be staying in New Jersey this semester-- at least, as best I can guess right now. After I left camp last fall, I didn't expect to do much traveling this summer, if any besides the Jr. High Mission trip. Lucky for me, my life is more exciting than that--


From June to August, I visited 16 states (NJ, CA, NV, PA, OH, MI, NY, DE, MD, VA, NC, CT, MA, NH, ME, AZ) and 4 provinces (Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island), took 4 flights (Philadelphia to San Francisco and back, Philadelphia to Las Vegas and back), drove/rode in a car for over 6500 miles. I took 1475 pictures and experienced an infinite number of beautiful and awesome things.

I am pretty fortunate.

CHARISMATIC GEOMORPHOLOGY!

Today, we woke up early and watched the sun rise in the Grand Canyon. I don't even know how to begin to describe how incredible it was to stare into this giant, awesome hole in the ground all day.

We left Bullhead City a little after 2 AM to make it to the South Rim in plenty of time for sunrise. It was cool and rainy, but the weather stopped for a few minutes to enjoy the sun pouring through the clouds, lighting up the canyon brilliantly. Even overcast, it was just so beautiful. Mike will tell you his favorite stupid thing I said today was probably just after sunrise, as we took pictures of the stunning canyon. I turned to this lovely Utah Juniper next to me and said, "I love this tree." You know, while standing next to the Grand Canyon. I was just in awe of everything I could see.

We decided to hike about a mile and a half kind of southeast from Mather Point (a great overlook closest to the first visitors center in the park) to Pipe Creek Vista. It just rained the entire time, and was so chilly and windy. I enjoyed the biodiversity along the trail in addition to the changing view of the canyon itself. It was really nice to just have a walk by ourselves, without loud tourists and worrying about getting in the way of other people's photos. We were so cold and soaked by the end of it that we were thankful when a park shuttle pulled up to the vista just as we finished a timer photo of our sad, soggy selves. We weren't really that sad though, just in need of some hot tea.

After we warmed up and dried off a bit, the rain mostly stopped for the day, just occasional spitting. We packed some snacks and my tree book into a backpack and took off, hiking along the rim trail about four miles to the west of Mather Point, stopping often just to soak it all in. I felt so small all day, but it didn't make me feel lonely or pointless. It felt cozy. I'm such a small part of such a big world, but things are pretty great. I mean, come on, I spent my day at the Grand Canyon. Didn't expect that this summer!

We hiked down the Bright Angel trail a little bit, though we had a short night of sleep to make it out to the canyon in the first place, and had already hiked quite a bit at a way higher elevation than either of us are really used to having grown up at sea level. We sat for a while on one little outcropping. We were tired. It was glorious, but we decided to take the shuttle back to the main parking area mid-afternoon.

I'd been doing so well, but as soon as I sat down on that bus, I was just beat. Done. I kind of nodded off a bit as we took the trip back, until we passed one little road with a lot of cars and people stopped and crowded around this little gully. The bus driver announced that we might want to look out the left side of the bus-- a bull elk was feeding there.

!!!

Charismatic megafauna of the day: BULL ELK. That woke me up! We got off at that next stop and hurried over to get some pictures. The elk didn't really give a care that everyone was watching him, just kept munching on trees and grass and knocking down branches that got tangled in his enormous rack. It was incredible. It almost didn't seem real. He was huge! And very peaceful. We kept a safe distance to keep it that way.

While taking pictures of the elk, we spoke to a nice couple from Flagstaff, where we're staying tonight. They recommended a sweet brew pub downtown. We made the trip to Flag, through some really heavy rains and some really interesting national forests-- Arizona just keeps blowing my mind. Rain! Trees! FORESTS?! It's so green at 8000 feet. I was also amused that the part of the Kaibab Forest that we drove through on Route 180 didn't even really have trees, it was mostly just open rangeland. Still really beautiful, and just awesome to see storm clouds in the distance dumping rain on the mountains surrounding us.

So that brewpub in Flagstaff: Beaver Street Brewpub. Really great beer and food. Good end to a great day.

Beer of the day: R & R Stout, a really smooth, rich but not offensive stout that even Mike liked

Tree of the day: That Utah Juniper probably deserves it most, but I also enjoyed familiarizing myself with Pinyon Pines (they look vaguely sprucey), Ponderosa Pines (really cool looking red and black bark once they mature), and the Gambel Oak (just because I was sitting at the edge of the canyon with my tree book open at one point, with one of those in front of me)

Charismatic geomorphology of the day: Grand Canyon. And when the term "charismatic geomorphology" is a thing in the coming years, I want everyone to remember where they heard it first...