Happy New Year!

I hope everyone's 2014 shapes up to be a great one.

My resolution?

A Christmas Quickie

How was Christmas everybody? It seems like a lot of you got a nasty ice storm for the holidays. I hope you were still able to get together with whomever you had hoped to celebrate with. The only gifts we were expecting didn't make it on time (they're going on 10 days in the mail now). Michael's and my gift to each other was, you guessed it, a hike. I won't go on and on about it, but we decided to tackle the brand new Escondido Trail in the McDowell Mountains. We were planning on doing a 9.2-mile loop, incorporating two different trails. Yep, that was the plan. Do you see a loop on the picture below? No, you don't.

The trail was easy enough, very meandering, and pretty flat.



There were a lot of animal tracks too, promising a wild-life sighting that never happened.

What the heck?

During the hike, we could hear shooting nearby and then every once in awhile, we'd here a huge boom. Like a cannon. What the? It started sounding like Independence Day in Key West, so we kept an eye out for biplanes tossing toilet paper at us.

Hallelujah! Our chariot awaits.

After 5.2 miles, we reached an intersection we didn't know what to do with. New trails aren't on the maps yet, and the signs around weren't helpful enough, so we ended up turning around and going back the way we came, which meant a 10.4 mile trek total (I discovered this write-up after the hike, and yeah, like we would have figured out that combo on our own - sheesh).

Inexplicably, this hike really pooped us out, and we were both whining by the last mile. Who was going to carry whom? Pretend you're hurt so that helicopter will pick us up. You think any mountain bikers will give us a lift? How 'bout we just lie down here? Whaaaa. It turned out we were very alone on the return trip, and it even got a little spooky, but we survived to tell the tale. And to take a couple of Advil.

Happy Boxing Day for those of you who still call it that.

Next up, New Year's.

Merry Christmas!

White Tank Mountain Park

One thing we loved about the Caribbean were the waterfalls. Of course we have them here too, but we didn't realize how close. After rains Thursday night, the White Tank Mountain Park experienced this temporary water feature. White Tank park is just an hour away from us, so we might just have to head over there sometime. I tried to embed the video, but it's not working. If you're on Facebook, you can see it here.

So it's only 11:15am...what of it?

With the colder temps and wetter weather, we headed to the movies to see Gravity. How bad can any movie be with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney? We were not disappointed, which was a good thing since I was already annoyed at having to pay extra for 3D. If you think you're having a spell of bad luck, you absolutely must go see this. It'll make you feel better, I promise. Warning though, you might get motion sickness. It took me almost 20 minutes for my stomach to calm down afterwards. When Sandra spins, we all spin.

Then we went out and decorated a cactus for our Christmas card. This is not one of our better holiday ecards, but it'll have to do. We hope you all have a safe and fun holiday, and we look forward to what 2014 might bring (sort of).

Full Moon Hike without The Moon

So last night (Wednesday), we joined Ranger Amy again (we're starting to feel like stalkers) at McDowell Mountain Park for a 3+ mile, full-moon hike (on Pemberton Trail). Except that there was no moon. It was very dark initally...spooky.

Needless to say, I didn't take a lot of pictures since everything was in shadow. About a dozen of us headed into the murkiness, looking and listening for nocturnal wildlife. All we could hear was the crunching under our feet, the voices of others, and the buzzing of airplane after airplane after airplane as each made its way to/from the Phoenix airport. The planes weren't necessarily near or low, but sound really carries in the desert, so it can be annoying if you're sensitive to that kind of engine humming (like yours truly; no one else noticed).

Is anybody home?

While the cloud cover blocked the moon, it also kept things warmer than usual (yay!) and refracted a surprising amount of light over Scottsdale as we headed west. We kept our flashlights off unless Ranger Amy was trying to highlight something. What I like about her is that even though she has to tell the same story over and over again to a new (and not so new) crowd, she always changes it up a little bit (and has new ones).

At exactly half way through the trek, the moon came out. Tada!

We had reached Pemberton Ranch (or P-Bar), a homestead built back in the early 1900s. During the day, you can wander around the property and find everything from pieces of delicate china to old coins (which you then would leave or bring to the visitor's center - you can not take it with you). The cattle grazing negatively impacted the environment by replacing the healthy, green grasses that had existed there with a hardier, invasive brown grass that has taken over and is the main source of fuel for the wildfires we get every year. The cattle would eat feed that had non-native seeds/grass in it and leave cow patties around the ranch infused with said seeds/grass, and then the bad stuff sprouted and took over.

There are still some ranches outside the park, and every once in awhile the cows get inside, so watch your step and look for cows in the road when you're driving (just like the islands!). There's still a pond here, fed by springs and by water brought in by the rangers. Why would they do this when the ranch is no longer active? Because there are thousands of little pupfish swimming in it. They are actually native to the desert, and apparently if we come during the day, we can see them.

Time to head back. Although we didn't see or hear anything, we could have seen the following:

Mule Deer

Javelina

Coyote

Mountain Lion

Fox

Toad

Tortoise

Bobcat

On our treks over the years, we've seen a bobcat, fox, and tortoise. The coyotes and javelina are everywhere, so we've seen plenty of them (a group of javelina went right under our balcony last week, and you hear coyotes howling/yapping many evenings). There are the occasional ocelots (one used to spray our house) and bears (rare) that come down from the higher mountains during droughts and/or wildfires. Of course there are also owls (and other raptors), quail, road runners, ground squirrels, kangaroo mice, pocket mice, snakes, tarantulas, and scorpions...

Amy does this full-moon hike every month. You never know what you'll see or hear, so it would be different every time. The trail is easy, there's no incline at all, but it did take 2 hours to finish the 3 miles, so know your stamina. There was a young child on this trek with boundless energy, so if you've got a small energizer bunny that wants to come, they're welcome.

A Moonrise

Did anyone see the moon come up Monday night? I looked outside and thought, "What a nice sunset," before I realized that the sun doesn't set there. It was the moon! It was just beautiful.

Jennifer Ramm shared this one from the following night. Great shot!

The mornings have been pretty amazing too.

A Day in The Park with...Who? Who?

There was a lot going on this weekend, in Fountain Hills and beyond. It was rather hard to choose what to attend. Fountain Hills used to have an annual hot air balloon classic but doesn't any longer. We'd wake up to balloons almost on our roof, listening to heavy breathing as if a dragon was bearing down on us. Now Gilbert offers the classic. We didn't make it there, but I love the photos -- one at sunrise, one after sunset.



We missed the Fountain Hills Stroll in the Glow last weekend, but we can drive it and still ooh and aaah.

Photo by Mike, I Heart Fountain Hills

Tempe had their Fantasy of Lights Boat Parade.

We had planned on going to that but found something that trumped it -- read on (or skip to the end).

Another weekend, another hike. This time we hooked up with Ranger Amy again and followed her to the Dixie Mine and beyond to some petroglyphs. This wasn't an overly long or strenuous hike, 5 1/4 miles roundtrip, but we would have missed just about everything if we'd been on our own the first time.

We had a good group of people, none of them from Fountain Hills (it's not easy to make local friends that way). I give these folks credit for spending their vacations hiking in such an out-of-the-way place.

As usual, Amy was full of info and held everyone enrapt.

At one point, Michael and I were in the front. When we turned around, we saw Amy pointing out something in the jumping cholla behind us -- a cactus wren's nest. We would never had known it had been there if Amy hadn't stopped us.



Off in the distance, we could see the tailings from the now defunct mine. Miners had hoped to pull copper, silver, and gold from the mine, but in its years of operation, it probably generated about a $20,000 profit. Investors made more selling the land than mining it.



We plowed on and then walked right past the turn-off to the mine before Amy once again redirected us. Oddly, there's great signage all over the preserve, but here you get to look for a ribbon dangling from a bush.

You go through some rare shade,

and then there it is. Can you see it? Can you see Ranger Amy?

Us either, so we would have kept right on walking past it too. Here's what you get to see.



You can no longer go in since fools always manage to hurt themselves, but it was still interesting enough. Most people then turn around here and head home, but if you keep on going, you eventually see petroglyphs thought to be left over from the Hohokam Indians. The Hohokam were gone from the area by the 1500s, so if these markings are from them, they're quite old. Here's the first batch of markings. Unlike on St. Kitts, where the Carib Indian markings have been outlined in chalk or paint to make them easier to see, these blend into the environment pretty well. You have to know where to look because there are plenty of rocks without the writing.

Also around this area are a few caves. Let's follow Michael for a moment.

There were a number of these shallow exploratory holes. Of course, we checked them all out. You never know what you might find! If you continue on, you get to even more petroglyphs. Some are drawn/scraped onto the rocks.

Some are etched in. And no, no one knows what they mean. I think they're directions.

The canyon itself is beautiful to walk around.

We had a nice brisk walk back the way we came, and then we got ready for a surprise...

That morning, I had seen a post on the McDowell Mountain Park Facebook page that they were going to have a rare opportunity to release a rehabilitated great horned owl at 5:15pm at Nursery Tank Pond --- a different part of the park. Any earlier and other birds would have came after the owl before he'd had a chance to get his bearings; any later and we wouldn't have been able to take pictures. Good thinking.

Michael & I were giddy the rest of the afternoon, looking forward to our close encounter with such a cool creature. It got even better when it turned out they were releasing two owls, a male and female. They had been brought in as juveniles a few months ago unable to fend for themselves, and a mature owl at Liberty Wildlife fostered them until they were ready to fly off on their own. The hope is that the two will mate for life and live happily ever after.

The owls were named for the season, Nick & Holly. I was surprised at how small they were (only about 2 lbs each; the females are a little bigger). Here's a taste of the event.



Nick was ready to go asap. Ranger Amy held him a bit though and gave us some insight into an owl's life. I (and several other people) video'd the whole thing in case you're interested (mine's edited, badly, and no that's not me talking in the background). Keven Buettner took some fantastic photos. Here's Nick:



Holly was not only noisier, see if you can hear her beak clicking and even a chirp or two, but she was also more cautious. She gave Amy a loooong stare (glare?) before flying off. Uh oh.



Here's their new home.



Sigh.