Tucson Souvenirs

Earrings! They are my favorite souvenirs – not too expensive and small enough to be easily packed for the trek home.

The most unusual earrings I purchased this time were the ones that used cholla cactus stems as a large ‘bead’ (upper left). I noticed the cholla cactus around Tucson because they seemed to be more colorful than just about anything else.

I bought the hummingbird earrings since we did see quite a few hummingbirds during our walks…. again, the earrings are a good reminder of one of our trip highlights.

The bear earrings were a serendipity. I bought them as a reminder of the excellent black bear lecture I attended just before our trip….and I liked the symbolic representation. When I saw the arrow inside the bear symbol I thought of the 20,000 calories a day the bear needs to eat in the fall (does the arrow represent the digestive tract?)!

Saguaro National Park – Rincon Mountain Distract

Our January visit to Tucson included a morning drive in Saguaro National Park – Rincon Mountain District. It was quite different than the last time we visited in June 2013. It was too early for the desert spoons or saguaro cactus to bloom although the cholla provided some rosy/orange color to the landscape.

Here is a close up of the cholla – the brightest colors of the winter landscape.

I like the whites and greens of some of the plants of the desert…but these leaves are not for touching any more than the cactus with their spines.

There was snow on the peaks of the Catalina Mountains to the north. The ocotillos looked like gray thorn sticks; some had a few remnants of last year’s seeds. In a few months the ocotillos would be green thorn sticks with orangey red blooms at their tips.

The visitor center is low and has enough vegetation around it to be almost hidden even in this desert landscape. The loop road beings at one end of the parking lot.

I noticed young saguaros with nurse plants still protecting them from the harshest heat and sun.

The accordion pleats of the cactus body are not always as orderly as I’d assumed. Sometimes they need to grow more pleats as they get larger!

The beginnings of the saguaro ‘arms’ almost look like another cactus growing on the main trunk.

The plants on the rocky slope of the Rincons from one of the loop road overlooks have water nearby this time of year – probably from snow that melting higher up in the mountains.

From our vantage point we could not see any snow in the Rincons. Either it had melted or was still on the peaks out of our sight. We think of deserts as having very few plants but this one has quite a few plants…all that survive with very little water as look as they are undisturbed.

Intimate Landscapes – January 2016

This is the fourth month for my Intimate Landscapes series (after reading Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here)) featuring images from January that are: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

There is only one picture from Maryland this month – the frozen edge of a stream with pebbles showing, dark leaves caught on the surface, green and brown plants around the edge.

All the other images are from Arizona this month…I’ve saving the wintery ones for February since I had so much to share from Arizona. The colors are often subdued- the greens of saguaro and desert brush, the browns of twists of dead wood and occasional water, the whites of rocks.

And then there are sudden bursts of color that draw the eye – oranges…and yellows.

I made a slide show of the other intimate landscapes that appealed to be in Tucson – a vine growing on a purple wall, the color variation in prickly pear, a lone flower in front of a white wall, a very small cactus surrounded by black rocks and fallen leaves from its nurse tree that shades it during the hottest part of the summer, small saguaro getting big enough to show among the palo verde and cholla, groupings of cactus with colorful spines, young saguaros lined up in rows between lighter leaved plants and yellow flowers with palo verde in the background….such are the intimate landscapes around Tucson.