Skip to main content

Picacho State Park —> Lake Pleasant Regional Park


After the Grand Canyon trip and a night in the Jerome Grand Hotel in Jerome AZ we drove to Picacho State Park. The Saguaro cacti along the drive and then at the park are incredible. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for where they grow arms. The cactus lives for 100 to 200 years and only sprouts arms past age 50. It grows flowers at age 40 though. For me, it does not get tiring admiring the different variations of this amazing plant.
   The next day we took it easy in the hot morning and then headed to Biosphere 2, an hour away. It was great to see B2 in person since I talk about it when teaching ecology. The lung room (actually there are 2 for redundancy) was very cool. The several 1000 pound disk that is attached and surrounded by the 1/4” rubber membrane is supported by the fact that the pressure inside is just 1 psi greater than outside. The lung allows the air inside to expand without breaking windows everywhere. We got to see it move down a few inches when the tour guide opened the door and the air rushed out — it was like a hurricane in the doorway!
   The next day we awoke early to go horseback riding in Tucson at Houston Horseback Riding. Thanks Patricia Reyes for suggesting this activity! My horse was named Too-see-mee. At one point he gently lay down in the sand with me on him!  Bobbi, the tour guide was astounded and apologetic but I didn’t mind and I was unhurt. She thought he had perhaps forgotten he had a rider on him — which wouldn’t be hard as I was being unassertive with him. 
   We saw a rattlesnake on the ride and many cacti — we rode through Saguaro National Park. The cacti were again gorgeous. The whole family really enjoyed riding. After riding we had 3+ hours to drive to Phoenix to our campground: Lake Pleasant Regional Park.

   On the drive Amy was telling us how the park has burros (wild donkeys). Nevertheless, we were astounded when 8 or so burros slowly passed through our own campsite while munching on grass. I even got to pet one that hung around a little longer. The burros can be heard braying loudly at all times of day here. Our campsite is also located on the lake, which is lucky that the water level is at around its highest because we had a cooling family swim upon arriving last night. The temperature on the car’s thermometer indicated up to 40 degrees Celsius at one point — the highest we’ve seen to date. I must say that I love this kind of dry heat compared to humid heat of Ontario. The lake provides drinking water for all of the surrounding communities (it is an artificial lake). The campground also has lovely Saguaros.




Labels:

Comments

  1. Lightsmith13 May 2019 at 11:05

    Great fun! Lucy looks particularly prickly in one of those photos! ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lightsmith13 May 2019 at 11:10

    So many Burros! Reminds me of the Tom Waits spoken line "It is illegal to hunt donkeys in Arizona. So I left Arizona".

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cloudland Canyon State Park

On Wednesday night we headed over to Forest Gully Farms where we stayed one night, in wonderful houses built in side hills. I don’t know much about The Hobbit, but I do know that the houses that we stayed in looked like Hobbit houses. There at Forest Gully Farms we met a very nice man who showed us around. We went to see some of there chickens, because we were told that we could hold them. After I had chased chickens around for awhile I caught a beautiful black one. Right now, after Forest Gully Farms we are staying at a wonderful campsite where there are wonderful hiking trails. Cloudland Canyon State Park is wonderful! So far we have been hiking every day. On the first day we started with a small hike but then it got bigger. Before we started heading back, because I was already really tired, my mom saw another waterfall that she wanted to see. To get there, you needed to go down, and to go down, you needed to take the stairs. So we went down the, approximately five hundred sta
9 comments
Read more

Swimming with the Manatees

       Today was one of the the best activities of the trip so far. One of the very first things that we planned for this trip was to go swimming with the manatees, an activity that was first discovered by Miriam as she looked through one of our research books. Everyone has been looking forward to it for a long time, even though we had to get up pretty early in the morning. And it was worth it.        Mama’s alarm clock woke us at five-thirty , at which time we had to scramble into a bathing suit, grab our clothing, and go. Swimming with the manatees is best in the morning, which is why we had to leave early. We ate three hurried muffins in the car and arrived soon after. It was still pretty dark when we got to the building, so we just went in to wait for the manatee to start. Luckily, hot chocolate was provided.        Soon, a woman guided us and several other people into a room to watch a movie about how to behave on our tour. (Don’t touch the manatees unless they come to you,
8 comments
Read more

The Actual, Real Hobbit

After Mammoth Caves, we camped for two nights in Nashville before moving on to a place that for Miriam and I was secret. We made seveural guesses as to where we were going, but none of them were exact. The closest one was one of mine- I guessed that the place we were staying was underground. Based on my mom and dad’s reactions, I thought that I might be close, but I did not know the full extent of it at all. We arrived at a place that at first looked normal. Two friendly dogs named Jedi and Trooper ran up to greet us, so I spent the first several minutes of our visit trying to figure out if it was possible to pet two dogs at once. The answer to that question, by the way, is no. Then we saw where we would be staying. You might remember that on my last post, I mentioned that if you’re a fan of The Hobbit you’d better read this one. And that’s because where we were staying literally looked like a series of hobbit holes. The first hole was the most like a hobbit hole-
7 comments
Read more