Thursday, March 28…The River (Bruce Springsteen)

    We are early risers now…well, if one considers 7 a.m. to be early, which I do.  Mom is up and heading for the clubhouse around seven for a shower and we’ve been getting up when she leaves. We deflate the air mattress, fold up the bedding and stash it in the bedroom, put the table back in place, etc.  The living area is then ready for the three of us to sit at the table, plan our day, eat breakfast, whatever.  We don’t necessarily leave for our day’s entertainment early, but we get up early to talk about it.

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   Kim and I have been to Sabino Canyon several times; we’ve always walked/hiked the pathways.  Today the three of us took a ride aboard the Sabino Canyon Shuttle.  In an effort to cover all the ‘Mom’ bases, I made sure that we ate a good breakfast and that we’d be riding instead of walking today. I also knew that we’d be out of direct sunlight because the shuttle is covered. What I didn’t do was buy tickets online beforehand.  We arrived at about 11:30 to discover that the next available tour was 2 p.m.  Ugh!!  I bought tickets from the kiosk and then we had two hours to fill.  Walked the Bajada Loop then went to Arizona Pizza Company for lunch.  Then it was back to the shuttle stop to wait. 

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   A saguaro is an amazing sight and sometimes, there’ll be one with a ‘crest’, which makes it even more amazing.  The top of the crested saguaro grows outward in a fanlike formation instead of upward and each cristate, or crest, is different.  I’m always on the lookout for cristates whenever we’re driving through areas where saguaros grow.  Saw one today in the front yard of a house on Ina Rd. on the way to Sabino Canyon.  I like to take pictures of them but sometimes have to be satisfied with just seeing them; such was the case today.  No picture of that cristate because traffic didn’t permit a stop but it was added to my mental list.  

   However, on our walk through the Bajada Loop, we came across the most splendidly crested saguaro ever and so many pictures were taken of that one. Every other cristate I’ve seen, the crest is the top of the cactus; however, this one looked like the crest had crested again and then there were many healthy arms growing out of both crests. Simply a marvel to look at!  From a nearby sign: Though a crest is a matter of great curiosity, to date no one knows exactly the cause of it. Many theories have been proposed including viruses, genetics, lightning, frost, microscopic insects, and abnormal lateral growth tip division.  However, none of these have been confirmed. From the National Park Service:  Cristate saguaros are fairly rare. Scientists once estimated that for every 200,000 normal cacti, there is only one abnormal crest. 

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   The shuttle ride was worth the wait. The road snaked over three miles into the Santa Catalina Mountains, crossing over the Sabino River five times.  A very twisty river!  The guide made sure to tell us that we were not crossing over bridges, but ‘vented low-water crossings’ instead. I could see there was a difference between a typical bridge and what we were driving over but didn’t have a clue as to why a vented low-water crossing was preferable.  Found this on Wikipedia: A low-water crossing is a low-elevation roadway traversing over a waterbody that stays dry above the water when the flow is low, but is designed to get submerged under high-flow conditions such as floods. This type of crossing is much cheaper to build than a high bridge that keeps the road surface consistently above the highest water level, and is usually deployed in semi-arid areas where high-volume rainfall is rare and the existing channel is shallow (which requires extra ramping on the banks to build a more elevated bridge and thus costs more), particularly in developing countries. Now I understand why the river was flowing over the road surface at a couple of these low-vented crossings.

   Anyway, we listened to a recorded audio description of what we were seeing and some of the history of the area. There were nine stops; one could get off the shuttle at any of the stops and either catch another shuttle or walk back to the visitor center.  We chose to ride up and back in the shuttle. 

   Probably the best part of the ride down was being followed by a man riding an electric three-wheeled wheelchair with hand brakes.  We were sitting backwards in the last row, so we were able to watch him the entire return trip. He got a lot of smiles from hikers that he passed along the way. And one time he was able to ‘ride to the rescue’ when a backpack fell off the shuttle. The shuttle stopped and the owner of the backpack went hustling back up the hill to retrieve it. The ‘Lone Ranger’ scooped it up, came riding around the curve to meet the woman who lost it and gallantly returned it.  Turns out this man was riding the ‘trike’ back down for his wife who was on the shuttle.  Don’t know how it got up there, but it was fun watching it come back down.

   The shuttle made one more unplanned stop when a Western diamondback rattlesnake crawled up onto the road.  Probably more pictures were taken of that snake than during the rest of the tour. 😮

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    Made a detour on the way back to camp to see the burrowing owl site.  Mom knew that we had helped with the initial burrow building stage of the project and was curious to see what it looked like with the tents up. From her surprised reaction, it did not look like she thought it would.  We continued on past the tents and saw some owls standing outside some older artificial burrows.  Also saw some owls hanging out by the canals on Hardin Rd.

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   There was supposed to be another Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base tonight.  More Starlink satellites being sent into space. Sky was mostly cloudy, but we went out at the appointed launch time anyway to see what we could see.  Which was basically nothing because the launch had been delayed, although we didn’t know that until we got back to the camper. It will happen ‘no earlier than 7:30 p.m. (Pacific Time) on Friday, March 29.’  Between the three of us, we should be able to remember that.