Trips

Saturday, 1/9/10 – Casa Grande

This morning we bought fresh apple fritters (donuts) at the clubhouse and ate them for breakfast. It was a real sugar high so we walked some of it off by walking around the park to look at what people had for sale in front of their rigs. Several people were selling used paperbacks, others sold jewelry or crafts they had made. Of interest were the PVC pipe animals – roadrunners, cranes, humming birds – they were original and clever.

We drove out to Casa Grande National Monument and joined an interpretive talk about the Hohokam people who built Casa Grande and irrigated crops with a canal built with sticks and stone tools that was 25 miles long bringing water from the mountains. The structures were all built with a cement-like mix of caliche mud. There were many compounds or small villages in this now desert area that once was lush with vegetation. The water table has dropped from 5 or 10 feet then to 100 to 1000 feet now. Casa Grande – the Great House – (built about 1350 AD) was four stories high and 60 feet long. It was aligned with the equinoxes and solstices and lunar phases. There is evidence of a small, oval ball court and many similarities to structures in North and Central Mexico as well as the Four Corners area to the north.

Great House

Plaza Building

Ball Court

We ate our picnic at the Monument and then drove to the Golden Era Toy and Auto Museum also in the town of Coolidge. A man and his wife bought a storefront on Main Street and now display all the dolls, toys, trains, and antique cars that they have collected over their years. I, of course, liked the Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy memorabilia. It was an amateur endeavor but brought back many memories.

Sunday, 1/10/10 – Casa Grande

We ran into town to shop at Lowe’s, Bealls, and Albertsons and got home in time to watch the football games. Gale did a load of wash and walked a little. At 4 PM we attended a Fantasy Tours presentation – mostly about Alaska – but it answered some of our other questions. We were served more Symphony wine from Pahrump and we won a free membership to Enjoy America campgrounds and Gale won a $50 gift certificate to our next tour because she remembered that Chicken, Alaska, got its name because no one knew how to spell Ptarmigan!

Monday, 1/11/10 – Casa Grande to Huachuca, AZ

We set up at Quail Ridge Park (AOR and Good Sam). As with Twentynine Palms, we spent several days and saw a number of the sites, including the museums at Ft. Huachuca. We got through security at the gate (driver’s licenses, auto registration, and insurance) and found our way to the historical old fort area and the three museums. We went through the Buffalo Soldier history and the history vs. Geronimo and Pancho Villa. The Fort also provided protection for homesteaders in this area. The Intelligence Museum was also very informative about the people who made military intelligence an important part of war efforts, of coding and decoding, of breaking in on radio signals of the enemy, of drones used for observation, of mapping and of interpreting aerial photos, etc. It is a nice museum that I enjoyed a few years ago when I refereed the US Armed Forces Volleyball Championships here.

We spent part of one day in Bisbee, a cute old copper mining town, and had a good lunch at the Bisbee Grille across from the mining museum. We walked around town and browsed in a few shops.

Another morning we drove down to Ramsey Canyon and the Nature Conservancy Reserve there. We hiked their little trail through hardwood trees – maple, oak, and huge sycamores that are two to three hundred years old. The trail follows the canyon stream and passes two homesteads that were able to grow fruit trees. It was hard to realize we were still in the Arizona desert as we walked on maple and sycamore leaves! We continued on up the Hamburg trail (that goes to an old mine) to the overlook and could see down into all of Sierra Vista and Ft. Huachuca as well as the layered rock cliffs of the canyon. It was a fun hike.

White-tailed deer at the Ramsey Canyon Preserve

Ramsey Canyon Preserve - Mountain views

Sierra Vista from the Ramsey Canyon Preserve

Ramsey Canyon Preserve - Sycamore tree

The highlight of the Huachuca visit was meeting Perry Barnes, a lecturer from our Elderhostel trip to the Mayan Ruins on the Yucatan peninsula, and her friend Karen, who is a birder for an afternoon at the Whitewater Draw Wildlife Preserve to see the sandhill cranes that winter here. Karen was great at spotting many other birds and waterfowl. Some of my favorites of the 40 species we saw this afternoon were – the coot, great horned owl, red-tailed hawks, sora, snipe, Northern shovelbill duck. And then there were the sandhill cranes coming home for the evening after foraging to the north around Wilcox. There were thousands of them and they kept coming like swarms of locusts! They are fun to see land and they make such a funny noise.

Great Horned Owl perched in the rafters

American Coot

Sora

Sandhill Cranes

Sandhill Cranes - the sky and the shores of the lake are covered with thousands of birds

Sandhill Cranes

Friday, 1/15/10 – Sunday, 1/17/10 - Huachuca home to Estes Park

We got the weather window we needed to head for home. We stopped one night at the Isleta Lakes RV Park just south of Albuquerque. We found this nice place last year. It is on the Indian reservation and is a Good Sam campground with wide pull-throughs with full hookups. The best part is the man-made lake for fishing or for us to have a nice walk. We walked this afternoon and saw lots of birds, including a beautiful bald eagle and a golden eagle.

The second stop was in Colorado Springs. We try to stop within a few hours of home on the last night out so we can dump all the tanks in the morning and cleanup the camper so it can be re-winterized when we get home.

The drive home was easy and the snowdrift at the edge of the road on North Lane was not big enough to hinder us from driving into the yard and finish closing up the camper. It is good to be home for a while. It was another fun trip!

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