easter vacation

for our easter vacation, we went down to picacho peak state park. its about 70 miles south of phoenix, right off I-10. its some kind of volcano flow mixed with sedimentary rocks.... who knows. the campground was pretty nice, even though you can see it from the highway. it was super windy, i thought that our tent was going to blow away. with us in it! so it was a little hard to sleep, but otherwise nice. i was on a quest to see an elf owl, but i was again disappointed! but the bird book says they're here in the summer so maybe its too early. we did hear a great horned owl.

some views from up the peak.

some scenery
we also saw some birds, ants and lizards. and i saw the eye shine of what may have been a ringtail or a kit fox. some medium-sized, agile mammal.

we took the scenic route home today, and it really was more scenic. part of the drive was through the gila river indian reservation, which was much nicer to look at than the fields of who knows what (wheat? we couldn't tell) that shouldn't be growing there. at some point, i thought if you ignored the mountains in the distance and the sorry appearance of the soil (it does not look like what i would call "fertile"), you could pretend you were in the midwest. the road was straight and flat, and there were fields on both sides of the road.

anyway, then we stopped at the casa grande ruins national monument. there are ruins of a huge house and smaller houses and a ball court, etc., from the hohokam tribe. you actually can't even go see most of the smaller structures, it looked like they were doing some new excavation. this is the casa grande, protected by that big roof (which a sign said was built in the 1930s i think).


it is impressive they built this huge community in the middle of the dessert. the walls are basically primitive concrete made out of busted up rocks they dug out of the ground.

the two holes in the wall below are for a celestial calender sort of thing, one lines up with the setting sun on the equinox (or maybe solstice? i forgot) and the other with the moon on certain days.


the doors in the smaller buildings are smaller.


these little guys (round-tailed ground squirrels) were all over.

and, we drove through a small town called coolidge. i kid you not, there were people there selling "baby easter turtles". what turtles have to do with easter, i don't know. but i guess baby things are always good for easter since its springtime.