Unearthing the Driveway

The Treacherous Step Exposed

It started out small, like most projects do.

People walking down our gravel driveway reach a downward slope where they have to step up and over. Loose gravel made that step perilous and we were expecting a hundred people for a backyard party. I knew there was some asphalt underneath, so I swept, shoveled and hosed a small area to reveal old but workable paved driveway surface.

Then our local community pitched in to pave East San Simeon. The blacktop looked so clean, I was embarrassed to have dust and gravel from our driveway tracked onto and defacing the new black surface.

So one morning, while still cool and the sun was barely above the horizon, I went out with a shop broom to where gravel meets new blacktop.

Blacktop meets old grey-top.

Optimism faded immediately. Sweeping was hopeless. I tried a shovel. Nothing doing.

The gravel was embedded over and within a thick layer of fine dirt that over decades had been compressed into a hard block, like caliche or hardpan clay. The hardpan was several inches thick. I needed to break it up with a tool.

Concerned about damaging the old asphalt, I started with a hand tool. I felt like an archeologist. It was way too much work for too little impact.  I needed something bigger, but not my iron pike. I started using my pickaxe.

I hacked away with the adze edge, gently or hard depending upon thickness, then shoveled the broken hardpan onto my screen and sifted gravel from fine dirt. The gravel I spread on our side driveway. The dirt I wheelbarrowed to several strategic sites. After about three hours of hard labor, I had put down a layer of gravel on the side driveway, created a large hill by the mailbox, but had cleared a only few feet of driveway.

Pickaxe, shovel & wheelbarrow, the screen behind my legs.

But those few feet were so pretty and so precious that I felt like I was unearthing sections of the ancient Appian Way. No one had known it was there.

I could keep up with the neighbors because I had a hardtop driveway. My pride bloomed. If I unearthed a few feet each day, soon I would uncover the original asphalt all the way to the bottom of the hill. That's only 150 feet.

In addition to aesthetics and history, the hard surface would increase runoff and direct precious rainwater to the acacia and palo verde trees in our little wash.

So it's been my hobby for the last six weeks or so, especially on a Saturday morning.  A few hours of carefully hitting and scraping with the pickaxe until the hardpan breaks off from the old asphalt surface. Then screen (dust everywhere), dump the gravel, and dump about four to ten wheelbarrows full of fine clay soil/dust. That's more than enough for a day.

Just one little, twelve foot section left.
It's the darker rectangle within the sun's glare.

The sun gets warm, I am sweating and dragging, and lizards are actively running around the yard. It's time to jump into the swimming pool than take a nap.

We had some rain a few days back, and that softened the hardpan to where I could just scrape it up with the shovel. Trouble was, wet dirt is heavy and hard to screen. What I gained in shoveling versus pickaxing (is that a verb?) I lost on my back trying to separate large gravel from sludge.

I suppose they make machines that do this in a few minutes. Maybe when we get rich and famous, we'll hire some guys to lay down some new asphalt. But until then, I managed to get some really good exercise and Jasmine the Wonder Dog, who never really liked walking on the gravel anyway so she'd walk on the cinderblock wall instead, can now walk on the driveway without any bother.

And I have these really neat large piles of dirt on the West side that I can form into terraces. But that's another project and another blog.

Sunset to the East

The sun, most everyone knows, sets in the West. Which is only one reason sunset on August 23rd was so spectacular.

These two photos were taken looking to the East and a little South.

The real reason this sunset was so spectacular is the size of the cloud that reflected the evening sunbeams.

It's impossible to capture the immensity in a photo. Imagine that it's your field of vision, this huge, glowing red cloud perched above and behind ominous dark clouds.

Then this red cloud gets bigger and bigger as it slowly moves towards the south, finally fading as the sun itself recedes lower below the horizon.

It doesn't take long.  Everything changes in just few minutes.

Harvesting Melons

Okay, gotta brag about the fruit from my tiny garden.

This cantaloupe is the grand daddy of them all. 6.6 pounds. It grew on the vine that clings to the fencing mesh-wire that keeps the little critters out.

The melons get so heavy, I make slings out of mesh bags that Trader Joe's use to pack avocados four at a time.

I have several melon-hammocks tied to the mesh-wire, and another large cantaloupe ripening and soon ready to harvest.

In the other photo you see the cantaloupe and some muskmelons. You get an idea of their size from the Le Souk Ceramique cereal bowl which is almost six inches in diameter.

Cheers,
Shari.

Monsoon Frogs & Turtle

If two incidents can make a pattern, we have one. Two years in a row we have had a Noah's flood monsoon storm pass through the Foothills on the Fourth of July. Do we know how to celebrate the Fourth or what?

It's not just the wind and water. The Wet brings out critters you otherwise never see. Our Fourth of July gathering is blessed with frogs -- one tiger striped little fellow found its way into the kitchen where a guest, familiar with these things, pronounced it an endangered striped Chiricahua frog and gently took it outside.

The down side is the croaking. These frogs make a lot of noise -- all night. They are looking for mates and they don't have a lot of time. The sound is not as pleasant as frogs on Whidbey. It's more like the wailing of something in great pain. Lovesick, I suppose.

So frogs have become a staple for our Fourth of July parties. No, we don't eat them. We just look at them with flashlights. Then the following morning we net them out of the cement pond -- easily a dozen or two.

But the tortoise yesterday was a first. We had a big pour yesterday. Monsoon rain can be very local. A quarter mile can make a huge difference. Lately most of the rain has hit downtown and south. Yesterday it hit the Foothills, up to two or more inches depending on location.

When the rain gets that heavy, I am out in the back sweeping water away from the back doors. As I often complain, people here don't think about rain when they build houses. Without the wood dams that I have caulked down by the thresholds, sheets of water would be oozing into the TV room and kitchen. Not good. The concern is enough that I sweep the water away. It's a fun way to get exercise and really get into the Wet.

So I'm out there sweeping water and there is this tortoise by the side of the house. I have no idea where these guys live 51 weeks out of the year, but it's astonishing what shows up in the Wet. Bugs the size of pigeons. I can hardly wait for the tarantulas.

Hydrocarbon Harvest

Sheets of the precious hydrocarbon harvest.

It's monsoon season, the Sonoran Desert's version of the Wet, and many people do not realize that in addition to all the fauna and flora that actively thrive and bloom this exciting time of year, it can also be time to harvest hydrocarbon from our swimming pools.

Cut and formed, ready for shipment.

The blue blooms burst out, blushing from the sunshine absorbed during the spring and summer weeks. The azure film covers the pool surface, ready to be pulled out, cut to size, processed, and converted into the myriad uses that we have all come to take for granted. But it all begins here.

Close up shows the fine cellular construction of
this versatile native material

Known under the trade name "solar blanket", the hydrocarbon sheets can be used to cover and insulate swimming pools where the sunshine is not as plentiful as blessed Baja Arizona. The versatile harvest can also be used for packaging, whether in sheets or separated into popcorn sized pieces, used in residential insulation applications, serve as pet-bed liners, and even exported to China where they grind up the prized sheets into a fine powder used to color Blue Hawaii mixes.

If left too long in their Sonoran solar habitat, the hydrocarbon sheets become over-ripe, pieces detaching and freely floating through pumps and filters where they gum up the works, so it's good to harvest them when ripe.

The Fifth Season

A headline today reports the hot weather the country has been experiencing.  NOAA is quoted, "Most of the contiguous U.S. was record and near-record warm for the six-month period, except the Pacific Northwest."

Except for the Pacific Northwest?  Sorry about that, Lower Alaska. 

As for Baja Arizona, it's nor-mal. We just call it the summer and monsoon seasons.

See, we have the usual seasons: autumn, winter, spring and summer. But we add a fifth season, monsoon.

Just when I thought the dry heat was getting to much, it turns into the Wet. The change is dramatic. There are clouds in the sky, lightning in the afternoons, and even rain. Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) have little effect and the A/C keeps the cool. It stays warm at night because the clouds and humidity hold the heat.

The desert smells different. Especially when it rains, the fragrance of the creosote bush is spectacular. New green growth appears on some plants, like the ocotillo which can shed and grow leaves several times a year, and some plants have learned to take advantage of the Wet and flower this time of year.

Bugs, like beetles the size of a small bat, come out that haven't been seen in a year. And worth a separate blog, frogs and toads appear like they have been transported from a different planet.

Most of the world has four seasons, but I wonder if Vivaldi lived in Baja Arizona, would the Four Seasons be the Five Seasons? If Beethoven knew the desert monsoon, would the fourth movements of his Pastorale Symphony have even more thunder and lightning?

Agamemnon on Big Sacred Mountain

The paved road that starts from near Safford, below 4,000 ft., and ends up over 9,000 feet in the Pinaleños

We Anglos tended to name geographical things after ourselves. We used George Washington's name, for example, for cities, counties and states.  McKinley got an Alaskan mountain (thankfully now known as Denali). We also tend to name our housing subdivisions after the trees that were removed to grade and "improve" the sites.

The Spanish named a lot of geography after saints. There is something charming about the names Santa Rita Mountains and San Pedro River. The San Pedro runs south to north. Parallel to the east is Aravaipa Creek and its valley. Again to its east, also running south to north in this part, is the Gila River. The San Pedro and the Aravaipa end up flowing into the Gila which then cuts through some quite hilly terrain (the occasion for Coolridge Dam), then flows into the Peenix basin. The Gila, by this time a dry river bed most of the time, flows west and ends up in the Colorado River, or what's left of it in Baja Arizona. It's in the upper valley of the Gila that the town of Safford (named, of course, after an Arizona territorial governor) is located in some pretty rich farm country.

Looming some six thousand feet above Safford are the Pinaleño Mountains, the highest lift of any mountains in the state. Its peak, Mount Graham (10,720 ft.) is named after an army officer who helped map the area. The Apache name is Dzil Nchaa Si An, which means Big Sacred Mountain. There is something simple and reverent about native names. They didn't need maps so they didn't worship cartographers.  Or astronomers.

Agamemnon in the Pinaleños, looking back towards
Safford and the Gila River valley. 

The Pinaleño Mountains are not in an Indian reservation, which rendered the Apache nation helpless in its fight to keep the Max Planck Institute and the Vatican from constructing telescope observatories on its peak. Big Sacred Mountain is, well, holy to the Apache. Mountains are where ordinary people, with reverence, can get empowered from higher beings. But the Apache didn't build churches for their sacred ceremonies, so they had no evidence to convince the astronomers' friends or the Parks Department ("Land of Many Uses").

A paved road takes you from the Gila River valley, below four thousand feet, up the Pinaleña Mountains to well over nine thousand feet. Twenty-one miles and seemingly endless hairpin switchbacks take you from Sonoran desert to junipers, then pine, then dense fir forests, even Douglas Fir. This is a very special sky island with some five different eco-sytems in its varying elevations.

I am pleased to report that Agamemon and I enjoyed the climb thoroughly. Especially getting to Ladybug Peak where all of a sudden, after yet another hairpin curve, the road comes out the other side of the ridge and you get stunning views of the other side, the Aravaipa valley, and even the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Looking west from the Pinaleño Mountains, near Ladybug Peak:  the Aravaipa valley, 
beyond that the San Pedro valley, and beyond that the Santa Cruz valley where Tucson is located.
But you can't see Tucson from here. That may be Baboquivari in the middle of the horizon.

On a hot Memorial Day weekend (we are already in three-digit highs), the air was clean and brisk at the higher elevations. Gorgeous, invigorating and inspiring.