A Bust and a Success

The second day of Maya’s three off in a row we set out with two goals in mind. We would go north to the Pioneer Living History Village and see original buildings from the 1890s populated by re-enactors. Then we would go to a gourmet food store called Sprout’s and get the Anasazi beans we needed to make Yavapai chili and the blue corn meal we needed for honey blue cornmeal hearth bread. Both of these are from Maya’s new cookbook. We set out about noon. It’s only supposed to take 40 minutes to get up to this village. We should have had plenty of time. Only…

There is a lot of road work going on all the time here. We hardly go anywhere without hitting a slowdown of some sort because of lane closures. This isn’t just on the highways either, this is on all the main streets we use. Matt has a theory that they don’t do any construction or maintenance work on the roads in the summer because it is just too hot so now that things are cooling off (to the mid-80s) we are seeing an explosion of catch-up repairs and delayed projects. Maybe something else explains it. In any case there is a lot of work going on here just now.

So, our progress north on the 101 was slowed by three lanes of the highway being closed. This was on a Sunday, so traffic as (presumably) less than on a weekday, but it still slowed down to a crawl at the squeeze-point where we all had to get into one lane. By the time we got around to the north side of town where the 101 meets I-17 we had already been on the road for 40 minutes. Then the fun really started.

It seems that at about 9:00 AM a tanker truck carrying 7,600 gallons of diesel fuel crossed the median and spilled its contents all over the place. The clean-up shut the interstate down in both directions and traffic backed up for 15 miles each way. We were trying to get to exit 225 but all north-bound traffic was being diverted off at exit 224. When we reached the back-up a bit before 1:00 we knew nothing of this. There was construction of all kinds going on in the median and we assumed the back up was related to that. We crept along, sometimes going as fast as 10 MPH, but usually staying under 5. At mile 222 or so was a small sign that said “accident ahead.” This was our only clue about what was going on, but we didn’t take the exit because we still wanted to see the village and we couldn’t see any other way on our maps to get there other than taking exit 225 off I-17. Plus, we weren’t stopped, just slow. We kept at it, assuming we would get there eventually.

By sometime close to 2:00 we were both about to explode. Stopped is one thing, but creeping along ever so slowly has a much more maddening quality to it! We killed some time talking about how even five miles an hour used to be making good time by stagecoach. How far we’ve come since then! Now we don’t feel right unless we’re going at least 65 MPH on the highway. In any case, it was about this time that we saw that the whole interstate was closed and that all traffic was being diverted off. That’s when we got really upset. We could SEE the exit was wanted and yet here we were, forced to get off before that. All that time spent going slow was wasted! We didn’t eventually get there! Wasted! We were both so upset and frustrated by that point that we just went right from the off-ramp on over to the on-ramp and got back on the road going south. Also, someone U-turned into our lane (against his light) and almost hit us. He didn’t look confused about what he was doing or anything, just like he felt entitled to do whatever he wanted. Must… control… road rage…

Sprout’s was something a bust as well. We did find a lot of great items we needed: no-sugar peanut butter, mesquite honey, good eggplants, colorful bell peppers and Barefoot wines 2 for $11! But we did not find Anasazi beans or blue corn meal. It’s a great store, they just didn’t have those items. We checked for these obscure items at our local Fry’s as well, just on the off chance they had them, but no such luck. We went home mostly returned to a pleasant mood. We got there about 4:30. In more than four hours we only went grocery shopping. What a waste!

The next day, still looking for Anasazi beans, we went to Whole Foods. They list them in their guide to beans, but the store we went to didn’t have them. They did have the blue cornmeal. We also tried Fresh & Easy. There we found some other kind of bean we had never heard of, but not the kind we were looking for. Supposedly, these Anasazi beans are similar to regular old pinto beans. So, in the end, that’s what we used.

Pinto beans, chick peas, eggplant, red onion, green, yellow, and orange bell peppers. For spice fresh dill, fresh parsley, oregano, chili powder, some basil and (this was the shocker) half a cup of fennel. Half a cup! As Maya said, we’ve never put half of any one spice in anything! We hemmed and hawed over it and then decided to just go for it. The whole thing simmered while we watched Star Trek. Was it worth all the trouble? YES! It may be the best chili we have ever made. It takes a lot for us to say that. The spicing combo is not something we would have ever come up with on our own, but man it’s really good. Our compliments to Kevin Maguire of Enchantment Resort! That’s a great chili you’ve got there. The honey blue cornmeal heath bread was also really good. Its crusty sweetness is something of a perfect compliment to the spicy, hearty chili.

*****And Now Some News*****
With this post, we are all caught up again. Today, we’ll be off somewhere celebrating Maya’s birthday, as she’s had to work the last few days and we haven’t had a chance yet. Thanks to all of you who sent cards are gave her a call. The other news is that Matt is doing the National Novel Writing Month competition again this year. He’s set up his own blog where you can read all about it. Thanks for reading about us and our adventures, we hope you enjoy hearing about them.

Cacti Are Amazing!

The day after going to the natural history museum, Maya had to work but then she had three days off. She was off Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It was a real weekend! On Saturday we went to the Desert Botanical Garden. It’s part of the same complex of parks and public lands that the zoo is. We didn’t know until we got there, but it was the day for the pumpkin festival so the place was packed! Fortunately for those wanting to look at the gardens the pumpkin painting, hey rides and live music were next to the gardens, not inside them.

It’s called a “garden” but that is perhaps stretching things a bit. There are some very garden-like areas with the plants are arranged in rows or in artful clusters, but the majority of the place is more of a desert preserve with the cacti growing willy-nilly across the landscape just as they feel like. This is not a bad thing, we just expected a more formalized and organized look.

There was a main trail that looped through the park, and then themed spurs that shot off of that. The two most interesting spurs were the Sonoran Desert Nature Trail and the Plants and People of the Sonoran Desert Trail. On the nature trail the path led uphill past a dry stream bed to a little lookout area. There was a little shady place and a couple of those coin-op telescopes for looking out at the mountains east of Phoenix. The thing is that they weren’t coin-op, they were just on. There wasn’t even a coin slot. Matt looked at both the Superstition Mountains and Four Peaks. Along this trail we kept a lookout for jack rabbits and cotton tails. They are supposed to be in park. We have looked at about every outside place we’ve been to for there desert rabbits. We would really like to see a truly American rabbit. Pet rabbits are all descended from European rabbits so these desert rabbits would be totally different. We concluded that our odds of catching a glimpse of one are pretty small since these wild animals likely are hiding in a shady spot during the day.

On the plants and people trail, however, we saw some other native life. We saw a little covey of quail trooping along beside of the trail. They were hooting to each other as they went along, dashing from under bushes and between rocks. The educational material along the trail itself featured the different types of plants that different groups of people have collected and cultivated in the Sonoran. The Pima harvested saguaro fruits and cultivated a semi-domestic cotton (which looks really different from the typical cotton plants familiar from the South). They also made use of mesquite forests, both for the wood and for the mesquite beans, which they made into a sweet flour. When the Spanish reached the area (the Sonoran generally, not Phoenix specifically) they added horses and cattle which changed the land use a lot. Also they brought other crops like citrus, pomegranates, olives, and chilies. Most of this information was not new to us, but it is interesting to see the some story of changing human activity told from different points of view – this time from the plants’.

We also paid a little extra to go to the seasonal butterfly exhibit. It was a large aviary-like enclosure for monarchs. They migrate through the area, apparently. We wondered around watching the butterflies eating, sunning, flying, resting, climbing on Matt’s shirt… It was surprising haw large and furry their bodies are. The wings are striking, sure, but the body in the middle is really a massive thing. It would seem they’d have to be a bulky animal to do all that migrating, it just has never occurred to either of us before.

Last of all, we visited the Garden Shop. We made two purchases. Maya found a Vegetarian Southwest cookbook. It has recipes from various high-class restaurants in Arizona and New Mexico. Not only did the products sound good, but the methods are same as the way we cook. Most of the ingredients in the book are raw ingredients. This is not a book of “open these three cans” type recipes. When a dish calls for mole sauce or green chili sauce, it has you make your own! She had sworn off getting any more cookbooks, but this one was irresistible. We also got a cactus garden. Since cacti are the only plants we seem to be able to keep alive long-term (and not ever always then), we’ve decided to get more cacti. The little garden we picked has a golden barrel cactus at the center. That’s a type Matt has been craving since we saw them at the Huntington. He was originally thinking we would just get a largish golden barrel in a pot. The appeal of many different kinds eventually won him over. There is also a fishhook barrel which has red spines instead of gold and an old man cactus which looks like it’s covered in white hair. Cacti are so much fun!

A Natuarl History of Arizona

Back on 23 October we went over to Mesa to the Arizona Museum of Natural History. This museum has the largest collection of fossils in the state. At least, that’s what they claim. They do have other stuff in their collection related to Arizona’s human history, but their impressive collection of fossils is clearly the focus. That section of the museum is three stories tall and the rest is only one.

The right off the lobby a “time tunnel” leads you back to the formation of the universe. There are several meteorites on display, most estimated to be older than our planet. Among these is a fragment from the Canyon Diablo Meteorite which created the famous Barringer Crater in north-central Arizona. The crater is most well-known as simply Meteor Crater. We hope to get up there to see it while we still live in the area. These meteorites lead into a gallery on earth rocks and the mineral wealth of Arizona, but we didn’t learn anything new about minerals we hadn’t learned recently.

At the bottom level the fossil exhibits started. The displays spiraled up from the basement floor around a large central display called Dinosaur Mountain. Each higher level of the mountain is covered by animatronic reconstructions of younger and younger animals. Down at the bottom is Triassic-aged Tanystropheus, above that is Stegosaurus, then on the Cretaceous level is Pentaceratops and at the top is Glyptotherium. The Mountain is supposed to represent how the Grand Canyon has carved its way “back in time” by eroding deeper and deeper into the earth. To illustrate this, there is a stream cascading down the mountainside all the time. For dramatic effect, about every twenty minutes a “flash flood” dumps a lot of extra down the cliff face. There flash floods are about the only good thing about Dinosaur Mountain. The animatronics are fairly bad. Most of the dinos don’t even move any more and the ones that do are jerky and out of synch. Their noises are mostly just annoying. For example, the T. rex roar and be heard all through the museum!

The displays along this long, spiral path through time are a lot better. All the specimens come from Arizona and they each have information about the dig-sites they were recovered from. These sites are all explained and their significance to paleontology as a whole is noted. The signage did a good job of not only explaining what is known about past geologic ages, but also why that has been determined. We saw trilobites, aetosaurs, a Dilophosaurus reconstruction, a mosasaur skull, pterosaur wings, a Tyrannosaurus rex skull and full skeletons of Apatosaurus, Protoceratops and Triceratops. Out of all of that, perhaps the most shocking thing was seeing just how much “artistic license” Crichton and Spielberg took with Dilophosaurus. There is, of course, no frill and no evidence for poison-spitting. Not only that, but Dilophosaurus is rather larger than in the famous film. Seen full size and without the frill, Dilophosaurus looks about like a Velociraptor, which could also be part of the reason they were re-imagined for the film.
Moving on to the human history section of the museum we went into several reconstructions. There was a paleoindian cave, a Hohokam village, a Spanish mission, and a gold mine. These were all fairly interesting, but were fairly straightforward portrayals. The neatest part of the human history side was the History Courtyard where we got to pan for “gold.” There is a large fountain in the middle that looks something like a mountain stream. The water flowed through several sand-filled pools. Mixed into the sand was pyrite, fool’s gold. You scooped up the sand in a pan and swished the water around, letting it take the lighter sand away with it and leaving the heavier gold. This is the way it’s supposed to work anyway. Pyrite is not as heavy as gold though so it was actually really hard to get the sand and the “gold” to separate. We did out best and each came away with a little bag of the shiny stuff.

We parked in a spot that was limited to three hours. We thought this would be plenty of time, but as it turned out we had to hurry through the last little bit of the museum to get back to the car in time. It was a nice afternoon.

Two Big Nerds Ogle Fluorite and Native Copper

“The fact that went makes us nerds. The fact that we had fun… I don’t know what that makes us.”
- Maya on the Arizona Mining & Mineral Museum.

On the day after we went to see petroglyphs we went to what is, perhaps, the most nerdy attraction of all those we have ever been to. We went downtown to the headquarters of Arizona’s Department of Mining and Mineral Resources to see their Mining and Mineral Museum. Oh yes, we did.

Outside the historic building (formerly the headquarters of a chapter of the Shriners) are several large pieces of mining equipment. The scoop in the picture behind Matt was retired because it was just too small to keep up with the mining needs of the state. On the other front corner of the building was the wooden super-structure of a mine hoist. It’s like what a derrick is oil-drilling, apparently. There were also several chunks of wood from the Petrified Forest.

Inside the museum, was case after case of minerals, core samples, fossils, gemstones and polished spheres or various interesting rocks. This is not the kind of place that everybody would enjoy, but we had a lot of fun. At each case we were like, “Oh, look at that!” We saw a giant quartz crystal that was easily a foot and a half across, various precious and semi-precious stones in raw and processed forms. There were seeming endless varies of crystalline minerals in a vast array of colours. One of the things we saw over and over again was fluorite in purple, orange and red. It makes perfect cubes that look really neat all jumbled together. We also saw an amazing black opal with tons of flecks of green throughout. Even Matt was thinking about rings and jewelry.

Other than putting all the shiny stuff on display, the main function of the museum is to educate the public about all the types of mineral extraction that go on in Arizona. The state produces the highest value in non-fuel minerals of all the states. Copper is one of the things there is a lot of in Arizona. When copper (or another metal) is mixed in with a rock, but is still visible it is called native copper. We’ve heard that term before but not we know what it means! We also saw native silver and native gold. There were also cases that broke down the ridiculously complicated processes involved in extracting gold for gold ore or getting oil out of oil shale. For gold extraction it involves several iterations of crushing melting and mixing. Each time more of the non-gold bonds to whatever the mix is this time and the gold comes out more pure. There are 5 or 6 of these steps. Ridiculously complicated. Arizona has other minerals too. A lot of American uranium comes from Arizona. The museum had some uranium in its infamous yellow cake form on display. In the photo you can also see a giant block of coal on the other side of the case.
There were a few non-mineral items toward the end. The museum also had a nice collection of fossils from around the state. There were trilobites, a preserved dinosaur foot print, the skeleton of something small crocodile-like animal, and some teeth from an early horse. A watermelon-sized lava bomb and some other samples from Arizona’s volcanic areas were on display as well. In this same section was a model of the solar system made from polished stone spheres that really looked like the planets they were supposed to represent. The rocks they had for Earth and Jupiter were both uncannily accurate, if not in shape at least in colour. The model has not been up-dated to not include Pluto. And at the very end was a huge piece of native copper. Huge! We left with a smile but shaking our heads at our own nerdiness.

The Rocks Cry Out

In Florida we had a list of places we wanted to go. All we had to do was look at the list and pick a place and then go. In California, for some reason, we never made a list, although we always intended to. There we were often content not to go out and about so we didn’t need a list as much. Here in Arizona, we have made a list. Party, this is because there is just so much stuff to see here (Amerindian, wild west, mining-related, metropolis) and partly it is because we don’t want to “waste” any of our days here by just lounging around the apartment. Since we have been back from Louisville, we have been someplace or another every day that Maya has had off. We get up, look at the list, pick a place and go. We really have this system down by now.

On 19 October we went to the northwest corner of Greater Phoenix to the Deer Valley Rock Art Center. This is a tumbled-down pile of very dark rocks that are covered in petroglyphs. There is a small interpretive center and then a trail through the petroglyph area with signage and several viewing tubes that direct your view to certain striking glyphs. There are 1571 documented glyphs on the hillside made over a period of at least 4,000 years. They were formed by scraping or pecking off the dark, dusty, oxidized surface known as desert varnish to reveal the lighter rock underneath. (Pictographs, which are often confused with petroglyphs, are painted onto the surface of rocks.) There are many recognizable images among the Deer Valley petroglyphs such as deer, hands, spirals, and human figures, but their meaning is enigmatic at best.

The thing that we found most memorable about the site is that everything seemed to repeat the message that there is no way that modern scholars can know what the carved shapes mean. They can guess and they can theorize and they can compare the shapes to motifs and stories still in use among native peoples but they can’t know what the original meaning was. A deer or a spiral might mean one thing to a modern Hopi or a Pima, but that doesn’t mean that it meant the same thing the person who made the mark on the rock 2,000 years ago. Context is everything and we don’t have that. We only have the petroglyphs. The site is considered sacred to several native groups and they still periodically perform ceremonies there. Of course they don’t know the meaning of the glyphs any more than the Ph.D. people do, and for the same reasons. The main conclusion everybody has is: “this place was special to various people for a very long time and that makes it special to us too.”

The Ashes Whence Phoenix Arose

What is now called the Valley of the Sun was once the center of another urban civilization. Their name for themselves is lost to us but the Akimel O’odham people of historic times called them the Hohokam, meaning “those who have gone.” The Hohokam (ho-ho-KAHM) began to settle this are in about the year 400 CE. They built canals to irrigate their fields with the waters of the Salt River. In time the civilization grew and spread through the valley with many satellite communities and as many as 50,000 inhabitants. They constructed sunken ovals that are believed to be ball-courts and also large temple mounds. When they disappeared en masse from the valley in about 1450, they left behind their mounds and 1000s of miles of canals branching out from the river in all directions. It was these canals that inspired Jack Swilling to develop the valley for agriculture. He happened upon the valley and its ruins in 1867 while working out of the mining town of Wickenburg farther north. He envisioned an agricultural paradise. The land is fertile, just dry. If ancient people could irrigate the desert, he thought, so could he. Swilling’s English friend, “Lord” Darrell Duppa, suggested the name “Phoenix” for the tiny farming town because of the city’s “rebirth” from the remains of an ancient one through a return to canal irrigation.

Today many of the canal and settlement remains of the Hohokam are under the streets of this urban phoenix. One place where the past has not been black-topped over is at the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park. The site preserves the largest temple mound in the Valley and the museum houses a large collection of Hohokam artifacts. Not only did they grow the “three sisters” (corn, squash and beans) but they were astute exploiters of the desert environment. The saguaro cactus has edible fruits and a wood-like ribbed structure that can be used for fencing and all kinds of tools. The Hohokam also participated in an extensive trade network. They imported shells from people who lived near the ocean, worked the shells into rings, bracelets and other jewelry, then exported the finished products all other the southwest! Amazing! These long-distance connections may explain some the cultural connections to the temple-building, ball-playing Mesoamerican tribes that have been noted for the Hohokam.

Outside, are the actual ruins. Pueblo Grande was the largest settlement in the Valley and it had the largest ball court and the largest temple mound. The mound is close to the river and right next to one of the main canals so there is likely a connection between the authority represented by the mound and the canals themselves. Parts of the mound were once 20 feet high, and then buildings built on top of that. One room features a curious northeast-facing doorway that has been suggested to be part of a solar observatory for keeping track of the seasons. There were also some re-created Hohokam dwellings know as pithouses. The floor was slightly sunken and a wooden frame and roof built around the pit. Matt thinks we should have one of our own someday. He says we could use it like a cabin for camping on our back forty… when we have a back forty.
It was interesting to go see this spot were human occupation of this whole area really began, long before the United States was a going concern. The only downer to the day was that the cash register was down in the gift shop so after we had picked out some postcards and a book of native American recipes we were told we couldn’t buy them. Why didn’t the lady sitting there tell us this before we spent ten minutes browsing the shelves. Also, she was totally unapologetic about it.

When we got home we soon forgot our annoyance because we made the best dinner ever. When we say that, we think it really means something. We made a vegetable sauce that was eggplant, broccoli, zuccuni, onions and garlic sautéed and then simmered in red wine vinegar. To this we added a cheese sauce made from a block of parmesan cheese. This cheesy, vegetably sauce was spooned over a base of tomato-basil fettuccini. To top it off we had Italian marinated chick’n patties (a fake-meat product). Wow, wow and wow.

We Visit a Mystery Castle

On the southern edge of town there is a small range of low mountains that is appropriately known as South Mountain. Built into the northern slope so that it faces the city is an eccentric house built by hand by one man during the 1930s. It is known as the Mystery Castle. Boyce Luther Gulley was an unaccomplished architect from Washington. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1930 the prescription, as it often was in those days, was to move to a warm, dry climate. So he packed up, left his wife and daughter behind and went to Arizona to die. Only he didn’t die. His symptoms disappeared. So then he needed a place to live and something to occupy his time. He got hold of a piece of land overlooking the Valley of the Sun and set about digging up native stones and cementing them together. Over the course of 15 years he built an 8,000 square foot house with a bar, a chapel, several guestrooms, a huge living room and a few porches and patios. As this was a lean time generally and he, specifically, didn’t have much money, he reused as much brik-a-brack as he could. The rims of car tires became window frames, wind shields were used as windows, old telephone poles became support beams and even parts of refrigerators turned into various other things. Cracked, melted and otherwise rejected bricks he picked up for free and used as architectural details on corners and in the patio railing. Apparently, the only thing he actually paid for was the concrete to stick it all together. He never mentioned all these efforts to his family or ever went back to them.

Upon his death in 1945 (of cancer) his will stated his house was to go to his daughter. A local lawyer contacted his family in Washington and told them about the house. This was the first they knew of it. Mary Lou Gulley was a teenager at the time and she and her mother moved down to Phoenix and took up residence. The only stipulation was that they wait three years to open the trap door that he’d built into the sitting room on the main level. They did wait and in 1948 when they opened the door to the “wine cellar,” a reporter from Life Magazine was on hand. The article was called “Life Visits a Mystery Castle.” That title resonated with the strangeness of the place and Mary Lou’s house has been called the Mystery Castle ever since. Inside the trap door was the deed to the house and the land, several hundred dollars and various personal mementos. Mary Lou herself still lives in the house, 60 years later. She was hanging out in the living room while we were there. She’s been showing people around (for a nominal fee) and renting out the chapel for weddings all this time. Now that she’s a little white haired old lady, she has friends and neighbors lead the tours for her.

While the story behind it is fairly unique, the look and feel of this house is similar to many other slices of Americana you might happen upon. The Coral Castle in particular comes to mind. While on one level Americana is appealing because it’s unique and different, on another level it is often a bit repulsive because it’s so dated and tacky. It’s like the difference between hand-made as in fine art and hand-made as in craft fair. Maya, in particular, was hoping to see a fine art type hand-made house. The Mystery Castle was definitely a craft fair type house. The large collection of teddy bears, the endless statues with gaudy paint jobs and big smiles, the cross-stitch samplers that somehow grew to wall-hanging size, none of it is stuff we would want in our home. There must have been some kind of time and space convergence of cultural expectations and technological innovations that resulted in the Americana look. In any case, it’s a look we just aren’t into for ourselves. We liked the glass blocks set into the patio that gave light to the room beneath and the snake motif mosaics set into the floors but we just weren’t impressed with the pebble-studded fireplace or the fake grave dug in the basement. It’s a mystery to us why anyone ever was.

Here’s some news on a castle closer to home: Castle Post (formerly Castle Martin) near Versailles, KY is apparently set to open as a luxury hotel sometime before the end of the year.

Possibly the Best Zoo Ever

If you, faithful reader, are tired of hearing about zoos how we ooo-ed at the lemurs, aah-ed at wallabies and longed for an aviary of our own then rest assured that while we did all of those things, we aren’t going to talk about them… this time. The Phoenix Zoo has a lot of other interesting animals, features, and displays: more than enough to fill a good-sized post.

We returned to town on a Saturday, picked Asher up on a Sunday and then went to the zoo on Monday. The day we went it was near perfect weather. Not neat-perfect-for-Phoenix either, it was sunny and in the high seventies. That’s near perfect for anywhere! The zoo is located inside Papago Park, with is a fairly large bit of land. The park contains a golf course (there are, for some reason, a whole lot of golf courses out here), a desert botanical garden and a few very large outcrops of sandstone that look like piles of jumbled boulders. One of these outcrops has a natural hole in it called Hole-in-the-Rock. The Hohokam Indians marked the stone near this hole and tracked the seasonal movement of the sun. We didn’t go see any of this stuff (at least not yet) we’re just setting the context.

The first area we visited in the zoo was the Arizona Trail where many animals native to the area are on display. We saw the pronghorn. It’s not a “pronghorn sheep” as we have sometimes heard. Apparently, science can’t determine if it’s a kind of sheep or a kind of antelope so better to just call it a pronghorn. One of the really nice things about this zoo is that the enclosures are huge. We saw this again and again. There is an enclosure for bighorn sheep (actually sheep) off behind the pronghorns and it was large enough to contain one of those pockmarked mountains of sandstone. No fiberglass simulated mountain terrain, this was a mountain!

Along the Trail we also saw collared peccaries. The peccary (also know as a javelina) is the only native pig-like animal in the US. We had no idea such an animal even existed. There were supposed to be Mexican wolves and coyotes too. Unfortunately the wolves were off exhibit and the coyotes were hiding. Matt says he saw a coyote for a moment but there were no confirmed sightings. This area also had a bald eagle, a mountain lion, a bobcat, prairie dogs, burrowing owls, a roadrunner, various lizards and parrots.

After passing the absolutely huge African savanna area with free roaming cattle, giraffes and gazelles we looked briefly at a number of “standard” zoo-a-mals such as lions, warthogs, a tiger, a camel and rhinos before we found animals neither of us had ever seen in real life before: mandrills. Wow. They all have the characteristic bald, oddly-shaped back side but the big male has that uniquely coloured face! It’s hard to see it in the picture, but the legs on that guy looked so human. Not the feet or the hip, but the legs themselves. It’s always a little eerie to look at other primates.

On past this we saw a few Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi). It’s the largest kind of zebra and is actually quite close genetically to a horse. Rather than the flat grasslands home to the stereotypical zebra, Grevy’s zebra is native to the higher and rockier terrain of Kenya and Ethiopia. This was the zebra known to and used by the Romans, but it passed out of all knowledge in Europe and was only later rediscovered. It was named for Jules Grévy, a French president in the 1880s who received one as a gift from Abyssinia. In the wild the Grevy’s zebra eats coarse grasses and the leaves and bark of shrubs. The zoo says they feed their zebra on alfalfa and other hey but the ones we saw were definitely eating the dry leaves and bracken collected in the corner of their enclosure.

Another new animal for us was the king vulture of Central and South America. It’s a large bird and very strikingly coloured. The bright orange caruncle on its beak is particularly striking. As the name suggests, it’s the largest of New World’s vultures. According to the signage next to the cage, other carrion-feeders have been observed waiting around for the king vultures to arrive and rip open the “packaging” on their meal. Presumably, this is because they are the biggest and strongest. It even shows up in Aztec writing, particularly as the sign for the sixteenth day of the month: cozcacuauhtli.

The whole of the South American animals exhibit was interesting. Called the Forest of Uco, you enter a looping trail from a simulated village spread across the main path. Behind the simulated shops with Spanish signage you reach the animals, convincingly arranged in their various habitats as if you really were coming upon them as you wondered through the jungle. With shade provided by bamboo and other plants you can almost forget that you are really still in the Southwest. The center of the area is for the Andean bears. They have a really innovative habitat and apparently, the animals never get board. There are several places to look in on the bears as you wander though the “jungle.” Parrots, various fish and a few other things are part of the circuit. Making the zoo a great home for the animals and just letting you peek in at that occasionally seems to be the goal of the Phoenix Zoo. The animals aren’t always on full display, they are at home and you get to catch a glimpse. It’s a focus we haven’t seen before.

Shortly after Uco we saw a tortoise that was really trying its hardest to escape. It had one foot outside and was straining with all its might to pull its shell through the bars. Of course, it had no chance of getting through. None at all. Though, it was managing to lift the whole of the fence up off the ground an inch or two. Perhaps if several of the tortoises worked together…
The coolness of the day; the copious shade; the authentic-looking, spacious habitats and the variety and uniqueness of the animals all combined to make this one of the best zoo-going experiences we have ever had.

Not Really a Homecoming

Just a few hours later we were claiming our checked bags, waiting for the airport shuttle and driving our incredibly dusty car out of the long-term lot. We stopped to get a few things like milk and greens for Asher on the way to the apartment. Then we were “home.” But this isn’t home. Air travel is always strange. You start in one place and end up in a totally different place. This time it was even more strange. We’d just spent two weeks confirming that we really like living in Louisville. Two weeks enjoying the places we know and the people we love. Then we left that all behind… again. Plus, we don’t really know Phoenix yet so it totally doesn’t feel like “home” in any way. The contrast between there and here was so strong. Almost palatable.

The next morning we were up and out of the house before 10:30. That’s early for us, but we had a mission: get our rabbit. Asher was there and apparently still in good health. When we got him home we both spend long minutes just holding him and telling him how much we missed him and how much we loved him. Then we gave him kale to eat and watched him run around the apartment re-investigating all his favorite corners. He seems a little thinner, but overall none-the-worse for his harrowing experience.

Our plants on the other, had did not survive two weeks without watering very well. Unsurprisingly, our cactus did just fine. The large basil plant is still barely holding on. The smaller basil (surviving all the way from Florida) and the zinnias Matt planted in California are a complete loss. Just crusty leaves. At least Asher likes crusty leaves…