On Tuesday morning we relocated to Picacho Peak State Park, about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, where we drove in the late afternoon to pick up my newly retired sister, Dorothea, who flew in for a one week visit.
Wednesday morning we were up early to beat the heat and take on the (mostly vertical) 2 mile hike up to the top of Picacho Peak. It starts off moderately enough with a fairly steep hike up to a saddle. Then you have to go back down the other side with the help of steel cables to hang onto, and then you start the serious scramble up to the top again with the help with more steel cables.
It took us two hours and it's really quite doable even by us oldsters, provided one avoids the heat of the day.
We did it! That's Dorothea's shadow on the left. She consented to appear in this blog on the condition that I post no pictures
Fortunately, it was shaded most of the way up, but we did the return in full sun, and did not envy at all the sweating hikers we met as we came down.
We returned to a 36 degree C trailer, so we hung out in the shade until around 4 pm when we thought we might be able to handle a visit to Casa Grande National Monument, at least to check out the air-conditioned museum.
But in the end we braved the afternoon sun to check out the Casa Grande and its surrounding structures. It's the only remaining standing Homolovi structure of this size (4 stories) although there were once many of them. The Homolovi were the ancestors of the Totono O'odham people who live in the Tucson area today. They had complex irrigation canals to irrigate their fields. The museum had a giant Olla (clay pot) excavated from the site.
It's always so interesting to see how people from long ago led their lives.
As a bonus, just as we were leaving, a ranger spotted our binoculars and asked if we'd seen the nesting great horned owls so we had to hike back out to the site to find them.
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