Arizona Sedona Desert Museum

Saturday August 28. Off to an early start this morning to go to nearby Saguaro National Park. Enroute drove through a gorgeous pass through a State Park. Beautiful mountains and lots of desert vegetation. Just past that and before Saguaro, discovered Arizona Sedona Desert Museum. Hemmed and haad before paying the $13 entrance, but I'm glad I did. Great information about the desert and the animals and plants that live in it. There were lots of volunteers manning different boths or holding different animals. I had a great talk with a gentlemen about the geologic structure of the valley it looks out over and the huge water problems that the area is having. Basically they are building cities in a desert with growing water needs and no more water to fulfill those needs. Talked to another lady about a kestrel bird she was holding. It's the smallest member of the falcon family. And another lady who was holding a Harris hawk. They are the only raptor that hunts in a cooperative group like a pack of wolves. Beautiful bird and deadly to jackrabbits and the like. They also had a presentation where they showed some of the animals. They had a ringtail (member of the raccoon family), a brown pelican and a porcupine. They also had a small zoo where I took the photo of the mountain lion.

Then I drove the interstate through the hot desert from Tucson to Phoenix. The land between the two cities is either desert or irrigated for crops, but it's basically flat. After Phoenix, heading towards Flagstaff, the land changes dramatically. It becomes much hillier, and the road climbs about 2000 feet over a couple of miles until it levels off on a huge plateau (and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees). That marks the end of the line for the sagauro. They don't grow over 3000 ft in elevation.

Found the cutoff for Sedona. It's a short, scenic road that leads to Red Rock County. The rocks on the mountains are all red. Beautiful. Drove through Sedona and headed south along the highway to Jerome. It was a copper mining town build high up on the side of mountain in the 1800's. When the mine went bust, the town became a ghost town, until the 60's when a bunch of hippies did the squatters thing. Now they own gift and art shops in the very touristy little town. From there back to Sedona for dinner, a swim and a sleep.