Tucson I

Tucson is my favorite desert city maybe because it was where I was born. It is at a higher elevation so it is cooler than say, Phoenix. It tends to be greener and is surrounded by mountains. It is in the Sonoran Desert and it has a diversity of plants and animals. A good place to start is the Desert Museum, an ever changing live outdoor exhibit of the area. You could spend forever hiking, in the cooler months of course. The Saguaro National Park is split by Tucson into an eastern and western section. We visited the eastern side on this trip. The famed saguaro grow slowly from a seed and can reach taller than 75 feet and live up to 200 years. They can absorb 200 gallons of water at once to hold them through the long dry periods in the desert. We did not see any javalinas on our trip which are different from wild boar. They have become popular and are thought of as cute by many. We hiked through Sabino Canyon that I remember driving through and picnicking as a kid. Now it is for walking only. It happened to be wet because of rains that preceded us. You can't beat the sunsets in Arizona.