Telescopes, Cacti, and Excitment!

 We have a new member of our team.  But, I’ll leave that to later.

We had a leisurely start to the day; there’s no checkout time at this campsite😀.  After getting packed up and going, we headed out along the Ajo Way towards the west.  This takes you past Kitt Peak, where the National Observatory is located..  I spent literally hundreds of nights on this mountain back in the 70s using various telescopes.  The last time we went along the Ajo Way, I asked Doreen if she would like to go up there, and she said, “What do you want to go away up there for?” But this time she seemed quite interested, so sure enough, we headed up the Kitt Peak road, a 12-mile trip up the mountain off the Ajo Way.

The road up is quite steep and windy, not like it seems in this picture.

At the top, the most outstanding telescope dome is that of the 150-inch telescope, the one on the right.  When I was a postdoc at Kitt Peak in 1969-70, they were just building this dome.  I remember climbing up the stairs during construction when all there was was the concrete pillar the telescope sits on surrounded by the iron framework.

I took this photo from the base of the 150 telescope, and it shows a wide variety of other telescopes on the mountain.

This is the solar telescope.

After descending the mountain (Miss Travelaire liked going down a lot more than up!), we continued on towards the little town of Why, and then south towards Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  After spending all the time visiting Kitt Peak, it was getting on 3:30 or so in the afternoon when we came upon an incident that made us wonder just when we would get to our campground.

Up ahead, we started to see smoke rising from the road, and in a few minutes we were stopped in a line of cars with thick black smoke rising from the road ahead.  We were about half a dozen cars back from the fire, a raging vehicle fire that seemed like it would never stop.  So that was our excitement for the day!

The line of cars behind us ended up stretching as far as you could see.  Pretty much 98% of the people here were speaking Spanish, all heading for the Mexican border.

Numerous Border Patrol vehicles as well as several sheriffs came along, but no fire equipment.  The fire eventually did die down on its own, but it probably took a half to 3/4 of an hour before we were allowed to go past.  We were only 5 miles from the campsite and arrived at the information center in time to get registered, etc.

Here we are, nicely settled in our campsite, surrounded by all sorts of interesting cacti, under nice warm comfortable weather.

The people at the information center that registered us must have thought we were pretty old and dilapidated!

It was a colourful sunset tonight.  In the evening, I wandered down to the amphitheatre for the ranger’s presentation of what else: astronomy!

Oh, and about that new member of our team:  we seem to have aqcuired a mouse in the last couple of days.  We first noticed our bread had a couple of holes chewed in the wrappings.  Then at night we stared hearing it rattling around.  So last night, I set a mouse trap, the one trap we happen to have in the motorhome.  It had some old peanut butter, and I put some cheese on it.  The cheese and peanut butter were gone, but it never went off!  But with my flashlight, I could see the critter wandering around getting into mischief.  It turned out the mousetrap mechanism was stuck.  So tonight, I will try to fix the trap so it works better, and that mouse has seen it’s last day.