Ode to 118 degrees

I was aware of this when I agreed to move to this fair city in the desert.  This is the Sonoran desert after all, the same latitude and altitude as the Northern Sahara for those needing a point of reference.  Despite all of the super irrigated and lush lawns full of citrus trees this is still an area that averages extreme temperatures and and average annual rain fall under 9 inches.

This heat is different.  Strangely enough there is a difference between 103 and 109 and there is also a difference between 109 and 117.  At 105 or 109 you can still get away with working outside, shade still offers refuge.  At 117 the heat is thick, even in the shade.  You look outside and plants look fatigued, brown, and weak.  The bright sun only illuminates a weary and browning landscape.  The family of quail in our neighborhood seeks refuge deep within the jasmine that I keep moist.

So I will deal with this heat wave.  I will huddle indoors in a sluggish state of survival.  I will repeatedly remind myself of how nice it is in February.  And I will wonder why the heck we didn't arrange to be in San Diego.

We should have known better.  Ah.....Phoenix.

Introducing Bite Sized Phoenix

It's no secret that I'm a glutton for ....well, gluttony.  I take up any chance to get out and sample some new cuisine in the burgeoning and ever impressive Phoenix dining scene.  As much as I enjoy Yelp I wanted to put my own stamp on my fair city.

Enter Bite Sized Phoenix.  The idea is to provide a precise, twitter-like experience for those wanting to explore the culinary options of the greater Phoenix area.  I don't have any grand aspirations for the site other then an outlet to document my experiences in a medium that gives me a little more creative possibility.  It is still a work in progress but it is starting to take shape.

Raising our Arizona IQ

We've made an effort to explore all of the nooks and crannies of this the Grand Canyon state but the birth of Charlie put these visits on a temporary hold.  Now that he is up running we decided to see some new country.  In this chapter we visited friends in the remote dusty Northeast corner of the state to the small pioneer community of St. Johns.

Along the way we enjoyed the mountain and pine laden community of Greer.  This area was recently ravaged by the Wallow fire but fortunately most of the rugged area that we explored remained untouched.  I would stack this area up with the best of the Uintah's, Yellowstone, or Wind Rivers. 

We also spent some time in Eagar, which is the community right where the high plains meet the White Mountains.  While not as beautiful as the are between Greer and Pinetop it was still a welcome sight from our desert doldrums.

Most of the time was spent in St. Johns.  Not much to see there other then an appreciation for the hearty pioneer and Mexican stock that founded it and continue to populate it to this day.  On a clear day you can see well into the Navajo nation and the area that was part of the famed Route 66.

Greer was the definite highlight and we already have some plans to return and perhaps stay at the famed Molly Butler lodge.  The country is spectacular, the living simple and easy, and the weather well worth the drive.  Here's to getting up on the Mogollon rim.

Tis the season to get into the season

No better place to get the Christmas season started than a visit to the Mesa Temple Christmas lights.

South Mountain Park

A recent visit from mom and dad was reason enough to visit another nook of the Valley that I haven't experienced. Here are a few above average photos from South Mountain Park. On a clear day and with the right equipment you could get some great vistas of the whole Phoenix area.

Nevermind the Gas prices, Bisbee calls

Bisbee= One of the better places in Arizona to relax, rejuvenate, and rediscover life.

The Desert Botanical Garden

When you think of desert do you think dry wasteland?  Spend a spring evening at the Botanical Gardens and the lush surroundings will have you completely rethinking your opinions of the desert.  And it's just moments from down town. 

Tonto Natural Bridge and the open road

We recently decided to head up to the famed Route 66 and the Turquoise Room at the Posada Hotel in Winslow.  Our route took us right through some scenic pine country and the Tonto Natural Bridge. It is right off the highway and well worth your time.

The recent cold freeze created some great photos.  The waterfall froze and we were able to witness several large icicles come to a tremendous crash at the bottom of the ravine.  The sun was very bright which made most of the photos over saturated or laden with too much contrast.  Nonetheless, they do a decent job of capturing another of Arizona's natural gems.

Culture over consumerism

Thanks to the wonderful world wide web I no longer have to spend my December weekends exchanging blows with my neighbors at the local mall. Instead, I can enjoy things like the dedication of the Paolo Soleri bridge in Scottsdale.

Soleri is the coolest Italian architect in this town and he is the godfather of the whole arcology movement. He is known locally for his Arcosanti concept. His people also make real cool bells and chimes.

Anyway, this bridge is a nice counter and complement to the evolving Waterfront area. It's nice to see his bohemian, utopian influences juxtaposed next to the State's biggest den of consumerism.

Because it's hot...really hot

We all know that it gets hellishly hot in Phoenix during July and August. Experience a couple consecutive weeks of 110 plus heat and you start to really question the draw of this place. And since San Diego isn't an option every weekend, you've got to find ways to escape the heat that are a little closer to home.

Fortunately for us we've got the Mogollon Rim about an hour and a half to the Northeast of us. One of life's simple pleasures is looking down at your car thermometer as you climb to Payson and watch as the degrees peel off.

This weekend we opted to hike Horton Canyon. It is about 20 minutes outside of Payson just below the Rim. While it only takes an hour and a half to get up there, it is a world away from Phoenix.

To start, it is green. We were fortunate to hike the morning after some heavy monsoon rains. Everything was green and absolutely verdant. We saw ferns and other plants that we wouldn't think would have anything to do with this State. The sound of the creek, the smell of the damp pines, and the distant roar of the monsoon thunder is the perfect therapy for those of us who are having a difficult time stomaching this heat.






I will throw in a few more photos. This time from a Memorial Day trip down to Tucson. This is Sabino Canyon. It was too hot and the sun was too strong to really capture any decent photos. I'd like to revisit this place after a wet, cool Spring.

On location with the Three Amigos

We all have our favorite movies. We feel a special connection to the characters, the story, and even the location or setting of the movie. We want to be apart of the story. One of the easiest ways to do so is to find and visit the location that these movies were filmed. A couple of years ago Jodi and I visited the location of the famous Bluth Banana Stand at Marina Del Rey. Last week we decided to take advantage of the visit of Dan and Conner to make our pilgrimage to Old Tucson studio, where a good portion of Three Amigos was filmed.

The setting is spectacular. This is the old west that we grew up watching...mainly because so many old westerns were filmed here. We pulled up to the venerable studio with high expectations. We wanted to literally walk in the foot steps of Lucky, Dusty, and Ned. We were somewhat disappointed. First, the studio does a pretty poor job of capturing the great history of the place. For the most part the visitors are left trying to piece together scenes the were filmed there. Second, the great fire of 1995 destroyed a lot sets, including several used in the filming of the Three Amigos.

Fortunately we found a tour that was headed up by a man who has spent decades there and has even been an extra in several movies. His memories of John Wayne, James Stewart, Clint Eastwood and others was absolutely lucid. The studio needs to make sure that they get all of those stories recorded for posterity. He was involved in the Three Amigos and here are some insights that he shared.

• Scenes filmed at Old Tucson included: The Village with the Bar and El Guapo's fortress. The Village of Santo Poco was likely filmed in California but it wasn't confirmed.
• The fire of 95' destroyed several sets used in the movie, including the bar that gave us the beloved rendition of "Little Buttercup".
• The fortress of El Guapo was built specifically for the movie and was built a small distance to the Northwest of the studio. As such it fell into disrepair after the movie and was often broken into. Because of that the whole set was destroyed 4 or 5 years after the movie. Such a tragedy!
• The only real visible and tangible evidence of the movie is the church (different now), one series of buildings, a piece of El Guapo's place, and the desert landscape.

Here are a few pictures.

The tubman 601 flying over the village. (It was a male plane, right?)

How that looks today.
What remains of El Guapo's fortress
The church in the movie (slightly different)

Dan and Conner in front of where the El Guapo set was

Because of heat

Ones loyalty to Phoenix comes into question every time this year. The memories of a 72 degree afternoon in January are all but melted away by the suffocating heat as you sweat your way home in triple digit weather. The fact that July set all kinds of heat records has really put my devotion in question.

To cope with the heat you learn to value the myriad weekend getaways that are an hour or two out of town. It's nice to know that the rest of Arizona isn't a fiery furnace.

This weekend getaway took us through Pine and Camp Verde en route to Montezuma's Castle and Well. Who knew he had both. Both are just outside of Sedona and they provided a nice, cooler change of scenery. They provided a nice understated alternative to the valley. Top off an evening at one of our famed Indian Casinos, Cliff Castle, and you've got a four star weekend.

Montezuma's Well, in particular, offered a placid and quiet place to just relax. It isn't too far off the 17 and a couple of hours there can really clear your head. It doesn't offer anything spectacular on the surface but once you settle in you find that your thoughts flow as freely as the water out of the ancient well.

The vastness that is the Grand Canyon

I went up to St. George to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of Norm Wahlstrom. Since I was driving alone I decided to make the most of it and visit the lonely North Rim on the way up and the South Rim on the way back. (Interesting Trivia: Did you know that the N. Rim is at 8,500 feet and gets only 400k annual visitors while the S. Rim is at 7,000 feet and gets 4.4 million annual visitors.)

The view was spectacular but it is really difficult to capture the vastness that is the Grand Canyon without a super cool wide angle lens. My attempt to stitch together several pictures to make a panorama created a shot that looked more like a patch work blanket then a seamless view of the park.

Randomizer Volume V Series II

Because the thoughts keep coming and they are more then likely random. Plus I needed a breather from the immigration talk.

• Here's an excerpt from "The Eight Pillars of Greek Wisdom" regarding modern distractions and how the absence of them helped make Greece great. "The absence of artificial distractions permitted the mind to focus, and the scarcity of complexity let the most essential issues stand out....life was lived on a more human scale....Entertainment did not, as it does today, constantly saturate the consciousness r assault the eye with hyper stimulation....ours is a society deprived of the chance for deep thought. Unlike the problem faced by the prisoner in Plato's cave, our problem today is not too little light, but too much, a light so glaring that we cannot see what is real." Can I get an amen?
• U2 is now officially at the "Steven Spielberg" phase of their career. What do I mean? I mean that the supreme nature of their past work has granted their contemporary work a certain immunity from criticism. They once pushed the envelope and created a new paradigm. Now their work is fairly formulaic and the torch for ground breaking innovation has been passed on to another generation. We still love you but we've come to stop expecting a new Achtung Baby.
• We've been watching Mad Men on Netflix. It has singlehandedly taken the golden and some naive sheen that I had of pre-Vietnam America. Evidently AMC has set out to make the "American Dream" look as self absorbed, empty, and decrepit as possible.
  
• A few photos from the Mogollon Rim that were taken on a recent camping trip. Not many people realize this but there is some incredible country that is just an hour or so outside of Phoenix.

Saturday at the White Tanks

The most recent Washington Street activity had us visiting the White Tank Mountain Park about 25 miles west of Phoenix. Overall a pretty bland stretch of geography littered with granite mountains, saguaros, and assorted desert vegetation. What made the visit interesting was its history.

This area used to be one of the central settlements for the Hohokam Indian tribes that lived and thrived in the greater valley sometime between 300 and 1500 AD. Our hike passed through numerous petroglyphs depicting various facets of their culture. Evidently some of them are purportedly 10,000 years old. This lost civilization continues to play a role in Phoenix development today. Last week I attended a meeting that outlined how any new developments in the valley need to be screened for archaeological material. If anything of significance, burial ground for example, is discovered then the developer needs to pay for a team of archaeologists to work the site and to return certain materials and remains to the local native Americans.

Many planes in a big desert

Every time my dad comes down to visit Phoenix he always brings up the fact that he hasn't visited the Airplane boneyard at the Pima Air and Space Museum. This isn't entirely true because we've been to the museum a couple of times; but both times we went the boneyard was closed. Well I got sick of the incessant whining and decided to take one for the team and take him down there.

I'm just really beginning to learn what airplanes mean to my dad. To me they are nothing more then a crowded aisle seat and a bag of peanuts that get me to Austin. But to my dad they represent the coolest thing going from his youth. He grew up during the early years of the Cold War and our Air Force was the frontline against the growing threat of Communism. The airplanes represented the best in American ingenuity and innovation. Being a pilot was the pinnacle of "coolness". There isn't a career path out there today that combines the respect, adventure, challenge, and pay of being a pilot 50 years ago.

Anyways, here are a few photos from the recent trip. Enjoy the pictures of aluminum and old planes.

Phoenix from some new perspectives

According to my photography books the best pictures are taken in the early morning. Here are a couple of pictures taken at dawn just outside of Fountain Hills followed by a couple of panoramic pictures taken from Camelback Mountain.

Fountain Hills

Camelback

Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright's Super-Cool Adult Fort

The Washington Street foundation truly is the gift that keeps giving. I don't know about the kids but I'm sure getting a lot out of these field trips. This month it was a visit to the little village
that Frankie built, all nestled up in the desert lushness of the McDowell mountains east of Scottsdale.

I couldn't help but enjoy a tinge of irony as we had to pass through some of the most superficial and decadent areas in Scottsdale to get to Taliesin. I chuckled as I observed how the simple serenity of this little community overshadowed all of the super leveraged and soulless houses that occupied the foothills just a stones throw below. I think that Mr. Wright would also share this feeling.

Despite the fact that residential development has now creeped up to its very edges this place is suprisingly peaceful. You can spend several hours here without even giving in to the temptation to look at your watch or blackberry.

The guides really bring this place to life. There are layers and layers of subtle history here that can only be uncovered by those who have lived to make it. In our case we were led by a spry older lady who has spent over 30 years on this campus. She was able to point out designs that originated here and that revolutionized the way we in which we design and build.

This place has a simple yet elegant design about it. It seems organic enough to feel like an elaborate fort yet sophisticated enough to host a dinner party, which it did back when the great architect was still alive. This place made the Swiss Family Robinson tree house seem so.....so, Disney in comparison.

This campus is still a vibrant center for learning. I couldn't think of a more serene and focused setting to learn how to build structures that are in harmony with nature. There is a small student body that basically lives in self-constructed forts during their academic stay. Let's see a textbook try to reach a mind like that.

All in all this was a worthwhile visit and a true gem to the Phoenix landscape. I'm surprised that it took this long for me to make the visit. True and inspired genius doesn't come around often, especially here. So you've got to savor and learn from those rare occurrences that you can create an intimate and tangible connection to the inspired.

Holiday Cheer....Nutcracker Style

The Holidays are firmly here and what better way to ring in the season with the 12 year old red blooded boy that you mentor then a Saturday matinee of the Nutcracker? In all candor it was as part of our association the Washington Street Foundation; the incredible organization that provides incredible opportunities for 40+ valley kids in the valley. Armando admitted that he kind of liked the ballet, at least the visual image of girls prancing around in tights behind an insanely colorful and elaborate backdrop.

The Nutcracker is somewhat of a tradition with my family and I was happy to get a free chance to see what IB Anderson had up his sleeves this year. There's something magical about that production that extends beyond the legions of smartly dressed mothers and daughters. There's also something special about the Washington Street Foundation.

In the 18 months that I have been apart of the organization we have taken the kids to do the following things:

• Learn the art of bell making and the science of alternative community development from Cosanti
  
• Learn about college from visits to Scottsdale and Paradise Valley Community Colleges
• Visit the Out of Africa Wildlife Refuge and Phoenix Zoo
  
• Ponder the abstract genius of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin
• Learn about nutrition and rudimentary culinary arts
• Visit the Mesa Museum of Art for the Muppet's display
• Learn the fundamentals of rock climbing and rappelling
  

The kids are introduced to culture, arts, science, and opportunities that would normally be beyond the limited means of their families. To top it all off they get college scholarships upon successful graduation from the program. Christmas is the time to express gratitude for things that truly enrich our lives. I'm not even a student but I've greatly benefited from the opportunity to be part of this group. I can only imagine the magnitude of positive influence it has over kids from difficult circumstances.

This is a desert?

Most people conjure up images of the barren Sahara or atleast anything around Las Vegas when the word desert is brought up. But after living in Phoenix for several years you grow to realize that this stereotype doesn't quite pertain. There are places here that at the right time appear to be just downright verdant and lush.

Here are some recent photos from the famed Superstition Mountains that are east of Mesa. We will continue to poke around these hills in search of desert beauty and some of the Lost Dutchmans cache of gold.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ronifer/SuperstitionMountains