"My dear old Arizona home"

From El Paso we drove to Wilcox, Arizona, where we stayed 2 nights while exploring Chiricahua National Monument. The park protects one of southeastern Arizona's "sky islands"; wetter, mountainous regions surrounded by desert plains that have very localized plant and animal species because of their elevation and isolation. We are at about 6800 feet in this image.


In addition to being a mecca for birdwatchers and the like, Chiricahua also has really cool rock formations, eroded out of ash from a 27 million year old volcanic eruption.



This is an area called "the grottoes".



I am not trapped in the Pit of Despair here, though it may look that way. At least I am smiling.



This is a great park for hiking, with beautiful trails that wander in and out of the formations, providing views along the way. Its also a very remote and under-visited park, which meant that even though we picked the "most popular" hike, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, we met maybe a dozen people along the way. On all the other 4 short hikes we took combined, we only ran into one other person. Awesome!








There were gorgeous, rumbly thunderstorms always just around the corner, which made for great weather and nice skies. This park was one of the highlights of the trip.



We had come to the park hoping to spot coati, but no luck. There were some nice birds and plenty of deer though, and the road from Willcox to the park was a veritable gauntlet of wildlife; we saw 3 great horned owls (one in the middle of the road), several hawks, vultures, deer, dozens of cottontails, several black-tailed jackrabbits, a giant gopher snake, lizards, another small owl/nightjar, roadrunners, and scads of tiny ground squirrels, one of whom we unfortunately assassinated with the wheels of our environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle, despite all best efforts to avoid it. No wonder there were so many owls.

The blog title comes from an old Rex Allen song. Rex Allen was a singing cowboy and film/television star who was born in Willcox, and there is a museum in town dedicated to him. We picked up a CD of his stuff at the national monument's visitor center and that became the soundtrack for the rest of our trip. I think my favorite song on the cd is "I Won't Need My Six-guns in Heaven."


Click me to see where we went.