Big prickly things
Trip Start
Jan 19, 2009
1
93
96
Trip End
Jan 18, 2010
Saguaro National Park, Arizona
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Tombstone started as a mining town and was truly part of the Wild West. Tombstone is known as the ‘town too tough to die’ due to surviving several fires and managing to still exist through the closing of the silver mine. It is very famous for a giant shoot out between local law enforcers and a group of cowboys. We visited the sight of the shoot out and wandered around the old historic town.
We then headed off at a sprint to Saguaro National Park, pronounced, Sa-wah-row. These giant cacti can grow to up 50 feet. They take up to 150 years to grow anywhere near this size and grow so slowly that you can plant one in your yard when you are 5 and it won’t grow tall enough to grow an arm until you are at least 75 – 80 years old, crazy. This National Park preserves a huge Saguaro population allowing them time to grow without being disturbed by people. These are beautiful gigantic cacti well worth the loop drive through the park.
Our last visit for the day was Biosphere 2, the complex of enclosed domes was originally built to be a self contained research environment testing to see if humans can survive on the moon. If you’ve seen Bio Dome (the Paulie Shaw movie, absolutely hilarious) you will know what we are talking about. It cost over ½ a billion dollars to build and run this dome. It was built in Arizona because they have the most days of sunlight here in the US and had four separate environmental areas (biomes) including an ocean, savannah, desert and a rainforest. They also had a farm area for growing food and housing farm animals. The first experiment failed though, due to El Nino coming through Arizona and significantly decreasing the number of sunny days making it hard for the plants to consume CO2 so the people inside slowly became oxygen deprived. However they still lasted 16 months in the dome before they had to break the seal on the facility and let some air in. Whilst the project wasn’t exactly successful a huge amount was learnt about the earth and how it works and the project is now used by Arizona University for environmental research and studies, and is contributing to the next stages of the NASA space program. Such an interesting project, we were amazed by all the thought and ‘brains’ that went into this project. Whilst we don’t really want to live on the moon, we though Biosphere 2 totally rocked.
And now we head home to Sun City, Phoenix for a fantastic Christmas and a real bed. We hope you all have a fantastic Christmas full of family, friends and good times, we will be thinking of you. Much Love and Peace, the glad to be ‘home’, Bek and Jesse Train.
Comments
I could see you 2 volunteering to live in one of these Biospheres for a year or so- beware of those darn cactus- I hear they harbour terrancula's(sp), very large ones- EEkkkkk
Jesse & Bec,
Wow, it has been 12 months since you left and what a big year it has been. I am very impressed by all the locations covered on the map! I assume you plan to keep travelling in 2010??
LIfe in Melbourne is pretty good. Happy New Year and all the ebst 2010.
Tony Mount
Thank you for post this photos.