Palm Desert, Joshua Tree Sunset, and an Arizona Sunrise

I begin this large gallery with a few photos from my aforementioned jaunt to Palm Springs, to see an old friend and lubricate my anxieties.  Kim and Anji invited me to their client-furnished condo in the Palm Valley Country Club.  Nice digs...ended up staying for two nights and could have stayed a week.  Alas, I still have some responsibilities (and appointments, sigh) back home.

With old buddy, Kim...

...and new buddy, Anji.  Can I call her your fiance?  Whut's that, Kim?

The extent of the day's physical activities.

It's amazing what you can do with a desert when you add water.

Venus and the moon set among the palms.

Checking in back home, I got permission to stretch my time another night on the road.  Saturday afternoon I headed into Joshua Tree National Monument via the Berdoo Canyon 4-wheel drive road.  I didn't find the canyon to be particularly scenic though it was a surprisingly quick journey into the heart of the area.

These whimsical plants provide a variety of photo-ops.

It's just parched bushes on a rocky hillside of basalt.

The road to Keys View passes through a dense and mature stand of Joshua trees.

Keys View rises almost a mile over the Palm Springs Valley.  This evening there are some two dozen folks waiting for the sunset.  This composition is a voyueristic theme of mine; photos of family photos.  I don't know who any of them are but the two young women are with a group of 20-year olds...their conversation indicates some disadain for freshmen and they do a light-hearted rendition of "America the Beautiful."  The two women also played model for the designated photographer of their group, a lucky young man given the combination of pretty faces and golden light.

It's a bit disconcerting to realize that the cloud bank on the horizon is actually a blanket of smog blowing over from Los Angeles.  But, hey, you take what you get.

Dramatic 'mares tails' fly in the sky above.

It's only a few moments from this photo to the next...a dramatic storm cell has developed far to the south.  The Salton Sea can be seen in the basin below.

Not bad for a hand-held shot.

That's it for Joshua Tree...by morning, and after a couple of rest stops, I was 300 miles east waiting for the morning light of an Arizona sunrise.

Arizona did not disappoint.

Morning glory (sacred datura) grows by the wayside.

It's said to be a potent narcotic, but also a deadly one.

A Gallery: Labor Day in the Peloncillo Mountains

Note:  This entry is the update to my Photo Buzz post.  You'll find some more images of that awesome rainbow down below.

All of the long weekend we'd been planning to visit Apple Annie's out in Wilcox, pick peaches and pick up on some sweet corn and roasted chiles.  Alas, Brendan doesn't like any of those things and wasn't hot on the idea...and chemo kept me bagged out until Monday.  That morning everyone was waffling on the trip and in the end I set out on my own...with Apple Annie's now relegated to a pit-stop on my way to New Mexico to stock up on some more fireworks. (The neighbors have kindly put up with our moderate backyard pyrotechnics; colored smoke balls during the day and sparkling fountains by night....but we're going to have to find a remote and denuded location to set off the good stuff.)  After the fireworks shopping, my plan is to explore some backroads around the Peloncillo Mountains, a low but rugged mountain range running along the southern Arizona-New Mexico borderlands.

U-pickers go for tomatoes while a thunderstorm cell hits the Winchester Mountains.

It was a bit stormy on my way into the Peloncillo Mountains, heading north of Interstate 10 from San Simon.  Such days can provide surprise photo opportunities; alas, much of this day was looking to be bleak and shadowless.

This fork off the backroad ends at a ranch, as many of them turn out to.

The owners of this ranch don't seem too friendly, but I'm always respectful of private property.

Cows on a hillside...okay, that's creative, Eric.

Then how about a little mule deer spied through the creosote bush?

I followed this road for several miles...

...on my way to the last outpost of photo opportunity for the day: Orange Butte.

I'm not kidding, and the photo-buzz tingle had begun.

I come around to the northside of Orange Butte and...oh...my...god!

The sun's last light upon the blazing volcanic cliff face of Orange Butte.

Now, back to that rainbow.

It appeared as if sheets of rain were emerging from the bow itself.

Pure magic!

The Crazy Shit We Did, Part Two

Part One was covered back in my post entitled Saint Mary's Park Cafe...and by "We" in the title, I mean me and my friend, Kim, from my carefree youthful-adult days, with whom I tried to get in trouble on numerous occasions but only succeeded on a few.  This is a tale of one we got away with.

The Olympic Saddledome and the downtown Calgary skyline.

We're eighteen and it's the summer of '82 after high school, cruising downtown Calgary on a Saturday night.  As we're passing the construction site of the Petro Canada Towers, I notice one of the boards is missing and we can get into the area.  Did I mention I have a facsination for skyscrapers...and that the taller of these towers is to be the tallest building in Calgary?  Well shit, Earl, let's go climb ourselves a skyscraper under construction!

So under the cover of darkness we enter the site and make our way to the first stairwell we can find.  Up, up we go...twenty floors, thirty floors.  We spot some people working in one area but bypass them easily.  We reach the top of the stairwell sooner than we expect, entering an upper utility-area of steel stairs and catwalks that eventually lead to a ladder and hatch in the ceiling.  Climbing out the hatch we discover...


WE CLIMBED THE WRONG BUILDING!!  Petro Canada is twin towers, but one is shorter than the other...and there we stood with the taller of them still looming over us, some 40 floors down to the nearest level that bridges the gap.  Damnit.

Not to be thwarted, we return the next day, Sunday afternoon.  This time with friend Jim, who's even crazier than we are, and cameras to document the nefarious achievement.  It's a textbook operation, enter the site, climb the first stairwell up a level or two then cross over to the taller tower.  It's some sixty flights to the top and it takes us a good 45 minutes...mostly because my fat ass is slowing us down.  The building is nearing completion but the top five or six floors are little more than steel girders.  We climb the ladder of the crane to gain access to the highest points.  The deck that is to be the roof of the building is only poured on the central hub of the building, out to the edge it's nothing but steel.

Yeah, so out we go.  Kim and Jim are braver than I and make their way like confident ironworkers.  I pick a wider double-beam and crawl my way to the edge, where it's 750 feet down to the street.  The only time I stood up was for the photo.

 

We tossed a couple of paper airplanes over the edge, watching them go for several minutes before losing them in the myriad of buildings below.  Later on we threw a light bulb or two that we pilfered from the stairway.  Yeah, that was a bit crazy...but we made sure there were no cars or pedestrians below. (Being Sunday, downtown was pretty dead below us anyway.)  They landed on the roofs of the buildings across the street.

Craziest of all, Jim grabs a couple quarter-sections of tire that are being used as a safety bumber...and tosses them over the edge before either us realize what he's done.  Crazy f**ker!!  One lands on the sidewalk across the street while the other lands very loudly within the construction site on a floor of plywood.  Okay, paranoia sets in, time to leave...

Kim and Jim get several floors ahead of me on the way down but do have the courtesy to wait up at intervals.  The final exit out of the construction site requires crawling under some scaffolding, and just as we enter the crawlspace, the door of a trailer opens nearby and a man comes out and yells, "Get out of here!"  We're not sure if he thinks we're just coming in or not, but he's coming over and we're only ten feet from freedom.  Out on the street we're around the corner and easily away before he'd have a chance to crawl through that same space.  Ha ha...we did it!

Oh yeah...three weeks later, that crane fell off the building and the operator fell to his death.  Crazy shit, indeed.

Damnit...it's in my brain!

Okay, let's get this one over with.  To those friends on Facebook, you already saw my announcement there...now I have the gory details.

My brain looks like a snow-globe on the MRI scan.  At least a dozen flecks of light floating in my brain; right-side, left-side, inside, outside, front-side and back.  It's like a spring bloom in there.  Good news is they caught it early...most of them really are just flecks, and none are bigger than 3 millimeters (1/8").

They can't target the spots individually with radiation because they'd end up having to radiate my whole brain anyway just to get to all of them.  So the plan is low-dose radiation of my whole brain.  The docs speak confidently of being able to stop the current activity with few side effects, but recurrance is a common reality.

It's back on the roller coaster and it seems we're screaming downhill, but I still feel fine.  How can I be so sick and not feel anything?  It's not like I'm complaining, this is exactly the quality of life I was hoping to experience.  Perhaps even better than I had hoped, and certainly longer.  Still, this is tough news and it hasn't been easy to bear.  It's a whole new ballgame now...and the timeline seems like it just got a whole lot shorter.

But in the department of serendipitous timing, an old friend I hadn't seen in twenty years was in Palm Springs this last weekend.  I'd already thought about a semi-spontaneous trip to go visit and the timing on my news clenched it.  I left from my appointment with the radiation oncologist and drove out to California...then spent most of the next day (starting with brunch) drinking margaritas on their condo-patio and catching up on old times while old folks sliced their golf balls on the fairway twenty feet away.  We had made plans of some kind but didn't accomplish more than a golf-cart run to get more beer and tequila and go hang out at the pool.

It was exactly what I needed.

Photo Buzz!

This is why I love photography.  Before I left the house I told Kirsteen, "I'll see where the light leads me."  This is where it led...

Wow.  I am in the middle of friggin' nowhere* driving on roads that are little more than ruts; I come around a corner and this!  Words defy the experience, but I think I got the Leprechaun's Gold on this one.  It took me a few moments to gather my senses, and my camera, while the show built to this crescendo.

*I'll update this post soon, but I had to share the photo buzz.

A Catwalk and the City of Rocks

My brother and Brendan's uncle DeWitt came down for a visit last week.  Before his long drive back to Alberta, we talked him into some adventure in New Mexico...with just me and Brendan this time, as Kirsteen flies to Seattle for a long-weekend with an old friend and well-deserved vacation on her own.

Glenwood, New Mexico is a four-hour drive from our front door here in Tucson, mostly to the northeast; not far across the state line and set before a dramatic face of the Mogollon Mountains.  Beyond Safford, the last 90 minutes are always scenic and this time incredibly verdant, having had abundance of summer rains.

Tucked into a box canyon near Glenwood is the Catwalk Trail.  In days of old, the catwalk was set upon a pipeline; parts of it are still used in one or two places, though modern recreational engineering has replaced most of it and made the trail quite safe for the whole family.  Next to the parking area is a perfect picnic ground with ankle-wading access to Whitewater Creek.  This place is an all-round win.

There were no vacancies among the scant motel-pickings in Glenwood (we knew this might be the case) and headed an hour to the southeast to find one of the few rooms left in Silver City; cheap but clean and cozy...and the TV had Food Network, so Brendan was happy.  Just before we had left Tucson, Brendan was crying that he wanted to stay at home and not go on the trip...by the next morning, he was begging for a second night to the adventure!

Alas, my chemo meds were kicking in that morning and uncle DeWitt was to part ways with us anyway; so we planned a less ambitious but still Brendan-friendly agenda...a visit to City of Rocks State Park.

Turns out, this place is good for the six-year old in all of us!!  DeWitt and I tagged along to Brendan's excited and continued urgings to follow him here, there, and everywhere through a myriad-maze of bouldery chutes, hollows and passages.  The videos below convey it best.  Brendan is now demanding that we return for a camping trip.  Nearly all of the campsites are tucked right among the rocks...and instead of being numbered, the sites are all named for constellations!  How nerdy and cool is that?  I'm thinking Brendan's demands may be met before too long (when it's not so hot).

After hugs and goodbyes for DeWitt, he headed north and we headed west for home, stopping for a late-lunch at Kranberry's in Lordsburg, with its chicken-fried steak for me...and a promised pilgrimage to the fireworks outlet across the street for both of us.  My apologies to our neighbors for the occasional puff of colored smoke, whiff of sulfur, showers of sparkles, or bangs that project from our backyard in the coming weeks and months. (I'm a little surprised how much stuff you can get for $40.)  We won't be the first of our near-neighbors taking part in that action...but we promise to be careful.