Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

Tuesday we took in the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Colleen has been lobbying for me to see this, her favorite spot in Tucson, for a couple of years. It did not disappoint. Unfortunately, Colleen could not go with us as she has taken on a part-time job with the Tucson area schools and was having an audit of her program this week.

The Museum is located in the Tucson Mountains on the other side of I-10 from the main city of Tucson. To get to it, you have to drive up Tucson Mountain, thru Gates Pass, and then down a steep, narrow, windy mountain road with no guardrails back to the desert floor. It was an exciting ride. On the drive down, the whole valley is covered with giant Saguaro (the "g" is pronounced as a "y") cacti as far as the eye can see. They look like soldiers guarding sentry over the valley and up the sides of the mountains. Impressive!

It is a short drive to the Arizona Sonora Museum from there. Colleen is a member and had provided us with free guest passes (thanks so much Colleen). We picked up a map for our self-guided tour. Since we weren't sure how to begin, a very friendly museum docent helped us get going. I have to say that all the museum docents were very friendly and made our visit wonderful. The Museum is mostly outdoors and consists of a series of interconnected loop trails of mostly desert plants and a few desert animals. They display over 40,000 plants (not including grasses) from 1,300 different species, as well as 20 endangered desert animal species.



We started off on the Ancient Arizona loop trail. We were a little confused because we thought we would learn about the peoples of ancient Arizona, but it turned out to be about ancient Arizona plants, although I have to say it was not well-labelled. That trail segued into the Grasslands Trail, which did have some plants labelled. There were a few plants there that we had not seen before and would have liked to know their names, but they were still beautiful. Even in February a few of them were starting to bloom.

This trail then segued into the Desert Loop Trail - one of the longest trails in the museum. And one of the most interesting for us. The trail had every type of cactus, agave, and aloe plant you could imagine. In the agave garden, the Museum did a good job of explaining the difference between the 3 different types of desert plants that all look so alike to those of us from Minnesota. They particularly had quite a collection of agaves.



Also, along the Desert Loop Trail were the cat canyon with ocelet and bobcat, and a special enclosure for the coyotes, and another one for javelinas (who are quite offended when you call them cute little pigs). We ended the trail at the gift shop where I bought some T-shirts and post cards. We split a chocolate croissant, I had mint tea and Carol had a prickly pear drink. We were carefully watched the whole time by a small bird who was waiting for us to drop some crumbs.



We took a short drive up to Saguaro National Park to get a map and find out what there would be to do there the following day. Then since it was getting close to 5 pm, we headed to Gates Pass where we wanted to get photos of the sunset in the mountain range to the west of Gates Pass. There was an interesting crowd gathering for the same purpose. We did get some spectacular photos. When we got home sort of late, Colleen and Dan had made salmon with baked sweet potatoes for dinner. Nummmmm.