Rockstars and Cacti

2 days ago
2 min read

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that we’ve been hiking a lot - it’s our primary form of exercise and also we just love it for the variety of hiking locations, the fresh air, the views, etc. Most of our hikes have been in the woods, by babbling brooks or other waterways. We were not sure what to expect from Southern Arizona - was it just going to be dry desert? Were we going to enjoy the scenery? Or was it just going to be barren? Short answer, we loved it. Tucson is at 2,600ft elevation and the main part of town is in a valley surrounded by very interesting mountains. While not our usual scenery, we loved the rocks and the interesting flora (mostly cacti, but enough other stuff). The biggest difference though, was that it felt like we were climbing rocks (NOT rock climbing, to be clear). There were a lot of rocky paths, lots of gravel on the paths and a lot of interesting geological formations. Not a lot of tree cover anywhere, so it was good we went there in “winter”.

We enjoyed it so much that this is a post exclusively about the all that rock climbing and the cacti we saw along the way (some cactus photos from zoos and botanical gardens, but we also saw a lot of them “in the wild”).

First, the rock stars:

Our favorite hiking area was just a mile from our Airbnb. The Sabino Canyon Recreation Area had everything - easy to difficult hikes, a broad complex of interconnecting trails, a shuttle through the area giving us more options and just beautiful views.

Saguaro National Park was also very close to us and had a bunch of great trails. Knocked another national park off our list…note that there is both an Eastern part and a Western part of the Saguaro National Park, with Tucson in between them.

As mentioned in the other Southern Arizona posts (Part 1 and Part 2), Phoenix was not nearly as picturesque as Tucson, but there was still some challenging hiking among the rocks and mountains. We did most of our Phoenix hiking in the South Mountain Preserve - check out the mountains we climbed! We were very proud of ourselves after successfully completing several of these. Also, did you notice the guy at the top of the mountain with his Doberman - so cute.

And, Cacti

As I mentioned, we really enjoyed the wide variety of cacti we saw in both locations. FYI, a cactus is defined by distinctive spine patterns and flowers. The spines must grow from highly specialized buds that look like roundish bumps. The flower requirements were very technical (in my very unknowledgeable flower opinion), so I didn’t include it here. Our favorite cacti were the saguaros, the prickly pear and the chollas, but there were a lot to enjoy. I put as many names as I could in the captions.