Christmas Parade and Steam Driven Car

The 2003 Sierra Vista Christmas Parade was held last weekend, and while it wasn't quite as quaint as last year's Palominas parade it had it's share of interesting participants. One group was comprised of ten or so old farm tractors that had been restored to very good working order. I think several of the tractors were from a club in Tucson. They were led by this one, a genuine steam driven tractor from who-knows-when. It ran fine and looked awesome.

Here is a steam driven car, also in excellent running shape.

Black Tailed Rattlesnake and Desert Box Turtle

This is a Black Tailed Rattlesnake that showed up in our driveway at dusk. This species of snake is not too common in general, but we see them pretty often here in this area. It can be found from west Texas to eastern California and tends to be grayish throughout much of that range. In southern Arizona, though, it tends to be a bright yellow, but since this picture was taken with a flash that didn't come through very clearly. I found some information on the internet that said they typically lie in ambush waiting for prey to pass by, sometimes staying in the same spot for several weeks. This particular snake was just over three feet long and eventually crawled off into a yucca plant once we left it alone.

We found this little fellow wandering across the road nearby. It's shell was about 6 inches long. By looking at pictures and other info on the internet we thought it might be a Berlandier's Tortoise, but Jerry Feldner of the Arizona Herpatological Association told us it was an Desert Box Turtle, quite an old male according to Jerry. I don't claim to know the difference (turtle versus tortoise, not male versus female), but hopefully it found whatever it was looking for.

Another Rainbow and a Giant Centipede

I couldn't help but add another rainbow picture. The mountain range in the distance is roughly 10 miles away in Mexico, and I took the picture while standing in the master bedroom.



Doesn't this creature look cute? It's too bad that the sun wasn't shining when I took this picture, because the colors were really quite vivid. It's a Giant Centipede and this one was about 7 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. They can move quickly and have a very painful bite. I've witnessed the first part of that but thankfully haven't experienced the latter. We've seen several since we've been here, but this was the first time I had a camera handy. They haven't been any kind of problem in spite of their appearance.



On the other hand, while researching the little fellow on the internet I discovered that several specialty pet shops in the U.S. carry what is known as a Vietnamese Centipede. They average over 20 inches long when full grown and eat mice.

June 2003 Fire, addendum

Here's a picture taken on August 16th, about three weeks after the summer rains arrived. Most of the black ash has been washed away and the hillside has turned a vibrant green. All of the foreground and the right hand portion of the hill in the background had all been burned.

Pretty amazing recovery, although you can still see the effect of the fire on the lower branches of the trees and the yuccas will be gone until new ones replace them..

June 2003 Fire, part 3

The fire completely burned the grass and underbrush, which isn't such a bad thing by itself. The problem is that where the dead debris had accumulated around the base of trees, it took them out as well. These desert oak trees grow slowly and the ones in this area have been estimated to be be 70 years old or more. The grass will be back in a few months, the cactus in a couple of years, but the lost trees won't get replaced for decades.

Here's a good example of a tree that burned at the base. You can tell from all the ash that some
sort of underbrush, either a bush or dead branches from the tree itself, kept the fire going long enough to catch the trunk on fire. We now make it a point to trim all the low-hanging dead branches from the trees on our lot, and we don't let brush accumulate anywhere.

This was a pretty typical scene in the area after the fire.

I spent most of the day after the fire hiking the hillside putting out fires like this where I could. The Forest Service mostly ignored these hot spots if they were well within the area already burned, but I lugged a five gallon bucket of water around to put out those that were close to our lot. Later that evening we counted about a hundred fires still glowing on the mountain, but all except a few were gone by the following evening.

June 2003 Fire, part 2

The officials let residents back into the burn area just before noon the next day. Many areas were still smoldering, and a persistent spot high up in a canyon on the northwest side of the mountain would keep firefighters busy for another three days. The amazing thing is that no homes were lost. The firefighters simply dug their heels in and refused to let the fire cross firelines around the homes. I was particularly amazed to see a certain wood-frame house high on the hillside still intact ... I had watched flames roar around it for hours the day before.

Here you can see the extent of the burned area. Most of the mountainside was affected.

Here you can see where the firefighters managed to hold the fire back at Stone Ridge Road. How they did it is beyond me. Check the picture on the previous page that was taken as we drove out on that same road.

This picture looks down on the lot where we are building our home. The fire stopped at the road, our "driveway", and various other bare spots on the lot. About a half acre of our lot was blackened, but we didn't lose any trees.

One of the bare spots that helped stop the fire was the foot path that my wife and the dogs use to walk up to the lot. I say "helped", because I was told that several firefighters also were there all Saturday night protecting our partially completed house.

Here is how close the fire got to the walls of our house.

And here is how close it got to the building we are staying in while we build our house.

We feel extremely lucky to have escaped damage from the fire. I can't say enough about the work the firefighters put in, many of whom were putting in 16 hour shifts. We've been told that 225 men and women helped put it out, together with a small army of trucks, helicopters, airplanes, and assorted support vehicles. Firefighters included National Forest personnel and about a dozen different volunteer fire departments from all over southern Arizona. The Sheriff's Department was all over the place, and the local animal control units were out there providing temporary quarters for pets whose owners had to evacuate their homes. It was a pretty impressive showing.

June 2003 Fire, part 1

On June 21, 2003, I looked up from working to see a fire just beginning on the hillside above us to the west. It appeared to originate near a chapel parking lot that is often used as a pickup point for illegal immigrants and we first believed it was from an abandoned campfire. The fire department announced later that someone there had been using a welder and sparks had ignited the grass. I can't imagine anyone being dumb enough to use a welder out in the open on such a windy day.

I took this picture about five minutes after I first saw the blaze and it had already doubled in size. The chapel is hidden by the large cloud of smoke.



The grass was extremely dry and the winds rapidly pushed the fire southward up the ridge, toward the left of the picture.



The fire swept across the face of the mountain along a diagonal line, first racing up the ridges and then moving down the slopes toward us.



Soon the entire peak was engulfed. Firefighters had first tried to contain the fire with slurry planes, but high winds made it unsafe for them to continue.



More fire trucks with as many as 250 firefighters soon arrived, and helicopters began dropping water along defensive lines.



As it became obvious that the fire couldn't be contained, the priority switched to protecting homes. Here the fire has moved much closer to us.



We got the final word to evacuate about 3:00 in the afternoon. I took this picture as we drove out, and the fire was closer to the road than it looks. The heat was pretty intense.



I took this picture from the fire station less than a mile away. We tried to find a vantage point to see if our homes were burning, then finally drove into town to spend the night with friends.

Water Culvert

One of the things we didn't expect to require so much work was the road along our lot. We had to spend quite a bit of money grading and surfacing it when we first began work on the house, and it's an ongoing consideration in terms of water runoff and damage caused by Border Patrol agents and stray vehicles. We recently decided to add a culvert where the road curves to go uphill just past our lot. We wanted to replace a simple water bar (ditch and mound) with something that would do a better job.

With the help of the folks who own the lot above us, we first dug a trench and lined it with rebar. About half of the rebar is shown in this picture ... you can never have too much of it, you know.

We put in the concrete in three stages ... first the floor of the trench, then the wider sidewalls that support a cattle grate, then the outside walls. As usual, we mixed the concrete ourselves (six cu yds). The walls and floor were 6-8 inches thick.

A nearby landowner gave me a massive old cattle guard and I cut it up into 3 sections, each two feet wide and just under eight feet long. They sit end to end on the ledge we built into the walls of the culvert, shown here where the water enters.

Here's a view of the completed culvert looking down toward our lot. We found a nice big rock to cover the entrance so errant vehicles wouldn't drop a wheel into it. Plus it made nice landscaping.

And here's what it looks like from below. The total length is 34 feet, 23 of which is covered by the cattle guard sections. No, those aren't illegals sitting by the road, although these ones work pretty cheaply. That's my wife and the owner of the adjacent lot. His wife also worked with us almost every day, especially the hard ones (digging dirt and mixing concrete), but she wasn't here when I took this picture.

Double Rainbow

The sunsets here are really pretty even on an average day, but are especially so after a rainstorm. With a little dust or mist in the the air, the sky gets a deep purple cast that is beautiful. This picture doesn't really do it justice, though ... the purple hue is really more pronounced in real life. The double rainbow was nice, though.

The mountain in the distance is in Mexico.

As the rainbow got brighter and brighter I noticed that it had almost exactly the same curvature as a flower stalk from a nearby yucca plant, so I repositioned the camera to backlight the yucca stalk. It kind of makes it look like it was on fire.

Old Adobe Hut

This is an old adobe hut within easy hiking distance of our lot that apparently was once used in conjunction with cattle or horse ranching in the area. At some point somebody covered it with cement stucco. It is now in disrepair and not used any more that I can tell.

You can see Thompson Peak in the background of this picture, as well as the beginnings of the house we are building (just below the tip of the arrow).

You can also see the cement stucco over the short mud adobe wall in the foreground. The wall was broken long ago, but the adobe underneath has held up pretty well against the rain and wind.

This is a view from the inside of the hut showing the sun-dried mud bricks and the wood door frames. The primary walls were completely intact, and I think the building goes back to at least the 1940's ... maybe earlier.

Exterior Stucco

Note: We originally (and naively) planned to stucco the house ourselves, but common sense eventually overcame us and we ended up sub-contracting the job to a local tradesman. The shear weight and effort involved to cover 11,000 square feet of wall would have killed us. It was an interesting experience to try to teach myself how to mix and apply stucco, though, so I've left the information below pretty much intact in case anyone else might be interested in doing their own small job ... or stupid enough to tackle a large one.

We want to have the surface of the exterior walls have a stucco appearance. After investigating all sorts of alternative approaches (synthetic stucco, one coat stucco, etc), we decided to use a traditional 3-coat system for its durability and cost-effectiveness. The only problem is that we've never done it, and there is quite some knowledge and experience required to do it correctly. There is lots of contradictory information on the internet, but most sources pointed to the following system:

1. Metal lath securely fastened to the substrate. In our case we'll use one or two layers of wire mesh screwed every 12 inches to the metal furring strips of the foam wall panels. I was thinking of using two layers of mesh perpendicular to each other to assure a good grip of the stucco to the lath so that the inner layer forces the outer layer to stand off the foam panel, but some tests I ran later proved that was unnecessary..

2. A first layer (called the "scratch coat") comprised of (by volume) one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and three parts sharp sand (relatively coarse). Many sources recommended the inclusion of some sort of fibers as a binder in this layer to reduce cracking. I found out that although fiberglass is often used for this, the alkalai in the cement literally destroys fiberglass within about three weeks, making it functional only during application. Nylon or polypropylene holds up indefinitely and provides long term integrity. A company called Nycon (www.nycon.com) sells nylon fibers for many concrete applications in both small and large quantities, so I bought a few packets for my tests (see below). I applied a scratch coat layer both with and without the nylon fibers. The fibers made the stucco easier to apply and gave no shrinkage cracks. The portion without the fibers showed some cracks wherever the underlying lath was not lapped well.

The scratch coat gets raked horizontally with a serrated trowel before it sets too firmly to provide a mechanical bond for the next layer.

3. A second layer (called the "brown coat") comprised of one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and four parts sharp sand. This layer goes on as smoothly as the coarse sand will allow, which isn't very smooth although it can be troweled flat. I played around with applying a section, letting it cure for a couple of days, and then applying an adjacent section. I wanted to see what the effect on cracks and appearance of the joints would be. Cracks don't seem to be a problem (yet, anyway), but I found it useful to feather both edges of the joints (at different times, of course) with a wire brush to virtually eliminate any visible lap.

4. A finish layer (called the "finish layer", surprisingly enough) comprised of one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and three parts #30 silica sand (very fine).

Most sources called out the use of rods and screeds to achieve flat layers, but I found that the sand grains pretty much set the layer thickness if you let them, and the only leveling required is if the underlying wall surface is uneven. Our foam panels are holding pretty true, so I don't think that will be an issue.

So I built a 4ft x 8ft artificial wall using 2x4's and plywood, covered it with lath, and started trying to teach myself the art of stucco work. The results can be seen in the picture below. Most of the panel now has the finish layer on it, which we'll use to test various methods of colorizing. I left all three stucco layers visible in this section of the panel for illustration and also to see what happens to each with time and weathering.

Terrific Adobe Style Home

The Habitat for Humanity organization in Sierra Vista sponsored a tour of some local homes last month, one of which was this terrific adobe-style home that's on the National Register of Historic Places. It part of the Kinjockity Ranch, which was built by a very wealthy fellow back in the 1930's and is located about a mile north of us. I'd love to capture this same warm, rounded appearance with our house, but I don't think we'll be able to with the construction technique we're using. Still, I plan to steal a few ideas from what I saw as I was going through it.

Here's a picture from inside the house. I believe this room was added more recently, and it has the same feel we hope to build into our home, with maybe a few less decorative items.

Addendum: The Kinjockity Ranch has now been sold to a developer, and the new property is being called Kings Ranch Estates. From what I've been told, the developer is planning to convert this old adobe home to an upscale restaurant.