Fairy Duster

Our lot is covered with a shrub-like plant called a Fairy Duster. They're in bloom now (April) and the flowers are really pretty. The plant grows sporadically all over the slopes but our lot seems to have way more than average. I'm not sure why but I'll settle for being lucky.

Here's what they look like up close. The flowers are feathery and delicate, but the plant itself is quite wiry and the roots go down at least three feet. We found that out when we were trenching.

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.