2006/02 Southwest USA trip (NM-AZ) - Madera Canyon |
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We drove just to the north of the Santa Rita mountains, through a strange zone that seemed to be partly open range cattle ranching and partly expensive houses and gated communities, all within commuting distance of Tucson. We turned south towards Green Valley and Nogales on the Mexican border. All the road signs on I-19 were in kilometers, kind of unusual for the USA. Perhaps they’d outsourced the sign painting to Mexico? For additional confusion, signs for other agencies, like the forest service, were still in miles.
We turned off for Madera Canyon, the entry to the Santa Ritas, a very impressive mountain range. This was our second "Madera Canyon" of the trip, but "madera" just means "wooded" in Spanish, so there are probably a few more with the same name. We were camping at Bog Springs which at first sight didn’t seem to have either a bog or springs. There we met another Tiger motor home, just five years old and built at the original factory in Colorado. Dan was keen to show us around his Tiger and show us his modifications. Some would have been useful to us but most were not. Our immediate impression was that they didn’t carry anywhere near as much stuff as us, 
even before we’d added a few hundred pounds of rocks!
Monday February 6th
We decided to stay another night and explore the park. It was cold on the shadowed side of the mountain so we thought we’d first do our food shopping down in Green Valley. Then we realized that our soft tyre was much softer, so we needed to get that checked out anyway. After all of our bouncing over rocks I expected the puncture to be due to a shard of rock but it turned out to be a jewelers’ screwdriver, rammed all the way into the tyre. I didn’t remember running over a jeweler.
Sandie took the opportunity to buy a swimsuit as we were planning on visiting an outdoor hot spring on our way back. I pointed out that people are broadminded in this area and swimsuits are not really necessary, but she felt that she needed to buy one.
On our way back to the mountains we stopped to take pictures of Sandie amongst the cholla cacti. These cholla grow from a stem like standard roses, and then branch out with deadly spines from about waist height upwards. The trouble is that there are bits and pieces lying around on the floor too. The chain fruit cholla drop their seed pods and those are covered in spines. The teddy bear cholla begin life on the ground as a single tennis ball of spines, rather like a deadly version of Star Trek’s tribble. Sandie got a piece of cane fruit stuck to her shoe and tried to pull it off. She found that it was elastic and as it came free it whipped around and stuck to her hand. The spines have hooks so even if they are pulled out the hooks stay in. It took a painful half an hour with tweezers and needles to clean her up, but even then we didn’t get all the pieces.
After all this there wasn’t much time left to visit the park. We opted to just hike to our local Bog Springs, which turned out to be a 
long way from the campground. The trail was just about straight up the mountain, and heavy going. The springs come out now into a concrete box, so they aren’t very scenic, but the surroundings were pleasant, with more of those great old white sycamores.
Despite the drought, the forest service was still allowing campfires and our fire grate was on solid rock so we took the opportunity to incinerate some bratwurst. With the wind roaring down from the mountain at sunset the fire was a blast furnace and it kept us warm long after dark.