Week ending Jan 19, 2017 Huachuca City, Casa Grande

On Friday, we went to the Lehner Mammoth Kill Site.  This is another 11,000 year old Clovis site.  A large bone bed containing remnants of extinct mammoths, tapirs, bison and horses along with  the weapons and tools of the Indians.  It was a bit disappointing, as there was only a cairn with a plaque on it in a little parking area.  Apparently there are plans for more information in the future.   Since that didn't take long we drove to San Pedro House, on the river east of Sierra Vista.  It was the site of the main ranch house for the Boquillas Land and Cattle Co.  We did the 3 mi interpretive trail.  There were a couple of natural ponds, created from oxbows in the river. 

 Pond

Saturday we did the 2.5 mi return hike to the Presidio Santa Cruz de Terrenate.  It was the earliest fort in Arizona built by the spanish in 1775  but only occupied for about 5 years, before construction was finished due to the climate, isolation, inadequate supplies and Apache raids.   Before returning to the parking lot, we went down to the railbed below the Presidio to see if we could find the trail across the river to the north end of the Fairbank loop we had done the week before.  It turned out we were further downstream from the crossing than we had thought.  We did see a few relics from the time before the railway was decommissioned.

Chapel wall

Monday, we moved to High Chaparral RV Resort in Arizona City, just south of Casa Grande, a bit removed from the intersection of I-10 and I-8 between Phoenix and Tucson.  The sites were nice and wide, but a little strange. Our site is between the two yellow signs, but the neighbour's lines run to the shared utilities which is in the middle of our site.  

Once we got set up, we went over to find our friends Rupert, Helen and Keri, who had told us they would be here for a while.  We enjoyed catching up on happenings since we met them in Quartzite a couple of years ago. 

On Tuesday, they drove us into Casa Grande, and then Mesa on a shopping expedition and treated us to lunch. 

Wednesday, we picked up some groceries and Joan prepared dinner for us all with the last of the ribs we bought in Benson on New Years Eve.  We had a good evening together.

On Thursday, we all piled into our truck, and drove to Biosphere 2, about 70 miles away north of Tucson.  Biosphere 1 is the Earth.   The Biosphere is quite interesting.  It was constructed in 1986 to research and develop self-sustaining space-colonization technology.  Between 1991 and 1994, 8 people (4 men and 4 women) were sealed into the glass structured Biosphere to measure its use as a sustainable, survivable environment.   From 1996-2003, Columbia University reconfigured it to do a variety of experiments, including the effect of CO2 on plant life.    It has been leased to the University of Arizona since 2007, who are using it as a large scale laboratory to quantify the consequences of global climate change, since the composition and climate of the various sections of the Biosphere can be changed to simulate various scenarios.   

Exterior structure

Interior structure

Intensive Agricultural building

The bulk of our time there was spent on a tour guided by one of the staff, who explained the structure and its purposes, in the Intensive Agricultural test area, the Rainforest, Savannah, Marsh, Desert and Ocean sections.  

Rainforest

One  of the interesting features is the Aquaponics test area.  Aquaponics uses fish in a top tank to provide nutrients, bacteria, and water that circulates down through several levels of plants, before returning to the fish tank.  This takes about 1/10th of the water to grow plants than simple addition of water to plants in soil. 

Aquaponics

Another feature of the structure is the two 'lungs'.  These were built to handle the expansion and contraction of the air in the biosphere, as the temperature changes inside.  They primarily consist of a 4 ton rubber diaphragm supported by a 12 ton aluminum disk. 

Lung portion

After the tour was over, we headed to the B2 Cafe for some warming food, as it was a quite cool day.

On the way back to the trailer, we stopped at the Tom Mix Monument on Hwy 79.   Tom died at this location in a car accident in a construction zone in 1940.  He was the star of 291 western films, all but 9 of them silent between 1909 and 1935.

Tom Mix Monument