Sunrise, Hike and Two Articles

Greetings from the desert!  We were up early today and saw the sun rise.  This is very unusual for us, so it was nice to see a good one.



I swiped this off of instagram and twitter.  If I could find the tweet I would give photo credit, but it has moved on down the twitter stream.  This is the most recent SpaceX launch.  It’s a long exposure showing the take off and eventual landing of the first stage of the rocket.  There has been some speculation on the internet that the top secret pay load was lost, but since it’s top secret, no one is commenting.  I thought it was a really cool photo.



Saturday we did a new to us hike up Brown Mountain.  It starts at the Brown Mountain picnic area across from the Gilbert Ray Campground.  It starts off as a ramble through the saguaros and then gets pretty steep.  We’re heading for the top of Brown Mountain, which is center photo.



People actually mountain bike here.  I understand this not.



They also mountain bike here, some of those steps are two feet tall.  It looks bad to me in either direction.



Eventually we were at the top and we walked along a ridge line for awhile.  We could see the trail up ahead making yet another ascent up another hill and we bailed.  The route back was visible in the valley below us, so we walked to a low point between hills and turned right towards the path home.



The return trail is not interesting.  It’s a mainly flat meander at the base of the hills, with nothing much to look at.  If you want to do the flat part first turn right at this sign.  That will put you on the loop counter clockwise.  I think the way we went was better, given the amount of loose rock, I’d rather be going up it than down it.  I would rate this loop a solid “meh”.  I don’t know that we would do it again.



The girl hummingbird has been by to see us some.  The males seem to have moved on.




Politics warning!  Click away if you can’t stand anymore links to articles.

I have really really tried to keep the politics off the blog, but I find I can not.  These are two of the most terrible things I have read lately, and I don’t want to lose the links.  The first was published just before New Years, when no one was really paying attention.  One of the worst things the administration did in that week was reinstating copper mining next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota.  Ok, well maybe suspending inspections of deep water drilling rigs was bad, or maybe cancelling regulations about what to do with waste water from fracking was the worst.

If you need some serious outrage about the whole of 2017, Politico listed 138 policy changes made by the administration.  It’s a very long read.  None of them are good.

Other than this, I have nothing really interesting to report.