Walking and Buried Reports

Greetings from sunny Arizona.  We're continuing on our path to wellness.  Jim still sounds somewhat froggy, but is no longer coughing like he's going to hurl a lung.  We've been out on foot some.  Two days ago we went out for an hour in the neighborhood.  There is an enormous development up the hill from us.

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

I love this house, it's just cuter than a bug.

This house is for sale for about $1M.  It's fairly large.  There's a pool in the back and there is a view from the pool.  I know this from Zillow.

Yesterday I googled on "easy hikes near me."  The internet directed me to the Pima Canyon Trail.  Reviews sounded good, it's a canyon, how bad could it be?  It was the  dreaded Iris Dewhirst trail!  We used to do this trail when we spent winters here.  For some reason my brain did not connect Pima Canyon with Iris Dewhirst.  I reviewed the trail in 2013 here.  We were there, so we went.  Forty minutes out was enough.  It's sort of a tedious trail.  We both got sunburned and tired.  Perhaps not the smartest thing to be doing while recuperating from Covid. 

It's a beautiful area.

New construction.  It looks to be about 4,000 square feet.

This is a gorgeous house.  Not the roof line, the pool with a view, and the fake grass around the pool.

That's the trail, moving up the center of the photo.

The trail continues on for many miles.  At about three miles in there is an old dam, which is currently wet.  We did not go that far.  The arrow is pointing at the canyon meandering between the two walls.

Today we are resting.  It's kind of disappointing, we're supposed to get three days of rain next week.  No one ever explains forecasts any more, so I'm not sure if it's coming out of California, or what.  

From the Department of Perfidy and Malfeasance we have learned that Arizona ex-Governor Ducey buried a report on the amount of water available in the Hassayampa sub-basin which sits underneath much of the Buckeye city planning area, about 50 miles west of Phoenix.  Developers had plans to build up to 100,000 homes in a master planned community there.  There's not enough water to support this.  The sub-basin is 4.4 million-acre feet short of water for future development. The lack of water was a known fact, but the state was going allow it to go forward anyway.  Governor Hobbs will be thinking about how to proceed with future housing now that she is in office.  CLICK HERE for the article.

I often wonder about why people don't address problems head on.  Why do people continue to move to Arizona in droves when they know there is a historic drought.  Why don't the water managers come together and figure out what to do about this?  Currently there is a law on the books that says the guy with the deepest well wins.  There's no real attempt at apportioning water, it's still kind of every person for themselves.  Why did the Saudis get permission to drill deep wells, grow alfalfa and ship it to Saudi Arabia?  They barely pay for the water.  I also wonder why a chip plant is being planned for Mesa, AZ - from the internet we learn "...chip fabs need a lot of water to operate. By some estimates, a large chip fab can use up to 10 million gallons of water a day, which is equivalent to the water consumption of roughly 300,000 households."  It strikes me that this might not be the best thing to be building in the desert.  However, nobody asked my opinion.

Another article discusses the fact that unless there are drastic cuts to water usage, the two hydroelectric dams that provide power to the south west will dead pool, a catchy term for when the water levels are too low to turn the turbines.  Without power, there are no cities.  There have been some particularly gloomy estimates that this could happen 1Q23.  It just boggles the mind, it's no wonder people are in denial over this.

There's a good thread on twitter about the whole thing, which you can find here.

So, resting and lack of water, that's all I've got.