Saguaros!

Tucson gets about 350 days of sunshine a year. The rest of them seem to be happening right now....
Karl, Emil and Mrs. OZ do not like to leave "the ranch" so today Brody and Dicky Duck showed me the desert. We drove over Gates Pass to Saguaro National Park West.
At the height of Gates Pass you have a great view of the Baboquivari Mountains with Kitt Peak at their northern end. You also see Old Tucson Studios where many movies and the TV series High Chaparral were shot and which now is a tourist attraction.

We crossed over Gates Pass and drove into the "Saguaro Forest" - I insisted on stopping and taking a picture of me in one so you can see how huge they are! The saguaro is the largest cactus in the United States, commonly reaching 40 feet and it's range is almost completely restricted to southern Arizona and western Sonora.

The we entered Saguaro National Park West. Any hope of the cloud cover breaking up had been abandoned by now. Dicky assured me we would go out again when the sun shines because it seems everything looks WAY better with sunshine....

The park has a very nice visitor center and I took my notebook because they told me it is also very educational! There are signs outside that tell you about the desert and when you look closely you can see how Dicky checks out the picture of the javelina.

Inside was a gift shop where I bought a little book about the desert for Gretchen and they also had this fabulous "hands-on" table with neat things on it:

You all know about javelina already of course. And mule deer and the desert tortoise are some other inhabitants of the desert. And here is the story about the saguaro boot:
"The Gila Woodpecker uses the Saguaro, and burrows through its tough outer flesh into the body of the plant where there is plenty of moisture, and a relatively cool environment shaded from the searing desert sun. Once through the skin, the bird makes a sharp downward turn and hollows out a space for itself. A cactus, being little more than a living water container would continuously lose moisture, and be open to infection if it didn't do something to protect itself, so the Saguaro begins to exude a resinous sap around the void which the bird has made. The sap gradually solidifies to form a hard, bark-like substance around the wound, rather like a scab on animal skin, only this scab doesn't go away. The woodpecker has learned to leave the newly excavated burrow for a while in order to let the sap harden, although other birds sometimes decide to make it their own before the woodpecker returns, particularly desert owls."

After all that education we felt the need to drive home to get some rest...

We all hopped into a cat bed to have a little nap before Karl, Emil and Mrs. OZ come in....

And that was my second day at The Cat Realm. I hope it will be sunny tomorrow...

Today is the last day to enter the contest!!!!