Arizona

Lots of beach with no sea., that's pretty much what I was expecting, and I've been very pleasantly surprised. Yes Arizona is dry, yes it has deserts, but what I didn't know until I got here is that it also has mountains, lots of them and they're decent sized ones too. Mount Lemmon, just north of Tucson, is over nine thousand feet high. They have ski runs up there in winter. That makes it the most southerly ski destination in the United States. When you consider that Tucson is only about a hundred and twenty miles from the Mexican border, that's quite surprising. Unlike our snowy mountains, these are rocky, peaks with little vegetation on them, very steep with extremely erroded pinacles and interesting shaped rock formations. This is a place that's worth seeing.

Unfortunately, despite getting a unit on the banks of the Rillito River, there is not going to be much kayaking here, unless I want to try something equivalent to the Henley on Todd regatta. The river at least is living up to my preconceptions.

The temperature is living up to my expectations too. It's been a little warm here, with local temperatures sitting around the mid forties.  Local radio stations are talking about it being record breaking weather but since Tucson is a town that usually gets around three hundred and fifty days of sunshine each year, the locals aren't ones to make a fuss when it gets a bit warm. In fact I consider myself very lucky to have experienced one of the other fifteen cloudy days where electrical storms and heavy rain arrived to mix the weather mix up a bit. Didn't seem to cool it down much though.

Yesterday was spent at the Morenci Copper Mine, operated by Freeport McMoran. Having visited the "SuperPit" in Kalgoorlie, I can honestly say that Morenci is far more spectacular. For a start it's surrounded by mountains and secondly they've mined up a river valley so they have created a gigantic hole, with a bit less digging required. On the way back, the electrical storms were spectacular and unfortunately I could see that Arizonans aren't very used to wet roads. We passed three crashes in an hour, one of which was multivehicle with people trapped.