<snort><grunt> “Hey I sound like the javelina!” “Yeah, you look like him, too!”
In which the mooses leave the moose cave early but manage to find neither wildlife nor the trails they planned to hike, spend many hours exploring and laughing while at the Desert Museum, and take the wimpy way into and out of Sabino Canyon.
I had been eager to spend at least a few very early mornings out in the desert, but most days it didn’t turn out that way. We were just so comfortable in bed, not to mention usually somewhat sleepy from our thrilling adventures of the previous day. But last night we vowed to drag ourselves out of bed by 4:00am, come hell or high water, and attempt to meet some of the wildlife at Tucson Mountain Park.
The trails matched nothing on our map, even though the map looked new and trustworthy. The trail we had thought we were following turned where it wasn’t supposed to and dumped us onto a road rather than making the loop with other trails, which we never found. We ended up following a wide, deep wash back out to the car, somewhat disappointed. We saw no javelinas, no coyotes, not even very many birds. At some points the ground was alive with harvester ants carrying ocotillo flowers several times their body size back to their nests in a fascinating display of strength and organization. Otherwise, though, the desert was, well, deserted.
After a simple and uninspiring breakfast at the South Forty, a real local hangout and greasy spoon in every sense of the term, we spent hours—many more than we had planned—at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.