Thursday 5th March: The Desert Museum

The Desert Museum sets out to create areas of different desert landscapes with authentic plants and animals. It’s a delightful setting in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains, on the edge of the Saguaro National Park. We stopped on the drive there to admire the scenery and were tempted follow this inviting path and visit the Museum on another day.

In the museum the trails lead you through what you could expect to find in various parts of the Sonoran Desert, for example these types of cactus. The column one in the front would be about 8 ft. tall and the one with many arms in the background about 20 ft. It’s difficult to get the scale if there’s no person in the photo, and Jane refused to climb the column cactus and sit on top although I said the spikes were probably quite soft and spongy.

Many of the birds and animals were not in any sort of cages as they were in their natural habitat. At our coffee break in the outdoor café this colourful bird appeared on the wall in front of us looking for crumbs from our muffins. Our bird book told us it was a pyrrhuloxia, aka the muffin bird.

Plenty of lizards, too, roaming around. This one’s a desert spiny lizard, about 15 inches long including tail.

Not all reptiles were appropriate be mixing with the visitors. For instance there are many desert snakes, including 13 different species of rattlesnake. We viewed these from the safety of their glass vivariums. Similarly, the mountain lion, of which a small number still exist in the wild, was in an enclosure. This one ended up here after being found as a cub in a suburb of Los Angeles, its mother presumably having been killed- or maybe some kooky celeb just mislaid it.

Another enclosure was the free flight aviary of the hummingbirds. They were happily building nests, all of 2 inches in diameter, as shown in the photo. The eggs take only 2½ weeks to hatch, and about 3 weeks for the brood to fly the nest. Two chicks maximum. Average lifespan is about 6 years in the aviary, and 4 in the wild.

Not everything was on a grand scale, these small cacti could almost have been knitted (by Jane, of course).

There were extensive mineral exhibits. Mineral discoveries in the latter part of the 19^th century resulted in the establishment of many mines and mining towns and encouraged numbers immigrants into Arizona. In the process of prospecting and from random discoveries in general, numbers of dinosaur bones have been discovered. This is an example of where these bones would have come to light.

I’ve got to sign off with a view of the cowboy film cactus, the saguaro. There are 1.5 million of them in the adjacent National Park and some have obviously sneaked into the Museum grounds.

The catering facilities were also good. We had a splendid day out, which was the general opinion as the Museum displays a 5* Tripadvisor rating and top attraction out of 291 in the area.

Nerdy Tuesday 3rd March: The Boneyard

There is another aircraft enthusiast’s trip not to be missed. It’s a bus tour of the part of the Davis-Monthan US Airforce base where surplus military aircraft for the whole of the USA are stored.  Over 4,000 planes: it is nicknamed the “Boneyard”. The bus tour is organised from the Pima Museum that we visited a few days ago.

There are two main reasons for locating the Boneyard in Tucson. Firstly, the dry desert climate causes the least deterioration and, secondly, the ground is rock-hard, being baked clay covered by a deep layer of gravel, so no artificial surface is needed to take the weight of any aircraft.

The Boneyard lies within the Davis-Monthan base perimeter, and its runways are used to ferry planes in and out, but the Boneyard itself is controlled centrally from Washington DC. It has two purposes: to store US military planes for rapid restoration to operational condition, and to provide a spare parts service to any friendly country in the world.

So what happens? Say a front-line fighter is being superseded by a new generation machine. The old one is still pretty good and would be extremely useful in a sudden crisis, so it needs keeping in readiness. A good example here is the F4 Phantom. So they fly the Phantoms in to Davis-Monthan, wash them if necessary in a kind of large car wash (they invariably do this with navy planes to get rid of all the salt) and then spray the vulnerable surfaces like the cockpit glass with layers of latex. Here’s a Phantom that’s been given the treatment.

Interestingly, this plane was flown by the only US “ace” flier in the Vietnam War, Capt Steve Ritchie. “Ace” means he shot down 5 enemy aircraft, as signified by the 5 stars on the engine intake. It looks like it’s masked up for a respray, but that’s the latex. Helicopters look even odder because they remove the rotor blades for storage elsewhere. 

Engines may also be stored separately in these steel cylinders. Somehow you expect a more high-tech solution than this line of lookalike Long John Silver’s treasure chests.

Rockets too form part of the air menagerie. I think these are Thor rockets (not entirely sure), early generation missiles designed to deliver a nuclear strike. They could probably sell the empty tube on the left in the photo to a dog agility group.

Aircraft magazine pictures always show the Boneyard as long lines of identical aircraft tailing off into infinity. It’s quite difficult to take these sort of shots from a moving bus through glass, but here’s a few just for the record.

You’ll note the Boneyard looks a lot greener than the stark, bare desert of the magazine photos. That’s because it’s wintertime and, with a little rain, grass and other scrub plants green up. In a couple of months it’ll be back to its normal uniform gritty sand colour.

The rows being cannibalised for spare parts are obvious; several of these below have missing tails but there’ll be many other items removed not apparent from this distance. 

The technicians working on the aircraft need weather protection, not so much from the very occasional rain or cold, but from the fierce heat. These mobile hangars provide that protection and can be quickly positioned over any aircraft as required. Great also for weekend raves.

Our guide pointed out some spares ready for dispatch. These looked like complete aircraft bodies minus the wings and tails, but the guide said anything not designated as military reserve is in principle for sale. 

This was a fascinating insight into an unknown aspect of military organisation i.e. what do they do with their old planes. To quote the guide again, he said the Boneyard was a highly profitable enterprise where receipts from parts and aircraft sales are ten times greater than the cost of running it.

For Anoraks Only: Pima Air Museum

Only 4 miles from our campsite here in Tucson is the third-largest aircraft museum in the USA. We visited it on Saturday 28^th Feb. It’s a well-run outfit using ex-military personnel as guides so an informed opinion is always to hand.

We took the trolley tour where our guide was a retired pilot, with the navy then commercial airlines. This covered the 2½ mile external display area; we wanted to save our legs for the hangers.

Here are some of the exhibits with a story to tell, starting with the West’s longest serving bomber, the B52. It entered service in 1955 and is still operational today and for the foreseeable future although none have been manufactured since 1962. A few weeks ago one was de-mothballed out of the storage area adjacent to the museum to replace one that had crashed. 

This is the Budd RB, or what’s left of it, a transport aircraft from 1943.The US Government feared that aluminium, the basic aircraft building material then and now, might become scarce, so ordered 800 of these planes in stainless steel. Stainless steel is much heavier than aluminium. Aluminium never actually became scarce so only 17 were ever built. It looks rather sad and perhaps should have been turned into something useful like whistling kettles.

Our pilot guide said this one, called the NASA Super Guppy, needed skilful handling and calm conditions. It flew outsized cargo for NASA in the 60’s e.g. parts for the Saturn 5 moon rocket. The whole front end swung open in order to load up these extra-large items.

Now we have a Sikorsky flying crane. Sikorsky is an American manufacturing company even though it sounds Eastern European. The founder, Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev and emigrated. The helicopter was much used in the Vietnam War. It looks like a delicate dragonfly, but could carry around 10 tonnes.

United States Presidents’ official planes go by the title “Air Force One”. This Lockheed Jetstar was sometimes used by President Lyndon B Johnson as the presidential plane. He would refer to it, because of its small size, as “Air Force One-Half”. The plane directly behind, by the way, was JFK’s “Air Force One”. 

The Boeing B29 Superfortress was the most sophisticated and largest bomber of WW2 and carried on in service until 1960. It was the aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several were used after the war as flying TV transmitters, and a modified version was the first aircraft to fly round the world non-stop. Of the 3,970 built only one flies today.

Moving indoors to the fastest jet aircraft ever produced (as opposed to rocket-driven), the SR-71 Blackbird. This was operational from 1966 to 98 and was highly secret for its early life because it was the front line spy plane. You may recall Russia shooting down a US U2 spy plane; this was the follow-on to the U2, a plane that couldn’t be shot down because it could fly faster than any enemy missile or bullet.

It could cruise at over three times the speed of sound (2,200+ mph) and generated so much heat that it expanded 8 inches in length when travelling at top speed. It still holds the record for New York to London, in I hour 55 minutes, one hour quicker than Concord. Across America: Los Angeles to Washington DC in 64 minutes. It’s an odd looking machine; the front end could be a home-made speedboat. Come in S71, your time is up.

But for real speed the rocket planes went even faster. The Bell-X15 reached a record speed of 4,519 mph in October 1967. This still stands. Astronaut Neil Armstrong was one of its pilots in the test programme.

 The world’s smallest aircraft is this Starr Bumble Bee, built by Robert Starr as a private project and first flown in 1988. It had an amazing top speed of 190 mph but only carried 3 gallons of fuel. The wingspan is only 5 ft 6 inches. It wasn’t really meant to fulfil a practical purpose, just to claim the world record of being the smallest. Only one was made.

Finally, one hanger was a memorial to the 390^th Bombing Group in WW2. They were stationed near Framlingham, Suffolk. It was full of personal memorabilia like letters from POW camps. Whereas the museum elsewhere focussed on the machines, this was more a people exercise. An unusual exhibit was the embroidery below done by a POW with time on his hands, using unravelled shoelaces as thread and stitches remembered from his mother’s handicrafts.

The museum had a lot more besides and more than could be absorbed in a single visit but I wouldn’t give in to Jane’s pleas to come a second time. 

25/26 Feb San Diego to Tucson, Arizona

Leaving the San Diego metropolis on our journey east to Tucson, we passed through green valleys as the road slowly climbed the relatively low mountain barrier between California and Arizona. The pass topped out at 4,200 feet before steeply descending straight into desert at sea level.

The map showed the road now running ever closer to the Mexican border and soon we saw the black ribbon fence that stretches all the way from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s to keep illegal immigrants and drugs out, and is reinforced by vigorous border patrols by Homeland Security agents, two of whom we chatted to the following day at our lunch stop in a rest area. They recommended a good Mexican restaurant in Tucson!

Just before crossing into Arizona the desert becomes total sand. It’s the 200 square mile Imperial Sand Desert, a state controlled recreation area. Good for sand castle enthusiasts.

Yuma is the first town in Arizona famous only for a one-time notorious prison. We only stopped briefly to shop at Walmart and overnighted at an isolated site in the scrub desert. The sunset was lovely and the stars extra bright from the clear air and absence of artificial lighting.

Next day we ran into the saguaro cactus country. These are the cactus of cowboy films. The photo was taken in the rest area where we met the border agents previously referred to. They were armed, as you would expect, but couldn’t be persuaded to have a pretend shoot-out for our photo album.

Now we’re nearing Tucson with its backdrop of stark but dramatic mountains. The motorway we’re on is a typical American freeway with no crash barrier, but generally the central reservations are much wider than in Europe and there’s often a substantial hollow as well. 

So now we’re there and pitched up. It’s about 25 degrees and very pleasant; that would describe both the weather and the tea, and Jane who is also looking very pleasant.

What you can’t quite see, hanging in the green tree in the photo, is Jane’s hummingbird feeder. We bought a cheap one in Walmart, barely expecting it to work, but it hadn’t been out above a few minutes when we had our first visitor. Jane’s not divulging her secret formula that she fills it with.

San Diego Downtown & Campsite

San Diego is a lively town with an interesting mix of buildings. The Santa Fe Railroad Depot dates from 1915, when Balboa Park (previous blog entry) was created, and shows similar classical Spanish lines. It’s a bit overwhelmed by the skyscrapers at the back, but they look quite classy in their own right.

In fact, the modern buildings generally seem to fit in as part of a pleasant architectural environment. Here’s another view where the tall buildings’ paint scheme at the top gives the impression of shadows, or maybe the paint pots dripped over one night, but it looks good.

The Gaslamp District is the older quarter, comprising mainly art deco style buildings, with lots of cafes and restaurants. The original gas lamps are still there, lit by electricity. This is the typical look of the area.

One sad feature of the whole San Diego downtown area is the number of people living rough. The mild climate and comparatively affluent tourists no doubt create a hotspot here but it’s a shame to see so many fellow human beings living in such an evident downward spiral.

Now the campsite: “Campland on the Bay”. It sounded idyllic, and it’s also convenient for the centre of San Diego, so should justify the highest price per night we’d ever paid for a site. The photo supports that view, taken from the marina towards the private beach with the campsite behind.

However, the site itself proved to be little more than a concrete car park, with units crammed tightly together as you can see. The facilities were clean but tired and in need of upgrading. The camp shop was excessively overpriced and the wifi kept dropping the line; and many more complaints. But enough: when you feel you’re getting poor value for money a list of grievances starts to write itself in your head. It really wasn’t that bad, it just didn’t justify what they charged. 

We’re the vehicle on the left in the photo. Even though there’s a distant view of the beach, you can’t erase that concrete car park impression.