Organ Pipe to Columbus

Oct. 30 - Nov. 2, 2006

A stop was made at Kitt Peak on the way to Tucson. It is a national astronomical observatory with several large telescopes and radio telescopes. Ed and I took a tour while Pat and Nancy stayed in the vans.
 

Thanks to friends of Ed and Pat, we had passes to the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson. This is a very nice museum (actually as much a zoo as a museum) featuring the flora and fauna of the Sonoran desert. The photo is of an ocelot, which is a nocturnal wildcat of the southwest.
 

We spent the evening and part of the next day in Tucson doing laundry, shopping, refilling prescriptions, etc. We heard from Gordon and Diane that their RV had finally been fixed and that they would meet us at our next stop - Kartchner Caverns State Park. It turned out that a rodent had chewed through a wire that connected the transmission to the engine computer, disabling their motor home. That rodent had caused a $1200 towing bill and a $800 repair bill!

Kartchner Caverns, our next stop, is a very interesting cave. It was discovered in 1974, sold to the State for a state park in 1988, and opened to the public in 1999. The cave is considered to be a "living cave"; the stalactites, stalagmites, and other rock formations are still growing because of the high humidity in the cave - 99%. The park staff have tried to avoid the mistakes made by Carlsbad and other parks with caverns. To enter the cave you pass through a series of airlocks that prevent dry desert air from entering the cave. They also wash down the trail and handrails in the cave daily to remove the oils, lint, organic material, etc., left behind by people walking through the cave. If they didn't, they would soon have mold everywhere because of the high humidity. Photography in the cave is not allowed, so I have no photos of it to show.

While camped at Kartchner we did some sightseeing in the area. Tombstone, AZ, the site of the OK Corral shoot out, was our first stop. It was kind of interesting, but over commercialized.
 

The Tombstone "boot hill" with some of the graves of those killed in the OK corral shoot out.
 

Nice epitaph! 

The next stop was Bisbee, where we toured a copper mine; they decked us out in the latest fashion for copper mining.
 

Riding the mine train into the mine. The tour guide had considerable mining experience and was really interesting. 
 

Walking around Bisbee, we came upon this dog with a cat on top, and atop the cat was a mouse. The person who owned the animals claimed there was a trained flea atop the mouse, but that was beyond our powers of observation.

On the way from Kartchner to Columbus, NM for the start of the RV caravan to Mexico, we came upon billboard signs advertising "The Thing". This piqued our curiosity so we stopped and paid a buck to see "The Thing".
 

Wow! There it is!
 

"The Thing ' turned out to be mummy of what looked to me like a Chinese woman, with a mummified baby. I have no idea if it is real or not, but we only paid a buck to see it, and now our curiosity has been satisfied.