October 30, 2023; Mount Lemmon, Boneyard
Sandy and I enjoyed the “Shaka” audio guide when driving the road to Hana in Hawaii. We discovered that they have also have prepared an audio guide to Mount Lemmon, just north east of Tucson. We decided that this would be fun, so we loaded up Bev and Jim in our electric Pole Star rental car and hit the road.
Overall Sandy and I feel that Mount Lemmon is a greatly unheralded treasure of Tucson, and recommend that anyone who visits this town should not pass it up. I was pleasantly surprised on how easy the drive was. I have been on some “white-knuckle” mountain roads, and this was not one of them.
Mount Lemmon is the tallest of the Santa Catalina Mountains, so tall, in fact, that driving up the 25 mile road to near the top of the mountain, (The mountain is 9,157 feet, the road stops at 9,000 feet.) one passes through six different vegetation/life zones. These are the same vegetation/life zones that one would pass through driving south to north from the southern to northern borders of the United States.
At the base of the mountain, the foothills stand at approximately 3,000 feet of elevation which is still in the Sonoran Desert Zone (3,000 to 4,800 feet and 11 niches of annual rain) with lots of Saguaro Cacti.
The next zone is Semi-Desert-Grassland (4,800 to 5,800 feet and 14 inches of rain) characterized by only an occasional Saguaro and lots of grass with some oak and juniper trees.
Semi-Desert Grasslands (Thimble Peak in background)
Third zone we passed through was Oak Woodland and Chaparral, (4,800 to 5,800 feet and 17 inches of rain) with lots of oak trees and sagebrush and absolutely no saguaros!
These are hoodoos
Next came the Pine-Oak Woodland (park 5,800 to 7,000 feet and 20 inches of rain) with about a 50/50 mix of pine trees and oaks.
The fifth life zone we drove through was a Ponderosa Pine forest (7,000 to 8,000 feet and 20 inches of rain).
And finally at the top of the mountain and the end of road, a Conifer Forest with lots of pines, firs, spruce and huge aspen groves (8,000 feet to the top, about 26 inches of annual rainfall).
So, there it is, Mexico to Canada and back on less than a full charge of the Pole Star! Of course, driving through the zones is not a sharp border crossing from one to the other, but it didn’t take too long to note that the plants were changing dramatically as we drove up the mountain.
Along the the way there were a number of of interesting sites: thimble mountain, seven cataracts, a small ski resort, Arizona University Space Observatory, the town of Summerhaven and the evocative remains of a Japanese internment camp.
After returning to Tucson, Jim drove us to Calle Tepa where Bev, Jim and Sandy had very good Mexican meals and I continued with my Sonoran Dog Tour
After dinner we drove by the Davis-Monthan AFB airbase where all the retired military planes are mothballed out on the desert. This is called the Boneyard and on it are found retired aircraft from as far back as the 2nd World war. Because I did not have my I.D. with me (there was 100% ID clearance) we could not get on the base. But even from outside of the fences it did look like a lot of airplanes.
