My Winter Vacation –The Arizona- Sonoran Desert Museum

Cutest Prarie Dog Saying Hello!
Remember when you had to write an essay about “My Summer Vacation”?  That is what came to mind when I decided to share my recent visit to Tucson’s ‘Sonoran Desert Museum’ www.desertmuseum.org .  Peter and I spent about 4 hours enjoying the landscape and animals and could have spent more time.  This is one place I visited often when I lived in Tucson; one place I miss and one place you should know about!
Hundreds of saguaro cacti line the mountains on the way to the museum.  Half the fun is driving on the winding mountain roads outside of Tucson, getting to the crest and looking over the desert floor.  It makes me feel small and full of wonder.
This place is a world renowned zoo, a natural history museum and a botanical garden.  Walking along the many paths, you see interpretive displays.  The plants and animals represent a large area of the southwest- Arizona, California and many states of Mexico.  There are more than 300 animal species and 1200 kinds of plants in 21 acres of incredible desert. 
The live animal exhibits of Big Horn sheep, Mexican Wolves, Bobcats and the Grey Fox, the Walk-in Aviary and the Hummingbird Aviary are just a few of my favorites. 
Check out the color!
The enclosures look real and blend into the landscape while they keep the animals ‘caged’ and safe.  I watched some of them being built with wire and concrete and paint. 
The Bighorn Sheep need lots of space to climb on large rocks and their home provides just that.

These are at the top of the enclosure basking in the sun.

This guy is BIG! Look closely at the bigger picture and you will see him at the bottom of the hills.

 Obviously I could go on and on and I have hundreds of pictures from this place.   I just had to share a few with you. If you want to see more, check out my flicker page http://www.flickr.com/photos/brittdesign
  Please don't miss this on your ‘places to visit’ list.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Truscale29January 19, 2012 at 3:36 PM

    I love the Desedt Museum! Thanks for the memory update. Love it!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning As We Go!

Image
Viking knit is the oldest method of chain making and I've become fascinated by it.  Once I conquered the single knit, I decided to add beads.  I could have googled or asked how it was done but it seemed like something I could just figure out.  And I've learned a lot as I proceeded first with tumbled turquoise beads and then with pearls.  I thought I'd share a few of the things I've learned.   Iif you want a great tutorial on viking knit technique, Trina Ann at http://blog.trinaann.com/  has written a clear concise easy to understand tutorial.  I highly recommend it.    Tumbled tuquoise beads in viking knit  I used tumbled turquoise beads in the first viking knit chain and I did not really know what I was doing.  But I went right ahead and as it turned out, I liked the end result.  Since the beads were irregular in shape there was a random quality to the finished product. During that process, I began to really understand the technique of viking knit.  Loo
Read more

Spring Do-Over Challenge

Image
Re-do of Original Pieces Plus My Art Beads  I’m hooked!  The Do-Over Challenge that Jeannie Dukic ‘JKD Studio’ www.jkdjewelry.com offers has become something I look forward to.  Jeannie sends pieces of her ‘old’ jewelry to those of us who sign up and we get to create something new from them.  It does not matter if we like the piece she sends because we take it apart, add beads from our stash and create a completely new piece.  It’s a great way to recycle. Original Necklace and earrings When I received my piece to re-create, it lay on my bead try for a while as I sorted through the possibilities.  There were 3 art beads that might work but only one yelled, “Me!  Take me!”  Fortunately I had more of the polymer cane that was used for that bead because I wanted smaller one to go with the big chosen art bead.  The green chips were to be filler beads highlighting my art beads.  Large 'Take Me!' bead! I made two pair of earrings.  One pair could be part of
Read more

The Draw of the Mojave Desert or Why I Started Designing Jewelry

Image
When you look at my etsy stores you see Mojave Stone jewelry .  In the 1970's, my father and two brothers mined a stone in the Mojave Desert in the middle of nowhere California!  Actually, the mine was somewhat but not very close to Desert Center.  It had been a gold/silver mine before they staked their claim and began mining stone.  My family lived in Missouri and the stone had to be trucked from the desert after strip mining it.  I was married and away from home so I got to hear the stories of making a road, fighting off bees, surviving the heat, being careful of the critters and all the other 'Wild West' excitement.  And I did not have to rough it! Dad was going to retire (some day) and make and sell the polished cabochons (a stone cut and polished usually with a flat back and a convex top) for jewelry.  In the meantime, he had some distributors sell it, some metal smiths create pieces, and he trademarked it as 'Mojave Royal Blue' and 'Mojave Stone'.  He
Read more