Friday, April 3, 2009

Fountain Hills

At this very moment I'm sitting in front of a quilt shop in Fountain
Hills, AZ, which is about 30 miles E/NE of Phoenix. We are camped
just north of here at McDowell Mountain Regional Park, a very nice
high-desert park run by Maricopa County.


Here's a picture of Clara by our very own Saguaro, right at the top end of our camp-site. It was interesting to me, as we drove from Tucson up to Phoenix the other day to observe the gradual disappearance of saguaros, going down from at least 1,000 per square mile near Tucson to about 1 per square mile as we neared Phoenix.
They tell me, at the Desert Botanical Garden, that it's a matter of rainfall -- 14 inches per year in Tucson but only half that in
Phoenix -- but that rainfall is directly affected by the drop in elevation -- 2200 ft above sea level in Tucson to slightly less than half that in Phoenix. That seems reasonable in that we go up again as we go out of Phoenix to Fountain Hills and the Saguaros become more numerous.

The second picture shows why it's called Fountain Hills -- the fountain comes up every hour on the hour for fifteen minutes. The big question is why -- a) to entertain the snow birds, b) to aerate the water in the lake, c) secretly it's the Fountain Hills Sewage Treatment Plant -- you may only pick one answer . . .

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