Wind Cave Trail

Our Mogollon Rim trip last Memorial Day weekend was cancelled because of the unusual amount of rain we had over the weekend. So instead, we hiked pretty close to home (almost an hour's drive away).

Here are pics from Wind Cave Trail at Usery State Park.



The hike was almost 3 miles round trip, I think. It sure seemed a lot further than that, but we hung in there. It was a pretty easy grade trail with moderate switchbacks. There were a few spots where Joe had to jump up or down a rock to get to the next part of the trail, but all in all, pretty manageable.

The "cave" at the top is really more of a big notch with lots of tiny crevasses and thousands of bees who have made a hive out of it all. I might not have hiked to the top had I known this, but at least the bees weren't aggressive, and they didn't seem to mind us sitting down for five minutes to catch our breath. :)

Fun hike!

Identified Flying Object!

Good old Arizona and its mysterious objects floating in the sky! Took Joe for a walk on Monday evening around 7pm. The sun was setting, and it was still about 100 degrees but much more tolerable than it was at 5:30pm when I got home. I saw something in the sky that looked like a planet -- only much, much larger. It didn't twinkle like a star, it was a constant glow like a planet.

I hurried our walk a bit and we rushed home so I could grab some binoculars. Chuck and I went outside and focused in on the object, which was not moving at all, and was still glowing. We looked closer and saw something like a clear bubble that wasn't perfectly round, but was reflecting the sun around its edges. WHAT on Earth *is* that thing? The picture below is much closer than what the general public saw. What we saw looked like a clear plastic bubble, almost like transportation for "Glinda the Good Witch of Oz". :)



We went back inside the house and started our Google-Fu and found that we weren't the only ones seeing the strange object in the sky... here are a few links:

Mysterious Object in Sky Identified
UFO Chronicles - Mysterious Object No Mystery

It was a weather balloon belonging to NASA! It was the first time either of us had seen a high atmosphere weather balloon, which was estimated to be around 400 feet in diameter and can go as high as 120,000 feet into the atmosphere. Exciting!

Here's where you can track where the balloons land even! This one landed somewhere in Kingman, Arizona.

Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility

Yet another fine Arizona adventure!

Crossword Crazy

Been on a bit of a crossword kick lately. Discovered how difficult the New York Times crosswords can be (towards the end of the week) and decided that it'd be a worthy brain challenge. So far I've been doing the Monday thru Wednesday puzzles -- I've been too chicken to attempt late-week puzzles. I look at the speeds of the crossword tournament players and they have these ridiculously fast times like three minutes for a Monday. My best Monday so far clocks in at thirteen minutes. YIKES!

Anyway, it's been a nice relaxing (occasionally frustrating) thing to do after dinner or before bed, so I'm having fun with it. I've been doing crosswords since I was probably seven or eight from Dell Puzzles or Games Magazine. Clues in the New York Times puzzles are just savory in their difficulty. I go back to my old Dell crossword magazines that I hadn't filled in and just slam through those puzzles now. :)

Lately I've gotten into finishing the NYT crossword for the day and then reading either Rex or Amy's blogs to see what they thought of it. It's fun to commiserate on clues that I thought were ridiculous or unfair.

Here are links to their great Crossword blogs:

Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle
Diary of a Crossword Fiend