-Tites and -mites

This weekend we learned all about rocks - above and underground. Saturday morning we headed south to Bisbee, a small town six miles from the Mexico border. It wasn't what we expected - it looked more like a Swiss village than a southern Arizona city. The town was overflowing with artists, ex-hippies, old prospector types, and a lots of tourists like us. At the center of town is the Copper Queen hotel, the longest continually operating hotel in Arizona. Just going in felt like we were stepping back into the wild west.

After Bisbee we stopped at the Copper Queen Mine to see the gaping hole in the ground left by the strip mining operations there. The photo below doesn't do it justice - it was enormous. We were inspired by the mining operations so we decided to do a little rockhounding of our own. Per our usual rockhounding adventure, we turned off the paved road and parked our car a few miles down a dirt road. Then we hiked a mile or so across the desert to search for desert roses - a beautiful sandstone formation that looks like a mini-rose. Although we dug around in the side of a hill for awhile, we didn't find any desert roses. We did find some beautiful tiger-striped rocks and the somewhat unhappy owner of the property. Apparently he had posted some no trespassing signs we failed to notice along the way.


Dusty and loaded down with rocks, we headed back to our hotel in Tucson. On the way, we drove through Tombstone and got a roadside view of several classic wild west sites. Although we're normally suckers for the tourist trap, this one was too much even for us.

Sunday morning we went to Kartchner Caverns, a large limestone formation under the Whetstone mountains. We had never been to a limestone cave before and it was interesting how different it was. Even though it was cool outside, underground it was in the 70's with 98% humidity. It was so warm and moist it was almost hard to breathe. One man decided not to go in and a woman with a toddler had to leave a few minutes into the cave. Those who stayed were rewarded with some phenomenal views of cave formations unlike any we'd seen before. At the end of the tour, we were treated to the "throne room" - an enormous open space with stalactites, stalagmites, shields, soda straws, and other formations of all sizes and shapes.

After Kartchner, we headed north to Colossal Cave where we decided not to actually see the cave but instead to sluice for gemstones in their panning river. Here's a photo of our haul. We're thinking of retiring.