Historic Tucson - The Presidio Site

Tucson began as a walled fort. The wall was square of adobe that featured a lookout tower and military barracks for the soldiers stationed there. The wall was meant to keep out Apache raiders, and to protect the earliest settlers to the area. Most of the wall has been lost to time, but an archaeological excavation in the 1950s revealed one corner of the wall mere inches below the asphalt of a parking lot. About four years ago, the City began plans to build a replica of the corner segment of wall and turn it into a living history museum. Before work began, they brought in Desert Archaeology to find out as much as they could about both the prehistory and history of the site. On December 15, 2005, a groundbreaking ceremony was held at the site to kick off the reconstruction of the Presidio. Staff from Desert Archaeology were on-hand to answer questions and walk people through the archaeological findings. This picture shows how the archaeologists had to work around existing utility poles and such, and also how close the historic and prehistoric remains were to the modern-day surface.

Historic Tucson - Cheyney House

I've been working in historic preservation for almost 8 years now, so I've amassed quite a library of pictures of historic places in and around Tucson. I finally got around to uploading a few to my flickr account, so I'll share some here. This first one is of the Cheyney House after the restoration was completed. This is a house that caught on fire sometime in the mid-1980s and was utterly gutted. It stood vacant for years, charred and crumbling. The neighborhood felt it was an eyesore, and the City was getting ready to demolish it when a couple from Wisconsin found the house, saw the potential in its blackened bones, and decided to do everything in their power to restore it. The restoration cost over a million dollars and was a combination of private and public funding - mostly AZ Heritage Fund money which comes from lottery revenues. The newly restored house is a treasure. It's historically accurate, and now home to people who are passionate about keeping it a viable residence for years to come.

Labor Day from Mount Lemmon

We wanted to get out of town and into nature on Labor Day, so the bf proposed a picnic and we headed up the mountain. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, and the mountain was alive with chasing light and shadow. Heavy monsoon clouds started rolling in around the time we hit Geology Vista, and by the time we got to Ski Valley, the skies opened up and it started pouring rain. We ended up eating our picnic in the car while the windows fogged and rain hammered on the roof. It was surprisingly fun. Once the rain let up a bit, we went to the north parking lot and took a look out over the valley to the back of the mountain. Thanks to the clouds, the valley was dappled with shadows, and it all popped out against the backdrop of our gloomy mountain top. I can't wait to get back up there!

Discovery Place

We had a day to kill in Charlotte, NC and since I'm not into NASCAR, the entertainment options were a bit limited. I was poking around on google and found a science center in uptown Charlotte called Discovery Place. As luck would have it, a touring exhibit of Pompeii artifacts was on display. I'm an archaeologist by training, so I couldn't pass up a chance to see a Pompeii show that wasn't likely to tour to my part of the country.
Unfortunately, it was a rather "meh" display, but Discovery Place had a LOT more to offer. One of the coolest exhibits was the dinosaurs. I particularly like this picture because of the skulls on the wall behind the stegosaurus skeleton. My NaNoWriMo novel last year was about dragons, and several of the skulls reminded me of characters in my novel. I might even go back to write in a few more details after seeing these bones.

Tucson's 4th of July

We had a very delayed fireworks show this year due to a thunderstorm that pounded the downtown area around 7pm. The A Mountain show was pushed back to 10pm, but that just gave us extra time to find the perfect vantage point. We ended up along Granada Avenue, right near El Minuto. Even though my camera's starting to show its age (and does not do well with low-light photography), I brought my gorillapod and figured it was worth a shot. I mounted the pod in a mesquite tree, forgetting that mesquites tend to be frequented by large, biting ants. Ugh. Got some good pictures and some embarassingly bad ones, and ended up with a final count between 12 and 16 ant bites. Whoops!

Fun with architecture

I spent the past weekend in Raleigh and Charlotte, NC. I was there to visit a friend and take in yet another Rush concert (woo!). We spent Monday at Charlotte's Discovery Place science center, and then wandered around uptown so I could search out interesting buildings. One of my favorites was the Hearst Tower. I'm not at all familiar with Charlotte, so I don't know anything about the building, but it instantly reminded me of the Chrysler Building in New York City (my favorite building in the world), so I wasted a lot of battery power snapping pictures of it. Here's a great shot of the ornate entryway.

Central Park, NY

I just got a new laptop, so I've been going through all my old photos and trying to get things organized. I found a small set that missed being uploaded to flickr with the rest of my 2006 trip pictures, and this is one of the missing. It was taken in the rotunda room at the Natural History Museum, looking out over Central Park around 5pm. The weather was pretty warm, but the trees were still mostly bare from winter.