Mike in the Wild

One of the many joys of summer in central Arizona is warm weather that makes for comfortable night time stargazing.  It's also a time of year when the Milky Way rotates across the celestial sphere in the early evening hours, making for an especially convenient time to see the cloudy effect that our solar system's nearest stellar neighbors paints across the sky. As always the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio straddle the galaxy in Earth's Northern Hemisphere.  And for at least part of this July, our sun's two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, joined that same area of the sky shortly after sunset.  In addition, the end of the month brought a new moon, keeping Earth's natural satellite from adding a source of distracting light.  The combination of bodies and timing created a tantalizing composition to photograph under most circumstances; if you're able to add a terrestrial landmark like Prescott's iconic Thumb Butte Mountain, it was an irresistibl...

West of Prescott, where the city borders mostly National Forest, a network of trails and forest roads reaches deep into the wooded landscape.   But many people may not realize that one of the trails, part of the Javelina Trail #332 just south of Iron Springs Road, is the engineered pathway of an abandoned railroad line. The line goes back to the late nineteenth century, connecting the new mining town of Prescott to communities laying southwest like Skull Valley, Wickenburg, and eventually even Phoenix.  It also continued north, to Ash Fork, where it connected to Chicago bound trains.  It entered the area from the west over the steep Sierra Prieta Mountain Range between Granite Mountain and Thumb Butte, following part of what is Iron Springs Road before curving onto today's Javelina Trail for its entry into Prescott. This trail actually has an even wider reputation, being a restricted forest road when the forest service needs access for fire management.  Even more...