Every morning and late afternoon the hiking club explores the dendritic topography on the east side of the Santa Ritas. It's an ironic term for a terrain that's sparing of trees. But that's the usual word for the interdigitated fingers of convex ridges and complementary gullies that look like a fern leaf when seen from space.
The convex ridges are grass-covered and tree-free. The gullies are rather thick with "scrub" oak. What an ugly word! It sounds so much prettier in Spanish: chapparal comes from the Spanish (actually the Basque) word for this sturdy little tree.
If the road builders had followed the spine of this topography you could mountain bike up a smooth, steady ramp toward the Santa Ritas.
At about 4500 feet, the mornings are still in the thirties. No wonder there is no spring color. Later, on the way back to the van, I saw ten hawks kettling over an east-facing ridge. They are the heralds of mid-morn.
It is the witching hour at which too cold becomes too hot all too soon. The stocking hat is off and a wide sombrero is on. Waxy sunscreen, like the klister wax of skiis, is on. Comfort is more ephemeral than desert wildflowers.
I believe that to intensify an aesthetic experience we must take something away, because we can not focus on too many things at once. Maybe that is the appeal of yellow-brown grasslands when the rest of southern Arizona is blazing with green plants and yellow flowers. These grasslands have an understated beauty of texture and topography--not color.
This morning we rode up Temporal Canyon. And sure enough--I found the windmill promised in the last post. It was made by "Fiasa" in Argentina, the land of Las Pampas.
