School of rocks

There is a mountain of rocks a block away from my house, and it took me till last week to climb up there. How embarassing! I went back this evening for sunset with a friend and we explored the huge boulders and secret caves until the sun was gone. 

While we were up there I heard two gunshots. I thought nothing of it-- this is Arizona! But turns out there was a domestic shooting two blocks from my house. The school was on lockdown for a bit and we were just sitting in my house freaking out... but all is well! 

This is my house ^ straight up.                                                 This is where the shooting was  ^

Aaaaand this ^ is one of the views from School of Rocks!          

Just tootin' my horn

Today Nicole brought me to a thrift store where I bought THESE:

that happen to go along with this gem of a hat:

I'm probably going to wear these overalls all week, in case you were wondering.

Nerdin'

Nerdin' is one of my favorite pastimes. The classes that I've been taking this semester seem especially conducive to nerdin', because they involve extensive plant I.D., tree aging, GPS, and maps. It's been a tough call to determine which of my classes is nerdier. 

But then my Maps and Wilderness Navigation class took a trip to Flagstaff (I had pics but sadly my camera is M.I.A.) and we went to the USGS Space Center, and then had a library archive tour.  Our nerdy little hearts were so happy to learn from George the Geologist while he told us about the lengthy process of mapping the Grand Canyon-- he spent months surveying and tracing the complex geologic features. This is the dragon map that he made:

Probably the coolest thing I've learned in Maps and Nav is that non-GPS folks are referred to as 'muggles' by the GPS/ geocacher community. You have to be careful to hide your GPS while in public for two reasons. One is that you will look too nerdy (my textbook actually told me this), and Two is that you can't let the muggles see you when you are using your GPS and trying to find a geocache.

We all look super nerdy trying to use our GPS units, but we try to embrace it.

But probably unsurprisingly, my favorite things to nerd about are herps.

The tail end (pun intended) of lizard season was a couple of weeks ago, so I was lucky to find a few of these scaly guys sunning outside of my house. I had yet to touch one, so I ran back and forth in my PJs trying to grab one, and finally trapped a larger one in a box and scared it enough so that it stopped moving. I felt bad for a sec, but holding a real live lizard was way too cool. In my herpetology class last spring we only had gross preserved specimens to study. This is a million times better:

While continuing nerdin' on this lizard, I looked it up in my herps of AZ book. It's a Ornate Tree Lizard!

And see that spot of blue on the side? That's how you can tell that it's a male. Nerd-tastic.

Over the hills and far away

My dad came out to visit me for a few days, so we took a lil road trip. We headed over Mingus Mountain on a long road full of switchbacks to the small town of Jerome. Elevation 5,246, founded in 1876. Because I know you wanted to know!

Here's the crazy road:

And a necessary dorky picture:

The town of Jerome itself is quirky and touristy at the same time. It's an old mining town, and all of the buildings are basically clinging to the hill.

I was a fan of this staircase: 

But I think the main draw of this town was the view. You can just see it through the buildings in this picture... there is some gorgeous geology in the background! It looked like the layering in the Grand Canyon.

After we had our fill of wandering the artsy streets, drove down to the old copper mine. Apparently it is the largest wooden headframe still standing, and its purpose was to haul ore up from the mine. 

Here is a view down the mine, all 1,900 feet! I spit down it and it was the coolest.

Then we played around on the old mining equipment:

Jerome... we give it the AC stamp of approval!

Winter Wonderland... in AZ

What better way to spend a Saturday morning than driving on crazy back roads in trucks blasting country music, marveling at the snow-dusted mountains, and throwing many snowballs (all instead of doing field work)?