Mt. Lemmon Trip

Well, Jodie and I decided to take a trip up to Mt. Lemmon on Friday to get out of the heat and explore a little.

So, we started out at Tucson, at an elevation around 3000 feet and lots of cactus.


Gradually the cacti began to disappear and small green trees began to dominate the landscape.

Then a few pine trees began to dot the landscape.

On our drive up, we saw tons of people biking up the road. Definitely very impressive because they went all the way to the top, which was climbing over 6000 feet in 27 miles. Here is one of the unreal bikers.
We stopped off at a view point along our drive. It was very cool because of the neat rock formations - like the pillars just to the side of the road.



As we were about to leave, a family joined us at the stop and we asked them to take a picture of us.

We then continued on our journey and the trees began to change even more... showing signs of fall.
This was near the top of Mt. Lemmon at the entrance of the... ski resort. Kind of crazy huh? I never knew that Tucson had a ski resort, but they do. Apparently it is the furthest South ski resort in the United States.
Before we stopped at the ski resort, we decided to continue all the way to the top to the observatory. Here's the parking lot with lots of Aspen trees in fall colors.

To get to the top, you had to go on a little walk past the gate for the observatory. But here is a picture at the top.
Jodie really liked this lone pine tree among the aspen.

On our drive back down to the ski resort, we ran into some more fall colors.

Here's the proof of Tucson's ski resort. It's not very big by any means, but its still pretty impressive I think.

There's a picture of one of the two ski lifts.


We found some more fall colors.
A view from the bottom of the ski resort looking North.

Outside of one of the restaurants at the ski resort.

After spending some time exploring the ski resort and the city of Summerhaven (right next to the ski resort), we decided to head back down to Tucson. On our way down, we stopped off at another view point and had lunch on some of the rocks. After eating lunch, I took this picture of Jodie enjoying the sunshine. Also, the rock pillar behind her, there was a group climbing up the backside of the column; it was pretty cool.

Here's part of the view from the lookout - I thought the rocks were really cool.

A view of southern Tucson. Actually, mostly everything that you can see in the picture is the airforce base.
Jodie grabbed a picture of me.
The view towards central-nothern Tucson. Our house would be on the right side of the picture, at the base of the mountains.

In all, it was a fun little trip to get away, cool off, and explore a little.