Safford 9

 This was a partly cloudy day, for a change.  Quite warm when the sun was out and cool when it was in the clouds.  Yesterday’s winds were just a memory, only the ever-present breeze.

We decided to go up into the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area for our day’s venture.  It’s a 23,000 acre parcel with 4 permanent rivers, lots of mountains, river canyons, cliffs.  We went up to the Riverfront Campground for lunch and did some walking around.  Carlene met a young guy who was searching for ancient pottery and did a good job of describing it.  Carlene and I each found some shards in the rocky gravel  afterwards.

We met another woman from Safford who showed us some Saffordite.  Basically it’s a volcanic glass, looks like a rock until you put a light behind it, and then it’s translucent!  She said it’s only found here around Safford.  A little research by us later and it turns out to be true, only found in a 100 mile radius of Safford AZ!  Some volcanic event 30 million years ago that produced these, and only happened one time.  So we’ve been looking for ourselves.  And Carlene found one here at camp late this afternoon.  Now she has me looking too.  Well, a rock you can shine a light through is pretty cool!

The coyotes were singing to us as I walked Skye tonight at 9.  They were a good ways out, no concern.  Skye didn’t even notice them, too busy sniffing the ground.

You left me!

Blue Dicks

Popcornflowers

Blue Dicks

Texas Stork bill

Dried up millipede

Saffordite

Saffordite backlighted