Mount Lemmon, Tucson, AZ

Tuesday, December 23

After leaving the Biosphere 2 we headed to Mount Lemmon.  This is what Wikipedia has to say about Mount Lemmon.

Mount Lemmon, with a summit elevation of 9,159 feet is the highest point in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It is located in the Coronado National Forest north of Tucson, Arizona. Mount Lemmon was named for botanist Sarah Plummer Lemmon, who trekked to the top of the mountain with her husband and E. O. Stratton, a local rancher by horse and foot in 1881. It is reported that Mount Lemmon Ski Valley, on the mountain's northeastern side, receives 200 inches of snow annually.

At the base of Mount Lemmon was a housing area with huge homes like this one.  Looks like a hotel but it was not.

It still baffles me that there are saguaro cactus instead of trees.

This is the start of our drive up from approximately 2600 ft elevation to a little over 9100 ft elevation.

This is a stop we made on our way up to the top of Mount Lemmon. So according to the sign we are not very far up towards the top.

Dusty headed left towards those people you see on the rocks to an overlook off that way.

Tic went the opposite direction and found this little water fall. 

Wow look we reached an elevation where there are not any cactus.  I'm not sure what elevation we are at.

Look at that beautifully blue sky.  Also at the bottom of the picture is a bridge and at the top you can just see a road at the top.

Now we have reached the elevation with interesting rock formations.

Here is another pullout where we stopped to look.  See the road below.  That is where we just came from.

The road below is interestingly cut through the rock formations.  We are stopped just above this part of the road.

We thought the striations in these formations were very interesting.

These formations look like 2 people watching over the road.

Besides the snow in the unusual rock formations in the foreground, we are seeing pine trees on the ranges.

Wow now we are in the pine trees and SNOW!

I was constantly wowed at the views.  Look at this huge valley.  I don't know enough about the area to know what small towns we are looking at.

This is the same valley but not in zoom.  Beautiful!  The closer to the top we got the more snow/ice there was.

Well we finally arrived to the top and the ski hill.

This is looking up the ski hill from the parking lot.  Even those there was snow it was pretty icy.

This was looking down the hill from the same parking lot.

On the way back down the hill we stopped at this pull out and Tic took this panoramic of Tucson at the bottom of the mountain.  Tucson is very spread out.