Arizona trip, Day 2 - December 23, 2007

Pit Mine Just south of Gila Bend is the Ajo Copper Mine. It's a 1000 foot deep hole in the ground, about two miles across. Unfortunately, you can't see the bottom from the lookout point. The tailings piles are huge. They even had to relocate a cemetery so that they could dump tailings there. Cactus South of Ajo is the Organ Pipe National Monument which has a bunch of organ pipe and saguaro cactus. Rocky Point The next stop was Lukeville and the Mexico border. I've had a goal to hit every major body of water around the US. The Pacific is right next door, I made it to the Atlantic in New Jersey, and Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico in one trip. So this trip's goal was to make it to the Gulf of California. Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) is the closest, easiest to get to city on the gulf. Crossing into Mexico was easy, the car didn't even stop moving! I had expected someone to say "do you have any drugs, guns, etc?" at the very least, but I just rolled right on in. The first 10 miles or so were through city at about 35mph, but after that it was a wide open highway and everyone went about 60. Once I got to the gulf I took some pictures from the harbor, and by all the new condo developments targeted at americans with too much money. I snuck in there to touch the water :) The actual city is very poor, only the main roads were paved, and there was trash everywhere. The new developments are more like a wild animal park for americans. They get to stay in walled compounds with their covered parking and fancy swimming pools and room service, then they can venture into the city for a few hours on a native sightseeing and trinket buying expedition, then back to the fort at night. I suppose that at least that brings some money back to the locals, but I get the feeling that it's rich americans selling to middle income americans for the most part. After that I headed back to the US. I barely had to stop at the border again, this crossing is *way* better than the 4 hour+ wait at Tijuana. Night at Kitt Peak On the way to Kitt Peak I took a detour through the Tohono O'Odham indian reservation. Apparently Delorme Street Atlas doesn't realize that dirt roads and a Mini Cooper don't get along, so I went way out of my way just to have the paved road end. I did get a nice shot of Kitt Peak at sunset though. That night was the closest mars was going to be to the moon, so I tried to do some night shots to capture that. I got some great shots, but couldn't expose both for the bright moon and the comparatively dim mars. In the full size image you can see a brightness-adjusted image with Mars marked. During the drive I was actually able to see how much faster the moon moves compared to mars. After two hours Mars was well away from the moon, it was only right next to it for about half an hour. This is one of my favorite photos I've taken. It's well past sunset, the bright spot is the full moon, but you can also see all the stars in the sky. On a 30 second exposure it looks like it is daylight. Back to Introduction - On to Day 3

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