Category Archives: Travels

Outside the City

We wanted to get outside of the city of Paris to see what the surrounding area was like. The city is surrounded by a ring road – a crowded freeway that defines the edge of the central city. We went to three places outside of the ring road, on three different days.

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Sabino Canyon

Sabino Canyon is in the Santa Catalina Mountains, at the northeastern edge of the city of Tucson. There’s a road up the canyon with bridges across the creek that was built during the 1930s. The road is closed to normal traffic, but it’s used by sightseeing trams that carry visitors up and down the canyon.

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Madera Canyon

Madera Canyon is in the Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson and close to Arizona’s border with Mexico. The mountains are called “sky islands” because they reach up from the desert, forming cooler, wetter habitats than the surrounding hot, dry desert. The canyon has a small creek running along the bottom from the melting snow.

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Picacho Peak

Picacho Peak State Park is about 40 miles north of Tucson. We were hoping to see California Poppies in bloom there, but the weather had been too warm, and most of them had finished blooming. There were still some poppies in gullies that were protected from the sun. We did see many other wildflowers – especially Brittlebush, which was in full bloom.

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