We had this pretty little girl for a sleepover and an afternoon at the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch.
It was a nice warm, partly cloudy day. Perfect for a walk around the park.
She loves to see the ducks.
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking pretty happy.
The turtles were looking for sunshine.
This crested duck was fun to see.
Kristi wondered why she put her hat on.
The Preserve has a lot of birds and we could hear them happily chirping in the trees but with a little girl that goes a hundred miles an hour they tend to stay high and away.
The park has several walls that are made for walking.
They were the highlight for Kristi.
She got braver and braver and soon was running instead of walking.
And jumping! Whew, we didn't have to take her home and explain any broken bones.
Artistic walls made a fun day for this young lady.
A swimmingly special day for Grammie & Grampa.
ANOTHER BINGO WIN! I keep telling Walt it is his turn.
Arizona has had rainy days in the valley and snow in the high country. While I am thankful for the moisture I was delighted to see a partly cloudy day with the sun peeking out frequently, It was time for a road trip.
Our trip was only about 40 miles to the Casa Grande Ruins in Coolidge, AZ.
These are the remains of what the early Spanish explorers named Casa Grande - Great House.
After almost 700 years in the harsh desert climate the Ancient Sonoran Desert People's farming community and "Great House" are preserved at Casa Grande Ruins.
There is a mystique in the ruins because even the experts don't know what the Great House was used for.
The experts feel that the compound was deserted around 1450 and they do not know why or specifically where they went.
The walls of the Great House face the four cardinal points of the compass.
One of the upper walls aligns with the setting sun at the summer solstice. Other openings align with the sun and moon at specific times.
One thought is that the Great House was a gathering place where the alignment of celestial objects gave them the time to plant, to harvest and to celebrate.
The building was over 2400 square feet and has walls over three feet thick.
It was built of caliche. That is a mixture of concrete like sand, clay and limestone. It took 3000 tons of it to build the Great House.
All this with nothing more than backbreaking manual labor. They can't find any evidence of tools other than sticks of wood.
There are very few trees in the area so the hundreds of juniper, pine & fir trees that were used for beams were either manually carried or floated down the then swift flowing Gila River for at least 60 miles.
The current protective structure covering the "Great House" was built in 1932 and replaced a wooden similar structure built to protect the ruins previously. Now the only residents are birds. Great Horned Owls nest there but we didn't see them.
Our tour guide told us that they estimate that there were around 2000 people living in the compound surrounding the Great House.
The ancestral people here in the Sonoran desert grew crops and hunted to sustain themselves.
The Sonoran desert is hot, dry with very little rainfall. How did they grow crops?
At the time they were settled here the Gila River was a fast flowing lifeline for them. With only sticks they built 90 miles of canals to bring water to their crops.
With the abundant water they were able to grow crops, fish in the river and hunt game nearby.
They used a stick with 3 prongs on it to do their planting. They poked a hole in the soil. In the middle hole they planted corn, in another they planted beans so the vine could climb up the corn stalk & in another squash that covered the ground around the plants helping contain moisture in the soil. Ingenious way back then. (Look at how this cactus fruit looks like little pineapples!)
During the 1860's through the 1880's more people began to visit the ruins with the arrival of a railroad line twenty miles to the west and a connecting stagecoach route that ran right by the Casa Grande. The resulting damage from souvenir hunting, graffiti and outright vandalism raised serious concerns about the preservation of the Casa Grande.
in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside one square mile of Arizona Territory surrounding the Casa Grande Ruins as the first prehistoric and cultural reserve established in the United States.
Ruins and the history of the people that built them are always fascinating. Another great desert day and we learned a lot too.
In the 1880s, when American settlers arrived they began to threaten the ruins by removing artifacts as souvenirs and leaving .