The Charm of Making

The origin of my title today has little or nothing to do with my topic (it's from the movie "Excalibur," and is critical to the relationship between Merlin and Morgana). Actually, I could have titled this post "The Joy of Creating" or maybe "The Joy of Cooking," but that last one's already taken and would also be incomplete.

One of the characters in Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang" complains about being tired of people who "don't do anything or don't make anything, except babies," and I have to agree - I know some of those people, and lest I sound like a right-wing wing nut, the ones who "don't do anything or make anything" come in all income brackets.

I do know that most people are busier than they should have to be, just trying to hold down a job or two or three, take care of their families, and otherwise keep body and soul together, so "making things" can seem daunting - just another task in days that are already over-full.  It seems easier just to plop down on the couch and watch TV.  I was fortunate to grow up with a grandmother who loved watching TV, but while she watched, she turned out yards and miles of knitted and crocheted lace and other projects. Her hands were always busy.  Maybe, like me, she saw needlework and crafts as a way to justify those hours in front of the tube.  In any case, she made beautiful things that were always appreciated by their lucky recipients.

      This afghan and sweater went to a friend who's expecting a little girl on November 10.  The afghan is just a whole lot of granny squares (I finally learned how to crochet the squares together as I go along, after more years than I'm going to admit), and the knitted sweater is from a pattern readily available online. Just google one-skein baby sweater.  It's knit top-down, from the seam of the hood, and is really, really easy.  And yes, that's my Cabbage Patch doll, a gift from my daughter, several years after I gave hers to her.
     I love giving gifts like this (it's the second baby afghan in less than two months) when I know they'll be appreciated.  And even though they take time, I have the pleasure of creating them before giving them away - a much greater pleasure than just going to the store or shopping online.  And shopping also takes time and is not always a pleasure, especially if I'm feeling pressured.  Confession time: sometimes when I'm shopping I just feel aimless and spacey, nothing seems very attractive, and it's not much fun.  Of course, at other times I find wonderful things and have a great time.  So it's not that I feel superior for sometimes making things instead of buying them; I just like having and creating options.

    On to the joy of cooking.  I'm trying to have a slow, relaxing weekend, and for me that often involves cooking.  Joe's observed that it makes me happy (unless it's 6:00 on a weeknight and we default to frozen pizza and a salad).  These may be the best muffins I've ever made.  They're the Orange-Cherry Corn Muffins from Mollie Katzen's "Sunlight Café" cookbook.  Well, okay, they're a tie with the Atomic Bran Muffins from the Northcoast Co-op in Arcata, CA, a recipe that I've seen elsewhere as 6-Week Bran Muffins.
     Yesterday I also made soup, no recipe there, just a basic vegetable soup with half a bottle of a low-salt mixed vegetable juice that we didn't like real well in a glass but that mixed well with chicken broth as the liquid in this tomato-ey vegetable-rice soup with white beans.

     Then today I used the last of the current batch of dough from one of the recipes in "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" to make a loaf of olive bread by mixing in chopped olives, a little chopped onion, coarsely grated Parmesan, and a little finely chopped fresh rosemary (could have used more rosemary).  What a nice lunch it made!

The bread looked better after it was sliced, though, since I forgot to slash the top.  Oh, well, I like the crusty, rustic look.  And it won't last long, anyway.

Autumn at last, celebrating the desert

Seasons aren't quite the same in the desert as in other places - some of you will snicker at that understatement.  But it does finally feel like our version of autumn; in fact, I actually wore a sweater to work yesterday! It was a cardigan, and I took it off fairly soon after arriving, but still - a sweater!  And since today's predicted high is only 70 degrees, I'm going to do it again!

The last couple of months have been very hard on the garden and yard and now we're playing catch-up, trying to get things looking respectable again.  A few crops thrive in the heat, so we took most everything out except those - okra, chiles, and eggplant.  This year I planted a packet of mixed eggplant seeds from the Cook's Garden; certainly those on the dish earn the name of eggplant.  These white ones, and some of the long pale lavender Asian-type, were the best of the lot, lovely to look at, not too seedy, very tasty.  But I won't do that again.  The most prolific were a bush of round mottled green ones just bigger than a ping pong ball, lovely to look at but very seedy, though the flavor was okay.  I've had the best luck in the past with good old Black Beauty and Ichiban, and I think I'll stick with those and maybe one new variety next year.  And I'm going back to burgundy okra, which have always produced well and are gorgeous to look at.  Joe turned his nose up at okra when I first planted it years ago but was seduced by the beauty of the plant and has learned to like its fruit, though he likes it best breaded and fried, which is my least favorite way to fix it.

As I spread bags of manure on the gardens and turned them over I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the soil; it's come a long way from the dead, packed clay of ten years ago.  Our house was built in 1984, in a development that was scraped and denuded of all life to make it easy for the builders, and most of our neighbors yards are still pretty barren.  I don't blame them.  It takes a lot of effort to coax life out of soil that's been so brutalized.  There's only one small front lawn in the neighborhood and the front yards are generally landscaped in desert or desert-adapted plants, including ours.

When we first drove into Tucson, during rush hour on June 4, 1992, at 104 degrees (we'd come from Humboldt County in northern California, where it might reach the 70s on an especially warm day) I felt like crying. We had all our worldly possessions in a 22-foot Ryder rental truck, towing our car behind it, and had given up our apartment and our lives back in California so I could go to grad school at the University of Arizona - I had a teaching assistantship and we had enough money for the summer - and all I wanted to do was turn around and go home, back to where it was green and wet and cloudy most days and the wild blackberries threatened to engulf everything else, including roads and buildings.  But we stayed and soon learned to appreciate the beauty and variety of the desert.

Many people think the desert is brown and lifeless, but that's not true.  There are so many shades and shapes of green, you would quickly get tired trying to list them all, not to mention the flowers, like those buds ready to burst into bloom on the barrel cactus above.  The blue agave with its sharp, serrated, sword-like blades thrives in the thin soil and blazing heat.  We now have a mini-tequila plantation on one side of our driveway, at least half a dozen blue agaves, all offspring of one plant given to us by a friend about six years ago (and we've given away many more).

 

Here's an up close and personal look at a saguaro. Those spines are 1 1/2 to 2 inches long, and this particular plant, in a neighbor's front yard, is about 15 feet tall, truly majestic, but not at all unusual.  According to the mythology of the Tohono O'odham people of the area the saguaros are or were people, and it's easy to see how that belief developed, especially the way they often grow together in pairs or groups, sometimes with their arms intertwined like friends or lovers.

And we have many different trees, like this palo verde with its green bark - there must be over a dozen varieties of palo verde alone - fast growing with tiny leaves so as not to lose too much moisture to evaporation.

Just look at that intense blue sky behind the ocotillo.  In spring those ten-foot ocotillo branches will be tipped with blazing scarlet flowers.

I had a friend whose grandmother married a miner and moved to the Nevada desert.  She told Sally that if you lived in the desert long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you'd never want to live anywhere else.  I've worn out a few pairs of shoes in the last eighteen years, and especially at this time of year, having once again survived the summer, as plants and animals (including us) are rejuvenated by the turning of the seasons, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be.

Gardens and more gardens

Last Sunday, September 12, Joe and I took a lovely drive to the south, where a group called Somos la Semilla (We Are the Seed, www.somoslasemilla.com) had organized a free tour of organic farms. Of the seven farms on the tour, we only visited three, but that was just right - we didn't rush, we spent the day in pleasant and often outright beautiful surroundings, and we discovered new things about areas we hadn't been to in a while but always liked.

The first place we went was Forever Yong (yes, that's the correct spelling) Farm east of Arivaca. It's cooler down there than in Tucson, mostly grasslands, at a higher elevation. This farm, like the others we visited, is in a drainage and the soil is so rich it makes a Tucson gardener want to cry. Our soil, as in most subdivision yards here, was bladed and graded with no thought on the part of the developers except to make it flat enough for building, so any gardening first depends on building soil that plants can actually grow in - it can be done, and we've done it in our gardens, but it's hard work.  When we arrived at Forever Yong Farm the husband of the couple who own it was giving an informal tour of the greenhouses, the first of which was filled with tomatoes. Readers in more temperate climates may not realize how tricky it is to grow tomatoes in southern Arizona - we got very excited about these.  The wife was running the farm stand, where we bought the most beautiful cucumbers I've seen in years, some garlic, and a quart of local mesquite honey which has a rich, almost smoky taste you won't get from the commercial factory stuff - heavenly! Unfortunately, I was so taken by everything around me I forgot to take any pictures there! But you can find the owners and their produce every Thursday afternoon at the Santa Cruz River Farmer's Market on West Speedway.

We drive on to the tiny town of Arivaca, after a stop at the Gadsden Coffee Company, a pleasantly relaxed coffeehouse a mile or so before the town proper, where we relaxed for a bit on the shady patio with some very good java and a big cinnamon roll (which we split, trying not to be toooo indulgent).  The ruin above is right in the middle of town, beside La Gitana, the local bar.  Neither Joe nor I had checked to see how much cash we had, so we didn't stop to get any, and at the coffeehouse they said there was an ATM at the general store.  There was, but it was out of money, and the store doesn't do "cash back." But while I was talking to the very nice and apologetic young woman who worked there, a young man who overheard my dilemma invited me over to La Gitana, where he works, and gave me cash on my debit card without even asking me to buy anything!  So that little episode was an instance of both the occasional inconvenience and the friendliness of very small towns - I could live in a place like that!

A few miles out the other side of town is the Arivaca Community Garden, with greenhouses (where they hold yoga classes) and guinea fowl in addition to vegetables planted in more of that wonderful soil; just look at these huge heirloom tomatoes!

We bought two flavors of goat cheese from one woman and a gourd and some green tomatoes from another, whose card I thought I'd kept but now I can't find it - darn! Anyway, her name is Pat and she grows lavender and makes wonderful things from it that she sells at the Saturday Farmers' Market in St. Philip's Plaza.  Here she is talking with some other farm tourists. You can get some idea of what a lovely 

spot this is, down in a little valley, with grass and plenty of trees for shade as well as the open areas where crops grow in wide rows separated by lawn.

When we left there we thought we'd take the Ruby Road that loops south and over to I-19; we'd never been there and it's supposed to be quite scenic.  Well, we've still never been on most of it, because after a few slow and bone-jarring miles we turned around and went back the way we'd come.  When we got back on I-19 we headed down to Tubac for a bite to eat and then south to Tumacacori and our last stop, Avalon Organic Farms.

By this time clouds had rolled in and we were hoping for rain, but not until we'd finished this last visit.  Avalon is an intentional community of about 100 people, with a religious focus, begun in Sedona by Gabriel of Urantia - I don't really know much about them but the people we spoke with there were friendly and seemed happy, and they certainly live in a beautiful place.

Like King Arthur, we had to cross water to get to Avalon; the Santa Cruz was running just a few inches deep, not a problem to drive through, but that was another reason we hoped the rain held off until we left. The river runs north from Mexico, and by the time it gets to Tucson the water has all been sucked off by development, but in decades past it still ran up here - and it still does, when we get a good rainstorm.

This Avalon is certainly an idyllic spot.  It must have been an old ranch; there's a big house, what looks like a caretaker's cottage, and a horse barn from those days, plus a lot of new buildings.  These people are committed to sustainability, and their architecture reflects that.  There are beautiful yurts and some other little houses that utilize a technology developed in the war-torn Middle East by people whose homes were destroyed by the fighting.  They took sandbags and piled them up in coils and then plastered them with a mud mixture; the result is similar to the straw-bale and rammed-earth technologies that have become popular here, but the final result has a charming, almost fairytale quality (at least I think so).

This is a shot of one of the interiors.  While I like these little houses very much, I couldn't live at Avalon. It's not anything to do with their theology, since I don't even know what that is, though it seems vaguely Christian, with emphasis on the "Cosmic Christ."  No, it's that I need my own kitchen and bathroom.  A communal meal once or twice a week might be nice, but I really like my own cooking, and Joe's.  Sharing a bathhouse if we're camping or a bathroom when we're on vacation is enough.


That said, the communal bathhouses are quite beautiful, and they make wonderful use of reclaimed and recycled building materials.

Heading back down the long drive out of Avalon was like passing through a bit of pastoral heaven.  And the rain began just as we crossed through the river and headed back to the real world.

Labor Day Weekend Part II

After our adventure on Friday we set early Saturday morning to try again for a cool hike at the top of Mt. Lemmon.  Joe was driving - he likes winding mountain roads and I like to read or knit while he's driving them, often a little faster than I'm comfortable with, but after nearly 20 years I'm pretty used to it.  There are lots of bicyclists struggling up the mountain and they don't always ride single file on that relatively narrow road. I admire their fitness and fortitude, but it can be frustrating to get stuck behind them.  It frustrates Joe, too.  He was enjoying driving the new car and several times he crossed the solid yellow line to pass cyclists on or near turns with limited visibility, though it's true there was almost no downhill traffic at that time of day.  A sheriff's deputy stopped us just past the Palisades ranger station. Fortunately, he let Joe off with a warning, and as I told him (without elaborating or gloating), I'm glad he got stopped. But it took away some of the fun of the Outback for him.

We parked across from the new community center that was built a few years ago as part of the recovery effort after the Aspen Fire.  Then we walked up Turkey Run Road, the first street on the right after you get into Summerhaven; this charming cabin is the first one on that road and it may be my favorite cabin on the mountain.  It dates from before the fire and has some interesting architectural details not visible in this photo, and more importantly, it nestles comfortably into its site rather than aggressively dominating it, like so many of the newer, bigger, more pretentious and vastly more expensive places built in the last few years. Many of those places remind me of what my grandmother (and I'm sure many other grandmothers) said: Money can't buy class or taste - though clearly not everyone would agree.

Turkey Run Road turns into a dirt road and then a trail along upper Sabino Creek, a beautiful riparian area.  The abundant rains have led to an abundance of mushrooms and other fungi in various shapes, sizes, and colors.

This fallen log was covered with thousands of these tiny mushrooms; the biggest were the size of a pea.  

There are signs of past human activity in the area along the creek - the concrete foundation of a building, another concrete structure that may have been connected to a bridge or meant to deter the creek from altering its channel,  rusty water pipes sticking up from the ground like the remnants of ancient plants, and this odd sight that made me think of the Teletubbies' world on PBS - while Isaiah was little, I grew quite fond of the Teletubbies:

After about a mile we came to the Aspen Draw Trail proper, which leads up to the summit, also the top of the ski lift, which stays busy in the summer giving tourists what must be a spectacular view.  There were lots of birds in the trees, including several of what had to be goldfinches, but much smaller than the ones we feed in our yard down in the "lowlands," as well as juncos and bluejays and titmice and others.  We've noticed on past hikes that we'll often see a junco who seems to be hopping ahead of us on the trail, like a guide, or maybe a sentry watching to see we don't go wandering off where we shouldn't.  Joe picked up a blue jay feather to add to those we keep in a Navajo pot at home.

We saw a number of downed trees, some cut, some fallen naturally, showing signs of rot and, in a couple of cases, that bears had been at them digging out insects and grubs. All that organic matter provides homes for opportunistic plants, like this solitary mushroom in the middle of an upright, rotted out tree trunk.

On the trail the view was always limited  to what was nearby, just behind us, just up ahead.

But once you reach the top you can see for miles and miles. These burned skeletons remind me of a prose poem by James Galvin, "Fathers and Indians," which appeared first in Imaginary Timber and later in Resurrection Update.  He writes  of "the old trees, pitch-hardened, fire-hardened spars . . . . Had they not been destroyed, they would not be remembered. The ones left standing remind us of the fallen, remind us there are forests of empty sleeves, tunneling into the sky."

That image, of the "forests of empty sleeves," has stayed with me for many years. For obvious reasons, it makes me think of the aftermath of war - not only war between peoples but the war so many of us continue to wage against the natural world.  But sometimes in that aftermath, to quote another poet, "a terrible beauty is born."

Going back to Summerhaven, we forsook the trail for the road, which was recently repaved and has wide enough shoulders for safety, for the most part.  We kept to it until we'd passed by the Ski Valley lodge and lift area and then got onto another trail that soon led us back to Turkey Run Road, and the village, and then back down the mountain to home.  It was a glorious day.

life is what happens while you're making other plans

Whoever said that was certainly right. Early Friday morning Joe and I set out for a hike on Mt. Lemmon, hoping to avoid the holiday weekend crowds that would be sure to fill the trails (and trailhead parking spots) on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.  We weren't too far up when Joe looked in the rearview mirror and saw smoke pouring from the rear of the car.  He pulled over as soon as he could, across from the entrance to the Gordon Hirabayashi campground/recreation site, a place we like very much during the cooler parts of the year when we can follow the trail that starts there and goes down to the Sycamore Reservoir.  But right now it's still too hot for lower-elevation trails like that one.

It was immediately apparent that we were leaking automatic transmission fluid.  It was red, like blood on the asphalt (well, not exactly, but there was a resemblance, and our beloved Forester was too wounded to go on just then). You don't have to go too far up Mt. Lemmon before losing cell phone reception; Joe set off to see if he could climb a hill and get a signal so he could call AAA for a tow truck, while I stayed with the car and hoped for help.

The entrance to the Gordon Hirabayashi campground/recreation area

A few people did stop, including a couple of very nice Forest Service employees. I gave them our AAA info and they called it in for us.  The other folks who stopped were also wonderful - when I said I was okay they all asked if I had water, which of course is essential in such circumstances!  What I didn't have was a timepiece, since I don't like to wear a watch, Joe had the cellphone, and I wasn't sure I should turn on the car.  I learned that I don't really have much sense of how much time is passing, though the stress of the situation may have exacerbated that failing. If I'd thought about it, I could have estimated by looking at the sun, but I didn't think about it, and so after a while I got worried about whether Joe would return before the tow truck arrived.  I amused myself by pacing back and forth, doing a few yoga stretches, reading a magazine (fortunately I seldom, if ever, go anywhere without something to read), and taking some photos, because even though I was in distress, I was also in a beautiful area.

It seems like most of the time we are in too great a hurry to notice, much less appreciate, the beauty that is literally at our feet - we'll stop and concentrate on a painting in a gallery, and maybe pay a great deal of money to hang it on our wall, when nature's compositions are more perfect.  Rupert Brooke's "Fragment on Painters" begins:

    There is an evil which that Race attaints

    Who represent God's World with oily paints,

    Who mock the Universe, so rare and sweet,

    With spots of colour on a canvas sheet....

As part of that "evil...Race," I have to agree - there's nothing like the real thing.

  

Look at this lovely grass with its feathery seedheads - if I found it in my yard I'd pull it out as a weed, yet nothing I plant is really any prettier.  When I ran the seedheads between my fingers they felt like silk and the ready seeds came off and floated away on their tiny wings.  If I changed the angle and spot from which I looked uphill, even though the rocks and trees and brush remained in place, my changed perspective provided a new inspiration.  I was wishing for art supplies but I only had my camera and so I shot dozens of pictures.

Joe got back just a few minutes before the tow truck arrived. We rode with our car down to the Subaru dealership, where we learned that they needed to order the hose that had failed, so for a few days we're driving a loaner car, a 2011 Outback, which is very nice, though bigger and heavier than anything we've ever owned. I like the way it feels and looks, though, and it's a beautiful shade of green.

Anyway, all's well that ends well.  The next day, Saturday, we did make it up the mountain, but this post is long enough already, so I'll give the computer and my fingers a rest and post about that later.

over-the-hill cooking

No, I don't mean the cook is over-the-hill, though sometimes we may feel that way! What I'm talking about here are those ingredients that get forgotten in the refrigerator or garden till they're a bit past their prime. Not rotting or slimy or anything, just not as fresh as they used to be. The question, then, is whether to throw them out or find some way to incorporate them into something tasty. There's a saying I like (I saw it on an old embroidered sampler):

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

My grandmother, who was very important in my upbringing and who raised her children during the Great Depression, would have liked that. She taught me a lot about cooking, sewing, gardening, etc., and I also absorbed many of my beliefs and values from her. One of those is that it just makes me crazy to see people throw away perfectly good food that could be put to use and provide eating pleasure.

All of this is just the lead-in to what we had for lunch yesterday, a zucchini frittata enhanced by a few over-the-hill mushrooms.

You can't see the mushrooms in the picture. There were four of them, nice Creminis, stored properly in a brown paper bag with the edges turned down and partly open to let the mushrooms breathe, and they'd been breathing at the back of the refrigerator for a couple of weeks or so, and now they were showing their age. Not crispy crumbly dried like the ones in the little packets that we buy as delicacies at the market, but slightly shriveled and leathery though otherwise okay. I didn't want to "reconstitute" them by soaking and thus lose their flavor and "structural integrity," so I sliced off the bottoms of the stems and chopped what remained into fairly small bits, then sautéed them in olive oil with quite a bit of minced garlic and a couple of sliced zucchini for 10 minutes or so over pretty low heat. I salted the zucchini at this stage rather than salting the dish later because if you salt the vegetables as you sauté them, it not only enhances the flavor but it also draws out more of their moisture, and zucchini have considerable moisture that, before it cooked down, helped to rehydrate my mushroom bits and enhance the flavor addition they made to the frittata.

I should add here that the zucchini had also been forgotten a few days longer than I would have liked, so their lovely dark green skin was starting to show the first signs of cellulite, but they were still quite wholesome and acceptable, though they'd lost some of their youthful perfection. Anyway, after the zucchini were tender it was time to pour the eggs over (I use 6 eggs to serve 4), sprinkle a good handful or two of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top, pop on the lid, turn the heat down even lower, and go do something else for 10 or 15 minutes. I know that's not the traditional way of cooking a frittata, but it produces a lovely, puffy dish with minimal effort, and with a nice salad (the dressing recipe is in an earlier post), some good bread, and a glass of wine (this is a decent but not too pricey white Zin) it was a lovely lunch.

The bread is the "bran-enriched white bread" from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, my current new favorite cookbook. If you follow the instructions to the letter you get exactly the results they promise - excellent bread with minimal effort. Don't let hubris derail you. As a long-time bread-baker who even used to teach classes on it, I thought I could improve on their method, so the first time I tried one of their recipes I didn't really pay attention, and what I got wasn't all that great. In fact, I almost took the book to Bookman's (Tucson's wonderful used book/music/and many other things exchange) but then I tried it again and followed the directions and was very happy with the results. With a bit more experience under my belt, I now feel able to improvise and adapt, but baking, more than other forms of cooking, does require a bit more attention to certain details.

Frittatas are such a lovely way to use up bits of this and that and turn them into something special. I'd meant to add some slivers of sun-dried tomato to this one, but I forgot. Fresh mushrooms are great, of course, and I often use just mushrooms and onions or scallions. Fresh herbs - parsley, basil, thyme, marjoram, etc. - brighten things up, but don't confuse the issue by using too much or too many different ones all together. Rosemary, for example, is wonderful with garlic and anything else, but in something as delicate as a frittata, it's probably all the herb you need, and it should be minced quite finely (dried rosemary is to be avoided - those little sharp sticks could really hurt a person! - unless you really have no possible way to get the fresh stuff, in which case the dried herb should be very finely minced and simmered in whatever you're making for a long time, or ground to a powder so it can't choke you). Leftover crumbled bacon and/or various cheeses - that last ounce of gorgonzola with some caramelized onion and a slice of crumbled bacon from yesterday's breakfast (or the day before - it's cooked so it will keep for a few days) can really elevate what might otherwise just seem like scrambled eggs for two.

And now it's time for me to go see what I can come up with for lunch today!

mountain getaway

I've been away from this blog for quite a while. The summer has been busier and hotter than I'd like; the monsoons have been few and mostly stingy, so we gave up on some of the summer garden - seemed like a waste of expensive water - and are looking forward to cooler weather and planting for the winter. But in the meantime, Tucson has a wonderful sky island getaway available close by, Mt. Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains just northeast of the city, rising through several bio-zones from the saguaros of the desert floor to the pines of the 9000+ foot summit, and Joe and I escaped there for the day last Saturday.

 

About halfway up we stopped at a pullout and I picked this Hooker's primrose.  The blossom is as big and as yellow as the columbine we see on the shadier, moister trails higher up, but there was no shade or moisture where these were growing.  There was, however, a spcctacular view of the road we'd just driven up. I hadn't realized the switchbacks were quite that dramatic.  Good thing I outgrew most of the car-sickness that plagued me as a kid!

We decided to try one of our favorite trails from a few years ago, before the Aspen Fire that devastated so much of the mountain and virtually destroyed the village of Summerhaven, though the people of the village have since rebuilt much of what burned.  The memory of the fire is still fresh, both in human minds and in the landscape.  These burned trees stand as silent reminders to those who stop to look down into the San Pedro River valley on the far side of the mountains.

The Butterfly trail used to be
thickly wooded, but much of
it burned, and some of those
burned trees have since fallen
or been cut down, so it looks
very different these days. All
over the mountains there is
new growth, especially ferns
and aspen and locust trees,
and some trees seize any
opportunity to put down
roots, like this one that
seems to be growing right
out of the rock, probably
since before the fire.

When we hiked there before the fire we didn't see as many raspberries we did on Saturday, and last September we found lots of elderberries, enough to pick some to take home to make syrup.  We were hoping for elderberries on this trip, but they're not ripe yet. However, we found lots of wildflowers, like these columbines and Indian paintbrush.

 
I love the bearded penstemons that line the trail, and so do the hummingbirds.

 

This dead log surrounded by a froth of lovely, delicate cranesbill is fulfilling one of the higher purposes available to a downed tree, that is, to provide  a home for colorful fungi.

 

Unfortunately, we cut our hike a bit shorter than we'd planned because my left knee, which I injured a few weeks ago (just before the elevator went out in the building I was teaching in for three weeks, which didn't help matters), started acting up, so we turned back. But the nice thing about hiking out and back is that things look very different on the return trip, so it was just fine.  It was also uphill on the return, which was easier on my knee. And I'm happy to say that I've been walking every day and the knee continues to improve, just not as rapidly as I'd like - but patience really isn't my strongest virtue.

We'd packed a lunch, since the four eating establishments Summerhaven boasted before the fire had been reduced to one. Of the three that burned, only one has rebuilt so far, and it was always our least favorite (the one restaurant that survived the fire closed some months ago for other reasons). But hope springs eternal, so we drove into the village to see if there was anything new, and there was! At the upper end of the main street a big banner announced "Planet of the Crepes" so we pressed on eagerly and at the intersection with Carter Canyon Road, in a shady clearing, we found a white trailer and a few tables and the answer to our prayers.

 

The menu was a delightful surprise, ranging from breakfast bacon-and-egg crepes to sweet treats (Nutella and banana, for example) and some fairly sophisticated savory offerings, all folded up in delicious, generous, crispy crepes. Joe had the veggie option, tomatoes, cheese, pesto and some other fresh and delicious ingredients, while I tried the smoked duck breast with havarti and arugula. Our taste buds were very happy and so was our budget; the prices are quite reasonable (my very fancy lunch was $6.75). There's a Facebook page under Planet of the Crepes Tucson, but I couldn't find the menu posted anywhere online.  Guess you'll just have to drive up the mountain and check it out for yourselves - I promise you won't be sorry!