We spent our first day in Tucson, Arizona, touring the eastern half of Saguaro National Park. This is easily the strangest national park we’ve visited so far. It’s essentially just miles and miles of saguaro cacti (and the various critters that live among them, if you can find them). Which isn’t to say that we were bored—seeing these iconic symbols of the American southwest was really cool.

The eastern portion of the park is arranged as a small eight mile driving loop, with several overlooks and short hiking trails that take visitors out among the saguaros. We drove really slowly around the loop, trying to delay leaving the car as long as possible. Because it was hot. Really, really hot.

When we finally exited the car at an overlook, a couple from Pennsylvania noticed our New York plates and struck up a conversation with us. After a few minutes of pleasantries, our new friends noticed that there was some trash in our car’s front grill. It wasn’t trash. It was a large bird. A large, extremely dead bird. I used a stick (two sticks, really—one wasn’t enough) to pry the macabre trophy from our car while the rest of the group looked on. So that was awkward.

At the next overlook, a bee stung me (for no reason at all—bees are jerks!). We weren’t off to a particularly auspicious start. But I’m happy to report that for the rest of the day, we didn’t unintentionally kill any more wildlife, and no more wildlife tried to kill us.

We eventually braved the sun and did a couple short 1-2 mile hikes. Other than the occasional lizard, some birds, and some bees and wasps (really large wasps!), we didn’t see much wildlife at all. We mostly amused ourselves by looking for the ideal saguaro to pose with. Lori found a few nice ones. I found one that looked like it was flipping us off.

About an hour before sunset, it started to cool off, and all sorts of critters came out. Especially jackrabbits. Compared to the east coast rabbits that we’re used to, these guys look like they’re on steroids. We also saw a roadrunner, which I chased long enough to get a few pics of, and a fox which didn’t cooperate at all with my efforts to photograph it.

We have a couple more nights in Tucson, so tomorrow we’re going to take a break from nature and visit the Titan Missile Museum and the Pima Air & Space Museum.

Some photos from today (click for larger versions):

Lori poses with a large saguaro cactus.

A greater roadrunner. True to its name, it rarely stopped moving.

A black-tailed jackrabbit.

This cactus wren picked an unlucky insect off the top of a saguaro in front of me.

Sunset. Tucson is in the distance.