Well, the last few months of 2020 ROCKED!

You think I’m joking, right? 2020 was terrible, wasn’t it? Well, I’m actually mostly serious. Read on to find out why…

September started out with a pretty amazing professional achievement for me. Some might say that having my painting Quarantine Queen grace the cover of the September 3-9, 2020, Tucson Weekly “rocked” – and I would agree with them! This painting was part of Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery & Workshop’s virtual “Corazones Unidos” exhibition, and I am grateful to the folks with Raices Taller for sharing the work with the Tucson Weekly. This resulted in the painting being featured on the cover of the weekly and also reviewed in the arts section. This might just be the true highlight of 2020 for me.

In October, Aaron and I started rockhounding. For anyone who doesn’t know, that means we went out searching for interesting and potentially valuable rocks. We had been talking about doing this for a while, and the weather finally cooled down enough that it was possible to enjoy the desert again. We started out with a well-known site called Saddle Mountain, located on public land that is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and located about an hour west of our home. Rockhounds have hit Saddle Mountain in search of fire agate for several decades, and although this means the site is relatively picked over, the vastness of the landscape means there are always treasures to be found. And we have indeed found a few. :-)

With rocks dancing in our heads, in early November we took a little trip to the Arizona/New Mexico border near Safford, Arizona. Fire agate was also the target of this excursion, and we enjoyed hunting and scoring some finds at Black Hills Rockhound Area, Round Mountain Rockhound Area, and along a road outside Clifton, Arizona.

November also brought a visit from my dear friend and former college roommate, Jenny. It was her first time in the Grand Canyon State and I couldn’t resist taking her to the Grand Canyon. The greatly reduced crowds (I have NEVER seen so few people at the Grand Canyon, which I would normally equate to Disneyland), we even scored one of the historic cabins on the rim. It was a lovely few days together and I was sad to see her go.

I also made it down to Tucson to see my second cousin Kim and my good friend Ursula. It was nice to be back in the Old Pueblo and to have a little human interaction. Ursula was such a great host and we cooked some delicious food and did some hiking in a couple of beautiful areas around her home in Vail, Arizona. I also enjoyed seeing all of the beautiful art she has been cooking up - check her out at www.ursulaschneider.art.

November’s rockhounding adventures took us to find Apache tears near Superior, Arizona, and on a wild goose chase looking for mine dumps way up the mountains on a crazy dirt road to Crown King, Arizona. We found a lot of Apache tears, which are round(ish) globs of translucent black volcanic glass that form in perlite. A legend of the Apache tribe explains the name: about 75 Apaches and the US Cavalry fought on a mountain overlooking what is now Superior, in the 1870s. As they faced defeat, the outnumbered Apaches rode their horses off the mountain to their deaths rather than be killed. Their wives and families cried when they heard of the tragedy and their tears are said to have turned into stone upon hitting the ground.

In early December we visited a site near Wickenburg, Arizona. It was a beautiful drive but we didn’t make any good finds. We spent most of the rest of December’s rockhounding adventures in the area around Tonopah, Arizona, looking for fire agates, Fourth of July Butte agates, and brightly colored jasper.

A Few Rockhounding Photos

Our poor pup Lola got very sick in early December. She was lethargic, had no appetite, and was running a fever. The vet ran some tests and she was diagnosed with Valley Fever, a fungal infection that dogs as well as humans sometimes get in the desert if you are unlucky enough to inhale the spores. Thankfully, after a few days of medication, she started doing much better. She still has a cough, but it will go away over time. She has to take medication for an entire year to prevent a relapse!

Around our neighborhood, I located what I named the “Poultry Epicenter,” which turned out to be basically about a block away. Tucked in amongst a few dead-end streets, I had just missed the source of the cock-a-doodle-doing until this time. There is a truly mind-boggling array of fowl in this neighborhood, including peafowl, guinea fowl, and literally hundreds of chickens in all colors and varieties. These are feral birds and they are supposedly protected and grandfathered in from when the area was a chicken and citrus farm many decades ago.

In addition to the Raices Taller show in September, I participated in a virtual exhibition with the Arizona Watercolor Association in November and in “Regalitos,” a second virtual exhibition with Raices Taller in December. I produced a variety of art over these few months which I have included below. Several pieces have sold but there are still a few treasures to be scored if you’re in the mood for art!

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September

October

November

December

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