Happy trails in Tucson

Originally uploaded by benho.

Happy trails in Tucson (which I always always spell wrong). Conference was fun, exhilerating, exciting, reminded me again why I love my job, came in 4th in the poker tournament. My talk (as expected) was sparsely attended and my lack of practice showed, overly fast, and not polished, no great crowd response but lots of good individual positive feedback after, but went well. I discussed well too I think.

But the hike is the subject of this post. So I skipped out early from the last session, grabbed my camera and set off alone into the desert. Under the beating sun, the imposing alien cactus, weird half naked backpackers but mostly alone, and once I got into it, surrounded at every step with a myriad of life which I'm normally way too obtuse to notice (I bet it's the jigsaw puzzles, elevated my powers of observation; or R-'s influence), but lots of butterflies of different colors, beatles, funcitoning crazy koyanisqatsi style ant colonies, birds, lizards, various metallic crickets/grasshoppers, a frog maybe. Cacti that would embed their hidden prickers into my skin (that was less fun). Beautiful vistas. Reminders of Dark Sun. Getting lost and moments of adrenaline filled panic. Capturing the perfect shot. Envelopped and alone in nature.