caracolina

Life after Work

Weekend Diversions

Salt River

We’ve been wanting to check out the Salt River area near Power Road/Bush Highway in Mesa ever since our Navajo weaving instructor Sharie mentioned it would be a good spot to harvest salt cedar sticks. We use these sticks as shuttles and shed sticks in our weaving because they are relatively thin and, most importantly, straight. Salt cedar or tamarisk (genus tamarix, family tamaricaceae) is a non-native and rather invasive shrub that grows along riverbeds here in the Southwest, so cutting their branches is not frowned upon. For no real good reason we had never been down to that area, although (as we found out today) it is very pretty. However… we didn’t find any salt cedar. We even asked some National Forest folks (the parking lots, picknick tables, etc are part of Tonto National Forest) and they couldn’t help us. Oh well, we had a nice time just getting out early and checking out the place. I hope we can come back some time and picknick down here.

Later today we took a look around historic downtown Glendale. Years ago, we visited some of the “antique” shops there, which I enjoyed, and since I’m looking for a few “old-fashioned” items I thought it would be fun to go back. Sadly, a number of them have since closed down and not a lot of them are open on Sundays during Summer, and to top it off – a lot of what they sell nowadays isn’t really old, it just looks old. But, we still had a good time and a nice chat with a lady in one of the stores.

RSS 2.0 | Trackback | Comment

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>