Word: sonoran
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Tucson, Arizona. In Arizona's Sonoran desert, at the foot of the Santa Catalina mountains, is the 80-acre Westward Look Resort. It was a working dude ranch in the 1940s and 50s, and is now an adobe-style hotel offering biking, hiking, horseback riding, tennis and a full-service spa. Through May, rates start at $199 per night, including breakfast. But if you can stand the blistering heat, check out the resort in summer, when rates dip to $89, including breakfast. 245 East Ina Road, Tucson...
...earn up to $60 a foot for a wild specimen, Wiedhopf says. The desert symbol grows slowly, about an inch a year - it can take six or seven decades for the saguaro cactus to grow an arm - and those 15-to-20-foot saguaros that dot the Sonoran desert can be over 200 years old. According to state law, any saguaro cactus over four feet tall cannot be moved from public or private land without a permit. To help prevent their removal, the Cactus Society has initiated talks with state and federal wildlife officials about implanting wild saguaros with memory...
...drives is $10,000 per week. Nearly every living thing either is venomous or has spines--or both--as we discovered when we spent two days at a CBP outpost called Camp Desert Grip. While exploring an ash-blackened waste of extinct volcanoes near the dead heart of the Sonoran Desert, we came across one of the many graves alongside a trail known as the Devil's Highway. Lava stones on the cindered earth spelled out 1871. Undisturbed 137 years later--that's how you know you've reached the middle of nowhere...
...right, because while the area is difficult to reach from the north, on the Mexican side, Highway 2 parallels the border within sight of the U.S. It's tempting to catch a ride out here and start walking. Indeed, so many people have died or approached death in the Sonoran Desert that the CBP has installed radio beacons with flashing lights on them for walkers in distress to summon help. A more primitive sos is also common: a creosote bush set on fire at night...
Still, a case could be made that Yuma Sector's fence is part of an overall strategy that is actually reducing the number of unprepared humans wandering in the Sonoran Desert. As agent Ben Vik explained, by eliminating banzai runs in Yuma and reducing vehicle traffic in the desert, the fence has cut illegal crossings to a level at which the judicial system in western Arizona can actually handle the number of illegal immigrants apprehended by border agents. Instead of loading people onto buses and sending them back to Mexico--after which many immediately try crossing again--authorities are taking...