Hiking and High Explosives

This has been an eventful weekend. We watched the demolition of the Asarco stacks on Saturday morning, went on a photography tour of Hueco Tanks that afternoon and watched the demolition of City Hall today. We took a lot of pictures this weekend. :)

This is how the smoke stacks looked before they fell. They had water cannons going at the bottom to keep the dust from spreading too far.

This is when the smaller one started to fall.

Then the main one started falling almost immediately afterwards.

It broke part way down. 

The huge cloud of dust that later blanketed downtown for a little while. I think it looks like a cloud fell from the sky.

After taking a little nap to recover from waking up at 4:30am to go see the demolition, we headed out to Hueco Tanks State Park for our tour. There are a lot of pictographs at the state park and it was really neat to go see them. We both had our cameras for this trip, so some pictures are mine and some are Robby's.

We actually got a picture together. :)

This was a neat flowering plant. It was great to go in the spring and see more color than usual in the desert.

 

This was a neat pictograph painted on the ceiling of a small cave. 

This was a horny toad we saw along the path. It was good enough to stand still for a long time to let everyone get a picture.

These fluffy seeds (or whatever they were) looked really neat with the back light.

These were in a cave with several mask like paintings.

This was a really neat pictograph and I love this picture, Robby took it.

Cactus flowers are pretty.

We had a pretty big group, 28 people total.

The hole in this stone was made by people using it as a mortar to grind stuff over a long period of time. Holes like these were common around the pictographs.

This was a neat cave we climbed into to see a couple of pictographs.

This one is known as the starry-eyed man for obvious reasons. It is the only one in the area that has the greenish paint.

This is a Mexican buckeye, apparently the seeds are poisonous, or at least our guide told us not to eat the tree. :)

Part of the park close to sunset.

More pretty cactus flowers, just don't get too close.

The sunset. It was a really cool tour and since it consisted of photographers, we walked about three miles in 3.5 hours. :) It really is like herding cats.

After getting home and eating a really late dinner, we crashed in preparation for getting up pretty early to see the next demolition in the weekend's lineup.

This is city hall, or it was city hall. It was demolished to make way for a ball park in the downtown.

  

We were all caught a bit by surprise when the explosions went off because it was a little sooner than they originally said. You can see some puffs of smoke from the initial explosives.

Then it only took a few seconds to crumble. It just folded in on itself.

There was another huge dust cloud but fortunately it blew right by the building we were standing on. We were wearing masks anyways, just in case.

This is all that was left after the smoke cleared. You can just see a man walking in front of the rubble. It was pretty amazing.

To end this epic weekend, here is a picture of our yard. :)