Tucson, Arizona | Snyder Hill

I have been camping at a patch of BLM land in South Tucson (corner of San Joaquin and Route 86) with a friend who has just left for San Carlos, Mexico.  We have been getting ready to go, and she wanted to leave sooner than I was able to.  I'm still waiting for the renewal of my truck registration. 

 

This is the San Xavier Mission just south of where we're camped.  It's very impressive, but still being restored. 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of our sunsets consist of a beautiful glow in the western sky.  One night we got some storm clouds to make things interesting.  The first is actually opposite of the sunset, but we still get color there.

 

 

 

 

This is a shot the day before full moon.  We have a very interesting backdrop of rocks with some nests that we think are hawks, but we never saw them close enough and when we had the binoculars out, they were shy.

 

San Xavier Mission at Tucson, Arizona

 



I love old buildings and this mission was first started in the 1600s, but was finished in the 1700s.   They are doing restoration on it, you can see the left side has been beautifully restored and they will be working on the other side soon.  The photo below shows the inside of the main church area, which they are working on - you can see the scaffolding up near the altar.  There were some alcoves off the main area containing statues, candles and the like.



 

 

You can see from the outside view that there is a large dome, and the view of the inside of the dome is found in the photo below.  This dome is intricately decorated and contains four windows.  

 

 

This building is massive and has been built to withstand any type of weather.   As you can see from the photo below, the walls of this window area are about 3 feet thick.  From information contained inside the museum, we found out that the walls in the main towers are 6 feet thick.  



 

 

We wandered around the grounds, and found one of my favorite little critters, the roadrunner - beep, beep.  He hung around quite a while and I got to take lots of photos of him.

 



 

We then went on to other adventures for that day, which will be in my next blog.