The SECRETS of Colossal Cave's JOB Offer

Got a whale of a tale to tell you lads....  This one HURT.  With wandering awe we finished our trip from Orlando to Vale, Arizona, and met Colossal Cave Mountain Park.  The spirit of this cactus-covered land was pure peace and inspiration.  The pictures are of our temporary parking spot at the first camp site.   Even though we'd been offered the camp host position a month ago, the existing 5th wheel on the site had not been moved and the road had not been graded (anywhere in the campground) so we couldn't drive up to the host site anyway.

Then we met our boss...the wonderful Martie Maierhauser, who had been overseeing the park for 50 years.  She lost her husband, Joe, in 2008... but he still had a strong presence and even a desk in the main office.  Martie explained the rare beauty and biological diversity of the park, and its fascinating history.  But we soon found we had a problem:  There was no vehicle to help us do our job.  The sizable distances between the 3 camping areas, the ranch, and the cave (high up on the side of a cliff) made it out of the question to manage the area on foot.  And the RV could not travel the washed out, rocky roads.  We decided to visit Tucson while Martie saw what she could do about preparing the host site.  We started with the Pima Air and Space Museum.  They were having a marvelous educational event centered on a paper airplane competition.

All of the kids had a cool shirt that said, "I folded, I flew, I made history".  But I was looking for my favorite:  the SR-71. 

So...I couldn't get even half of this stealth machine in the picture frame...so I tried making a movie.

I found out all of Arizona is in the middle of a SciTech Festival.  I just adore the "doing" of science.  There's even an Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” Symposium next month at this museum.

We walked through the 5 giant hangers with our mouths open.  The interactive displays were phenomenal with excellent histories, photos of the planes in action and actual period artifacts.

This NASA Aero Spacelines 377-SG Super Guppy was my favorite.   It was built big to move segments of rockets, including much of the Saturn rocket that powered the Apollo Program.

We walked our legs off and then went back in the main hangar to check out how the paper airplane races were going.

We had walked ourselves numb, so Bob took a nap out in the RV.  He suddenly woke up and said, "Let's go see my childhood friend, Justin Schmidt."  I had no idea who that might be, but we headed across Tucson to find him.

 

It turned out he's Dr. Justin O. Schmidt, a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson.  He studies apiculture- the science of beekeeping- with an emphasis on bee nutrition, chemical communication, physiology, ecology and behavior of bees.  And his wife, Li, is a very talented doctor, a Family Practice Physician with 14 years business, and about to open her own practice.  They are both fascinating to listen to.   Justin has ongoing experiments right in his backyard.  They are both celebrities in their fields and in our eyes, certainly.  They are generous, very kind people. Their two sons are extremely bright and original...and well loved.  Click here to read an article by Scientific American Frontiers about Justin.