tomorrow's important, but...

(comic/hiking photos/mid-20th-c. history/Hirabayashi/conscientious objectors/mountain highway)

So, tomorrow is The Inauguration. There are quasi-messianic airs about it.

I wonder, (as a high-school-teacher), how many teenagers will be following the day's events, and if so, how many of them will be multitasking as they do so: I thought the above cartoon from yesterday's paper summed up nicely the vastly different way that today's under-25-crowd takes in information...

...and how many of the over-25-crowd find it weird? or normal?

Are YOU a 'digital native,' or a 'digital immigrant?'

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I had today off, so I introduced a friend to Mount Lemmon.

This friend, although having lived here for three years now, had never taken the Catalina Highway up to its 9000-ft. end. So I took him up the road...

Despite the temperatures being in the mid-40's, a bit of snow remains on top...

...including enough for the ski resort to be in operation, even though the high just down the road in Tucson today was 80 (!) degrees...

Speaking of the weather, incidentally--my recent small thrill this past week was that I had a photo "published" on one of the local TV stations' evening news (www.kgun9.com) ; I didn't even see it, but a friend alerted my wife that she had seen a 'weather photo' with my name on TV! I'm not sure exactly which photo it was, but it was one of the ones I posted in the previous blog entry, showing San Xavier Mission in the afternoon sun...

Back to today, then...

Said friend also hadn't a chance to go on a hike in a while, so we thought we'd do a relatively easy trail--about 5 miles at a lower elevation, below the forest-level, in the grassland/juniper/oak zone that is just too hot to hike during the summer months. The trail we took ended up being a segment of the Arizona trail, a system of marked paths that goes from Mexico to Utah.

...a bit hard to make out the map on this trail sign, but take a look at the color of the sky;

a true balm for January-eyes...(even though it's my second winter in Tucson, I'm still amazed at the climate...)

So, hilly grassland with the occasional dead oak...
...leading finally to this riparian area with a man-made waterfall. The dam was built to form a reservoir to supply water to a (minimum-security) prison camp in the early-20th century, which is today the site of a campground.
Hmm...I forgot to take a photo of the remains of the prison, even though our hiking trail began there, before we stopped to have lunch at a spot overlooking this peaceful, well-watered canyon...

Today, only the foundations of the prison camp remain. It was built just before World War II...and then during the war, it served as an internment camp for some of the Japanese-Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes and businesses all over the United States, including Gordon Hirabayashi, for whom today's campground is named. (click here for a link from the University of Washington with more information.)

Also imprisoned at this site during the war were conscientious objectors, such as Hopi Indians and Jehovah's Witnesses.

In 1947, President Truman pardoned the conscientious objectors, but it wouldn't be until 1988 that the U.S. government would officially apologize to the Japanese-Americans for their internment...

During eleven of the years that the prison camp operated, 8000 prisoners worked for eleven years to construct the 25-mile highway that leads from Tucson up to the cool forested peaks of Mt. Lemmon. (It was completed in 1951.)

And that's today's history-factoid, all found out from our five-mile hike.

Who knew that Tucson's 'back-yard-mountain'-access was made possible, in part, by the U.S. Justice System's less-than-ideal handling of Japanese-Americans, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Hopi, among others?