Rob Davenport, my wife and I went out to the Rincon mountains for a study on watersheds and the potential hazards they pose to the local desert landscape.  In case you are not familiar with this location, it required a small road trip East of Tucson on I10 to Mescal road.  From I10, we headed North on Mescal until the paved road turned to dirt, and then continued on.  Down a quite windy road through a beautiful pass between mountains, we passed many turnoffs for campers and trail heads for hikers.  After about 16 miles since I10 we slowed up to the miller creek trail head.  Miller creek is a desolate trail with beautiful green foliage and the sound of water run off in the distance.  Through our journey up the mountain we discovered some amazing geology and catastrophic after effects of rock falls, which can be seen in the pictures.  This hike was originally intended to transport and use the department’s LIDAR scanner to conduct 3d image capturing of the watersheds of the area surrounding the Rincon summit to be able to identify potential hazards based on rock type and interpolation of the recorded 3d map.  The LIDAR scanner did malfunction before our trip, so the trip was morphed into an experience of visual interpretation of the geological landscape from the viewer, and LIDAR testing is now going to be scheduled for some time in the near future.  So look out for when we are going to go again, we would like to have you and it will be an amazing experience of world class Geo-mechanics!

-Brian Gary