Catalina State Park - A Brief Look

Catalina State Park is one of the wonderful State Parks in Arizona. There are a lot of hiking trails in the park of various lengths and difficulty. The park and trails get a lot of use from bike riders to hikers. The RV sites are well spaced with a lot of room between most of them. They only have water and electric at their sites with centrally located dump station facilities available to get rid of waste water from your trailer holding tanks.

This is a map showing the location of Catalina State Park. It is just north of Tucson located in an area called Oro Valley. The park is nestled up against the Catalina Mountains.

This image was taken at our campsite and if you look around you might see birds hiding in the bushes and dry grasses. They can be difficult to spot.

The one hiding in the grasses in the image above came out and it is a Greater Roadrunner. We saw them in several places and we heard the coyotes almost every night but did not see them chasing the road runner.

As we had mentioned earlier there are a lot of trails to hike in Catalina State Park. This is a one mile purportedly easy hike through some ruins left by the Hohokam Native American many, many years ago.

This was a neat sign at the start of the trail. We saw many lizards along the trail but we are not sure if we saw a Spiny Lizard. They are really neat desert critters.

It was wonderful to see this group of young school children out on a tour along the trail. There was a State Park Guide who was teaching them about the Hohokam ruins and the desert environment. It seemed to be an active, student participation exercise where they were asked probing questions about the surroundings and the flora and fauna. It was also refreshing to see no smart phones in use by any student.

Unfortunately none of the literature we had read mentioned any stairs. There were lots of them and Yogi, our older Westie, had some difficulty navigating them going up. At one point, most of the way up. Deanna had to carry him from there to the top. He did really well going down the stairs probably like the old horse heading back to the barn, they can go very fast.

Once up the stairs you are on kind of a plateau and you can see the mountains rising beyond. It is great country with open vistas in all directions.

There was a variety of cactus along the trail. Here is a barrel cactus.

This ruin was not from the Hohokam Native Americans that lived here from about 1100-1250 rather from a rancher that was in the area in the early 1900s. The enclosures left over from the Hohokam were largely piles of rocks and not really very discernible as dwellings. We think this small structure was one of the earlier “Tiny Houses” albeit without the conveniences of running water and air conditioning. It looks to be a tough place to live.

This is very nice Saguaro Cactus specimen. It is large with many arms and appeared to be in great condition.

We are now back down off the trail, Yogi has successfully maneuvered the steps to get back to the truck and we are all safe and sound.

This is a Verdin, a small bird seen quite frequently in the southwest. The dark spot that you see on the shoulder is actually red in color. The shadows from the trees muted the colors. You can see several oranges cut in half and skewered onto the branches of the tree. The Verdin and many other birds love to eat the pulp and sweet juice from the oranges.

There are no instructions as to how to use the hummingbird feeder and this Verdin is trying to figure out how to get to all the sugar water. We are not sure why he has chosen this approach as at other times they readily fed from the feeder.

We saw several different butterflies while at Catalina State Park. This shows the top side of an Empress Leilia or Leilia hackberry butterfly. This was the very first visitor to the oranges that we put in the trees. It is amazing to us how quickly they can find the oranges. Several of them were in at one time feeding on the orange juice.

If we thought birds were hard to identify, we get quickly and easily confused with butterflies. This image shows the same Empress Leilia sitting in the same location as in the image above but with its wings folded so you see the underside of the wings. There is quite a difference in appearance.

This was just a fun image we had taken earlier, at a different location, of a bird called a Grebe with a fish. We think it is a Clark’s Grebe but in the area where the picture was taken there are both Western and Clark Grebes and during the winter months the visual differences between the two can be quite subtle and indistinguishable. In a Clark’s Grebe the line of the black cap goes above the eye and in the Western the black cap goes below the eye but during winter plumage this distinction is not reliable. The fishing appears to be good.

We hope you enjoyed the brief tour around a small part of Catalina State Park. It is a fascinating place and quite heavily used by daily visitors not just us campers. It is after all close to Tucson.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. All the best – George & Deanna