Lake Mary Walkabout

On our first full day of camping, we decided to go on a little explore of the surrounding area. We'd never been in this part of Arizona before, so it was fun to poke around. About 4 miles from our campsite is Lake Mary. As you can see, it's not very wide:

It is, however, really long. As in, six miles long. Imagine driving for six miles, with a lake by your side the entire time. It was really amazing.

This is where it curves to the, um, south I think.

This is the dam that brings upper Lake Mary to a halt:

From here, if I turn myself to the right and this is what I see:

This little marshy area goes on for another mile or two, before you get to lower Lake Mary which is another 2 miles long.

Do you see the natural levy in that picture? On the other side of that is this ancient-looking cabin:

So cool. I love little things like that.

Between the upper and lower lakes, there was a turn off for a dirt road. It had a little inconspicuous sign, with a mile marker for a campground, and then something else. "Lowell Observatory NPOI 2 miles" it read. (Okay, I don't remember how many miles, exactly, but you get the idea.)

We knew Lowell Observatory was up in Flagstaff, so we decided to find out what this was. We took the steep, winding road up the mountain, all the while trying to figure out what NPOI stood for.

"National Point of Interest?" Brian suggested.

I shrugged. Sounded good to me.

Well, we get there and this is what we see:

Several little observatories, all fenced off:

At the end of the road (paved within the compound) was this:

Now, early in our marriage, I would have been frantically pestering Brian to get out of an area that's clearly not open to the public. Several years ago, I would have been nervous about getting in trouble, but would've kept my mouth shut cuz he just ignores stuff like that anyway. By now, I think of it as an adventure. In fact, when we saw a worker in a separate area watching us suspiciously, I encouraged Brian to go talk to her, and take John with him.






They ended up right next to the fence and talked to this lady for quite a while. Turns out, NPOI stands for Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer. (Say that five times fast.)



This is an outpost of Lowell Observatory and one of the things they do is maintain an accurate measuring of the stars for use in Naval navigation. This naval observatory is also in charge of setting the world clock. How cool is that? They do plenty of your normal scientific studying as well.



See those big pipes in the picture? There were four of them all in a row (you can only see the front one) and they're really long. Parts of the pipes are called delays. Little mirrors pop up from them. They use optical waves instead of radio waves, and all this is linked to Lowell.



No, I don't really understand all this, especially since that's the extent of my notes. You can go to the NPOI website for more info, but it's pretty technical. Turns out (looking at their map) we could only see a tiny part of this compound from the road. And the pipes are tiny when compared to the pipes in their three-armed array.

This is the view on the way back down (see the road that goes next to Lake Mary?).

And looking in the other direction...

Here's a view of the lake on our way back to the campsite. The angle of the sun made this so pretty:

On our way back, Brian suddenly says "Big Foot crossing!" and starts to turn the car around.

"What the?" I think.

Here's what he saw:

Big white footprints leading from the forest to the lake. Here's a close up of the set going in the opposite direction:

Funny. Now, if I had been thinking at all, I would have waited for a break in traffic, plopped my foot on top of this and taken a picture. How cool would that have been, I ask you?? But I didn't think of that until I was downloading these pics a week later. Grrr!!

What I did do is lean my head out my side of the car, and take a picture of this:

Ah well. These little beauties deserve their moment of glory too.