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Imagining the Sonoran Desert. Well,that's pretty hard to do. You just have to go there. Get out of the air-conditioned rental and walk off into the desert.

All I can do here is maybe encourage you to go and experience the Sonora. Several locations are mentioned by way of describing the photos:
Saguaro National Monument West, Tucson AZ
Wilcox Playa, high Sonoran Desert, east of Tucson on the way to the Chiracahua Mts.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the AZ/Mexican border, US side
Pinacate Wilderness on the Mexican/AZ border, Mexican side.

Ah, the cacti. Organ pipes, Saguaro ["so-whar-row"], Senita to the south on into Mexico and Cholla ["choy-ya"]. Desert critters abound.

A friend who knows both places once observed the wildlife diversity in just the US Sonora is probably equal to the Florida Everglades.

1. The Senita cactus occurs in the US only in the lowest elevations of the southernmost canyons, valleys, and basins in the Sonora. It's more common as you go into the heart of the desert into Mexico. This Senita was photographed in the Pinacate Wilderness of Mexico -- an area known for its volcanic craters. The black ground is pumice. I liked the exposed dead ribs amongst the living cacus.

Compare the Senita to the Organ Pipe and you'll just a few ridges [4-9] here; the Organ Pipe has many more.

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The photographs in this online exhibit were taken by T.Carrolan, your web host, between 1988 & 1991 using Minolta 35mm cameras. The transparencies were transferred onto PhotoCD in 1996.

This, and future, exhibits will be handled more like a slide show than the usual web photo display. Instead of showing you thumbnails and then linking to a windowful of image taking forever to draw down, I'm going to show you one image at a time. That one image at a time will be about half-screen size but at the highest quality JPEG resolution. Hopefully you have more than 256 colors for viewing.

I've done quite a few slide shows and only one gallery showing, so that's the format for presentation I most comfortable with.

These are progressive JPEGs, that is they will not only advance line by line with Netscape Navigator 3.x/Communicator 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x, but they'll also "crystallize" into focus in a series of steps. Like an interlaced GIF.

Enjoy.