Our Desert

Meredith and Harry took a lot of desert pictures while they were here and described it as "beautiful." The desert is beautiful, but nothing like the scenery back East. Living here, we never really take our camera into town to capture our landscape. One of the nice things about visitors is that they see things for the first time you look at everyday. Here's some of the scenery from the Yuma Proving Ground area.

Enough said...and yes, these signs are found in many places.

Our Saguaro Cactus, native only in the U.S. to Arizona

Sand dunes just to the west of Yuma...this is where they filmed all of the Star Wars movie desert scenes. The Imperial Soldiers on the movie get their name from the "Imperial Sand Dunes National Recreation Area" and the fact it's called Imperial County, California.

More of the rocky desert

Can we say only on a military base??

This tank park also greets you as you arrive at YPG. YPG is the testing headquarters for the tanks and bombs. What better place than the desert to drive around and blow things up, right?? All of the military vehicles are tested here at YPG, and any of the ones causing problems overseas are evaluated, fixed, and tested again. For example, one of the desert vehicles was top heavy and flipping over in Iraq. It ended up killing some of our soldiers, so that is one of the vehicles that is being driven around here constantly, as engineers try to redesign it. No, there is no tank company or other Infantry company stationed here. All of this is done by civilian contractors. One of our new neighbors, though, is the Batallion Commander for this group (he's a colonel). He told us that he has around 12 military personnel and 1700 civilians working for him.

Views from our house (outside of the gate)

Entrance to Yuma Proving Ground...people get nervous when we tell them, "Turn at the cannons," thinking they will miss them. As you can see, you can't miss these cannons! They are on both sides of the road as an unofficial welcome :) I'd say there's no question you've arrived at a military base.

Not Iraq, but an Iraqi village...they train the military dogs (all branches of service) here at YPG, and in their training, they have this Iraqi village setup. The dogs learn how to do their jobs in this setup before they are deployed overseas with their trainer. This is a "no access" area just down from the dropzone, about 10 minutes from the housing part of post.

Ocotillo Cactus (it blooms in the winter and is really pretty)

This is out near the drop zone, about 10 minutes from the civilized areas of post. You can see they guys jumping don't have a nice white sand to land in. Instead, it's this rocky desert terrain.

Pretty normal site around here

We love the cactus.