Travel Review: The Arizona Challenge

Contents

• Travel Location; Country, etc.
• Photos;
• Overall Review of the Trip and Travel Agency;
• Overall Review of Attractions, Accommodations, and, Restaurants;
• Most Enjoyable and/or Memorable Moments;
• If Trip were Taken Again, What Would I Do Differently;

The migratory ibis finds their next meal in marshed-out farmland in Buckeye, Arizona.

Alright, so it isn’t a real challenge. Yet. But in a nutshell:

In a dozen or so, short days, June will begin to bake Arizona in a daily maximum temperature between 102 and 106 degrees Fahrenheit (about 40 centigrade), according to Current Results. The hottest it has ever gotten in the Phoenix area was June 26, 1990, when it reached a fever-pitch of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. As June turns to July, who knows how hot it will get.

Now here’s the challenge: I’m going to attempt to survive these high temperatures after lived in two, relatively cool, places: New York and Colorado. According to Google, the July average max and the record highest temperatures in these locations are respectively 85/106 and 92/100. As I begin to write this first installment in this first series, I’ve never had to experience such temperature as those Arizona threatens, and I’m already wiping sweat from my face and neck.

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Buckeye, Arizona, United States of America

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Photo Gallery and More coming in Late August, Early September following this particular Trip. Until then, here are some Quick Facts About Buckeye:

Quick Facts

From Wikipedia:

Buckeye is a city in Maricopa County, Arizona and is the westernmost suburb in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The population was estimated at 68,453 in 2017.^[5] It is one of the fastest-growing cities in the US; in 2016, it placed seventh.

The canal for which the city, then town, became legally named in 1910.

Early settler Malie M. Jackson developed 10 miles (16 km) of the Buckeye Canal from 1884 to 1886, which he named after his home state of Ohio’s moniker, “The Buckeye State”. The town was founded in 1888 and originally named “Sidney,” after Jackson’s home town in Ohio. However, because of the significance of the canal, the town became known as Buckeye. The name was legally changed to Buckeye in 1910.

In 2008, Buckeye was featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as part of a week-long series entitled “Blueprint America.”

A vote to change the town into the City of Buckeye became effective in 2014.

In November 2017, media outlets reported that a company associated with billionaire Bill Gates purchased 24,800 acres (100 km²) between Buckeye and Tonopah for $80 million. Gates’s company plans to create a “smart city” called Belmont on the site.

Geography

Buckeye is located approximately 30 miles (48 km) west of downtown Phoenix.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 145.8 square miles (377.6 km²), all of it land.

Climate

Buckeye has a hot desert climate, with abundant sunshine due to the stable descending air of the eastern side of the subtropical anticyclone aloft and at sea level over the southwestern United States. Summers, as with most of the Sonoran Desert, are extremely hot, with 121.0 afternoons reaching 100 °F or 37.8 °C and 181.6 afternoons getting to 90 °F or 32.2 °C. The record high temperature of 125 °F (51.7 °C) occurred on July 28, 1995, and temperatures above 86 °F or 30 °C may occur in any month.

Notable people

• Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), author of The Jungle (1906), The Fasting Cure (1911), and others – Late in life Sinclair, with his third wife Mary Willis, moved to Buckeye, Arizona.

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From One Border Patrol Agents’ Perspective

Earlier today, I was offered a ride from an off-duty Border Patrol agent. Naturally, I accepted, in exchange for an interview.

His name was “Jeff” for the purposes of this aside. Before Border Patrol, Jeff worked as a corrections officer. For him, two very different jobs.

Jeff had an unheard of three day weekend in the first time in a long time. For the past four years, he has been working over 50 hours a week, not including the hour and a half commute both ways. Ten-hour shifts are mandatory for Border Patrol agents and the need now for so much of their time isn’t surprising.

This may be the last scheduled three-day weekend Jeff gets in a long while. I say this because the current administration is asking for above and beyond from agents on the ground. And the need is there.

Due to a number of factors in Central and South America, there’s a crisis at borders where some peace may be found. Most notably of course, we’re talking about the United States.

President Donald Trump has called migrants, who’ve trekked thousands of miles for safety, an “invasion.” His language has been less around a humanitarian crisis currently happening and more about a white separatist border crisis.

Jeff, having served years in Arizona as a corrections officer, didn’t want to talk about Trump and his policies of racism.

Last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), only about 26,000 migrants were processed. This year, according to Arizona Republic report, with already more than 27,000 migrant families processed in the Yuma Sector in this first fiscal quarter, agents like Jeff are working almost four times as hard.

For this administration, that isn’t enough. And we all know what happens when fast food workers are overworked and underpaid. So the struggle in Yuma at the moment is just that.

Thankfully, Jeff reported a decent paycheck. For his experience in corrections, his take home was about $40/hour. However, not everyone may be so fortunate and funding only goes so far.

Earlier this month, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristjen Nielsen, left Yuma Border Patrol with a promise. They needed more resources and she was to deliver. That was until the White House called down the line: break the law, do what you have to, and also, everyone who made promises to CBP is fired.

Now agents like Jeff are taking what time away they can get, because there’s a lot of work to be done.

Late last month, Border Patrol gave Yuma nonprofits a full day’s notice that they were releasing migrant families in droves into the desert community, without direction, guidance, or food, up to 200 a day.

The Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona of Yuma, the Yuma Community Food Bank, the Salvation Army, and the Red Cross, since the month began has had little time to develop a massive response. Their goal: to feed, house, educate, and better direct people in a country that is alien, a language that is foreign, and customs that border on edgy in many spheres.

Hopefully, with a change of pace in the White House come 2020, the American response to refugees will greatly improve. Jeff needs it. Migrant families need it. And even this rapper has called for it in 2016:

So why all the refugees, you wonder?

Late last year, it was being published that an unseen driver behind the current Central American refugee crisis was climate change, which affected food security. This was, of course, underpinning a crisis in their corrupt, violent, and gang-run governments.

This was one woman’s story in the New York Times.

Yet, this massive exodus for survival is nothing new. On Amnesty International’s website on the subject, the human rights organization reiterated the 2014 findings of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. According to those UNHCR findings, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama have seen a 432% increase in asylum applications.

Last summer, TIME’s headline said it well:

‘There Is No Way We Can Turn Back.’ Why Thousands of Refugees Will Keep Coming to America Despite Trump’s Crackdown

Organizations such as Amnesty International have been working on issues like these around the world for years. So while the current administration might be clueless as to solutions, the Washington Post, among many individuals and orgs, proffer their own.