Earthwalk Day 1405 (28 November 2025), 14,236 km: Mount Graham International Observatory

Happy Thanksgiving! Before making the turkey and the pumpkin pie and the roasted carrots and the gravy (my son made the rest) I got out for a walk and it took me to the end of Leg 54.

Destination… an (wait for it…) an observatory. Mount Graham International Observatory. Are you getting sick of observatories yet? Tough. This is Arizona.

Mount Graham is the home of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the big one, the Large Binocular Telescope. The latter consists of two telescopes which share second place among the largest optical telescopes in continental North America, and when used in combination they have the largest effective aperture of any telescope in the world.

It’s big.

I’m 3 km into Leg 55 now. Don’t expect Street View images for a while. As close as I am to Tucson, this is pretty much roadless territory and I’ll be on hiking trails a lot of the time.

Snowstorm in tomorrow’s forecast, might not get far. Maybe I’ll stay home and eat pie.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 32.695°N, 109.907°W.