Imagine taking a leap of faith 13,000 feet in the air out of a plane and free falling for 60 seconds at 150 mph. Yes, this is a sport and not for the faint of heart. It’s skydiving.

 SkyDive Arizona located in Eloy between Phoenix and Tucson is one of the biggest and busiest drop zone in the world. Over 100,000 jumps are made here each year.

 “The experience was like nothing I have ever felt. Looking through the window on the way up watching the ground getting farther and farther away. Then seeing the person in front of you just get sucked out of the plane,” said Kyle Flynn of Scottsdale about his first jump at SkyDive Arizona.

In 2012 34,800 men and women were members of the United Parachute Association and the numbers will continue to grow with the popularity of the sport. 

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(To view larger photos or video clips of barrel racing and team roping, click on the image during the slideshow)

It’s rodeo season again in Arizona and the Southwest.  That means heavy competition for thousands of athletes who strive to get the most points or the best time in their events to win cash prizes and hopefully move on to the regional and national finals.

Last month, Tucson held the 88^th Annual La Fiesta De Los Vaqueros, which is a nine day event and one of the top 25 professional rodeos in North America, according to the Tucson Rodeo’s official website. While attending the final day of this rodeo, patrons were overheard complaining of the size of the crowd, stating, “Seems like it gets worse every year.” In fact, this year’s rodeo had a record attendance, according to Dr. John Marchello, who coaches the University of Arizona rodeo team and has been a meat scientist at the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences since 1965.

 

[caption id="attachment_333" align="alignleft" width="500"]A healthy lunch option students should be eating. (Photo by Melissa from Flickr Creative Commons)[/caption] The meals and snacks offered to students in schools is an issue that has been changing and improving for decades.

Most recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed a new plan to eliminate junk food sold in schools.

This new plan proposed on Feb. 1, titled “Smart Snacks in Schools,” is a part of the government’s efforts to reduce childhood obesity under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA).

Author, educator, and nutrition coach Dayle Hayes has an overall positive felling about this new plan, but hopes that it doesn’t force people to focus only on the issue of childhood obesity, rather help them to focus on making all children healthy.

 

Remnants of Wright

The desert fascinated Frank Lloyd Wright. 

He once described the nature of Arizona as that of a “cry out for a space-loving architecture of its own.” He peeled back the flesh of saguaros to study their ribs, which would inspire him to invent his own support column design.

Wright left his fingerprints all across Arizona. He personally designed at least 26 projects in Arizona, with 17 of his designs recorded to have been built. However, only 11 built projects stand, all within the Phoenix area, while at least nine of his designs for Arizona have yet to come to fruition.

One of his designs, the David Wright house, located in Phoenix and named after his son, recently escaped an ominous fate.

 

New York World-Telegram & Sun dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.

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For a desert, Arizona has a lot of life. It is the inland state with the highest wildlife diversity and has one of the nation’s fastest growing human populations. The Wild West is not quite so wild anymore, and saguaros and suburbia do not make for happy neighbors. All that life has to live somewhere.

It is a tricky balance between wildlife conservation and urban development across the state, but the high biodiversity in Pima County makes the buzz all the louder.

A public meeting on Thursday, Feb. 21 invited the public to discuss Pima County’s Multi-Species Conservation Plan (MSCP), which tries to strike this balance through a permit under Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).