This week on Arizona Illustrated Take a trip to Picacho Peak for wildflower season.

Picacho Peak State Park is one of the best place to view the Mexican gold poppies and on a great year, It just blankets the mountain.

It's just a total blanket of yellow.

A local chef with an unlikely resume is a semifinalist for a 2023 James Beard Award.

And I got fired two times from Chipotle.

And then I got the rice.

And then this rice has Turmeric.

That's why it's yellow, because we like turmeric Here at Tumerico, we like turmeric.

And remembering the King of Sting, Justin Schmidt.

I think I got the moniker King of Sting because, well, I've been stung by more things than anybody else.

I was trying to get enough data to support or reject my hypothesis that the sting was important in the evolution sociology.

When they stings I say, holy cow, that would kill a cow.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

The 2022 2023 winter season has been colder and wetter than we've experienced in recent years.

In fact, it's been raining outside and even snowing, and that's why we're filming this episode indoors.

But all this rain should lead to an abundant wildflower season.

There are many great places to see them across Arizona, like Catalina State Park.

But Picacho Peak may be the most popular destination, and in 2023, they're expecting a superbloom similar to the one from 2019.

In this video we're showing you now, if you decide to go see them for yourself, prepare to expect lines at the park.

Please don't pick the flowers and remember to stay on the trail.

But Picacho Peak is more than just a place to see wildflowers.

Here's our story from 2017 that explores the geology, ecology and history of this unmistakable landmark.

I think it's beautiful.

I've always been intrigued by the cactus and the nature, and we just love to be outside.

Look at the other ones.

I like the nature.

It's really nice and the hikes are really difficult.

In the spring.

Usually there's breezes like this and it's very nice and refreshing.

Hello, sir.

How are you today?

Name is Robert Young.

I am the park manager of Picacho Peak State Park.

With the being the main corridor with the interstate here is the way to Phoenix or Tucson, were a little island If you look at it through the pass here of just the perfect example of Sonoran Desert, the park offers course unique shape of the the mountain and the geological aspect of that.

But you have the the great Sonoran Desert environment here and in the springtime you can have the Mexican gold poppies and Picacho Peak State Park is one of the best places to view the Mexican gold poppies.

And in a great year, it just blankets the mountain.

It's just a total blanket of yellow.

Well, for me, we were driving by to Tucson and I couldn't take my eyes off it, and I kept taking pictures out the window and I told my husband, we've got to go back there and go hiking.

And today was the day I just said, We're going.

So anybody who's hiking up this trail to Picacho Peak, you know, you don't want to be spending all your time thinking about how tired you are.

You want to look down and look at gas bubbles, fossil gas bubbles and the volcanic material, and then the gas came out of these bubbles, leaving holes, that is we call them vesicles.

Geologists would never just simply call them holes.

You need a fancier term.

Vesicles.

My name is George Davis.

I'm a Regents Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, Department of Geosciences.

Arrived there in 1970, right out of grad school.

There was a time where the geological word on Picacho Peak was that it was the throat of a volcano preserved like a big spine, like conduit to the surface.

Enter geological mapping.

It turns out that can't be supported.

Instead, Picacho peak is made of flows that are now tilted on its other side and the volcano that erupted through these flows was located ten kilometers away.

Very important part of the story of Picacho Peak is that the rocks were standing on on Picacho Peak are way out of place.

They were originally formed as lava flows on the other side of Picacho Mountain.

How can we be certain that there's a link between the two?

Well, we have a dotted line that connects the two mountains.

One of the dots is that island of dark rock, where I'm pointing right now.

And the other is the little, almost looks like a fortress on that ridge top in the far distance.

Those are volcanic rocks that were folded.

Part of the way to Picacho, but not all the way.

So it's almost like the breadcrumbs we're talking about that left a bit of a trail that causes us to conclude these rocks started out way over there.

So we have Picacho Mountain.

We have Picacho Peak.

Almost no one looks at Picacho Mountain because Picacho Peak is so interesting as a landform.

We're talking many years ago here, but approximately 1500 years ago, this area, this environment was completely different.

Where it was a farming community for that Hohokam Indians.

There was actually some running water and so forth.

So the history of this area does date back to earlier Native American with the hohokam.

Throughout history, you know, the peak itself, Picacho Peak was a landmark throughout time.

Behind me, you'll see the monument for the Mormon battalion.

The monument was erected in their honor for several things.

The Mormon battalion was contracted by the US government in the 1840s to construct a road through the Pass Picacho pass, becoming the main corridor as it is today.

Not only did construct that road, but they they camped here as well.

And there are journeys to California.

Ready...Fire one of the special events at Picacho Peak State Park is our annual event called Civil War in the Southwest.

That is a reenactment of the engagement of the Civil War battle that took place here.

We also add to New Mexico to our territory battles as well, and we see on average 200 plus re-enactors that come out to participate for that weekend.

So we see generally 32 to 4500 spectators come out for that event.

My name is Lester.

I'm a volunteer maintenance volunteer here at Picacho Peak State Park.

We love to camp.

My wife and I raised our kids in the campground.

This is a way to give back for all that.

We like to talk.

We love people.

And just to get out in God's creation and see the beauty in the United States.

I hate to be disparaging, but the drive from Phoenix to Tucson or Tucson to Phoenix, it's not very exciting geologically.

There's a lot of alluvium there.

And what makes Picacho Peak so fascinating as a landmark?

It's something to look at along the way, and it is so strong and resistant to erosion that it's held out much longer than the other rocks that were here at one time.

I started out Picacho back in the eighties and Ive been going on since then.

I like to come up at least a couple times a year.

Oftentimes more than that in the springtime.

And I like the challenge and I love coming out when the wildflowers are in bloom.

Beautiful.

I've been here approximately ten times.

It's fabulous.

It's challenging.

Makes me feel alive.

It's good to know at my age I can do it.

And I get to tell everybody about it and show them the pictures.

How old are you?

I'm 73.

My name is David Holmes And I am five years old.

Keep walking real easy and hard because the rocks are slippery and you have to climb up em.

I did like when we first got here, all those stairs.

Majestic, challenging, fabulous, beautiful, rewarding, inspiring and just blessed to be able to do this.

And fun.

Every year, the James Beard Foundation celebrates and elevates the people behind America's food culture with the prestigious James Beard Award in 2022.

Tucson favorite Don Guerra of Barrio Bred won the outstanding Baker category in the semifinalists for the 2023 awards were just announced.

And Wendy Garcia, the chef behind local vegan Mexican restaurant Tumerico, was nominated as best chef in the Southwest.

Here's a 2019 profile we did on Wendy's unlikely path to success.

- My first restaurant was, it was a Hometown Buffet back in the day, the one on Oracle and River.

And I was, as a dishwasher, I was washing dishes there.

(pensive string music) I even worked at Taco Bell, too.

Chipotle, yeah.

And I got fired two times at Chipotle.

(laughing) Yeah.

They measure everything, and they just want you to measure little things and like, you have to like, follow the recipes and you have to do what they tell you to do and I think I don't like that.

(knives chopping) We are in Tucson, Arizona, at Tumerico.

We make experiments, food experiments here.

With a lot of spices and fresh ingredients.

I know a lot of people, they don't handle spicy very well, but they need it, so I throw a little bit in there.

I'll try to make a lot of food for you.

Today we just gonna keep it simple, we makin' a little salsa for our carne asada tacos that we're gonna make.

The chilis sometimes are a little bitter, so mesquite flour is really smooth, and I like the flavor a lot, so it'll be creamy.

These are the Tumerico carnitas, they're made of jackfruit, we made them here.

And then, this is jackfruit carnitas right here.

(pan sizzling) I love nopalitos!

'Cause they're everywhere here!

And they're super good for you!

I like hot food.

Cooking, it's a part of me.

It's been on my family for generations.

My dad was a big eater, he loved food and my grandma loved food.

I grew up eating, like, meat, like really good quality meat back in the day, so one of the reasons that I became vegan 'cause I move here when I was 17 and I start getting fat and very unhealthy, and I just didn't like it.

So I, at one point I realized that it was the food, it was like, all these fried foods.

I mean, it tastes delicious, but it's not good for you.

So I got my tortillas going, we use corn tortillas.

GMO-free corn, 'cause everybody gets crazy.

All the chilies that we did, so we gonna use that salsa for our carne asada tacos.

This is just spinach and veggies that we just got here this morning with a little bit of balsalmic.

Then I got the rice, and then this rice has turmeric, that's why it's yellow, 'cause we like turmeric here at Tumerico.

We like turmeric.

Black beans.

Guacamole on the carne asada tacos, this right here is vegan cashew cream, so we're gonna do a little epazote pesto on top of the nopal, and I have, I love plantains, so we just gonna put a plantain right in there.

So these are the carne asada tacos with roasted salsa.

I don't see vegan food as different from any other food.

I grew up with this food, like, the flavors, the spices, the way the food is cooked?

Like, it's fresh.

- Have you guys been here before?

No, first time?

Just so you know, the menu is on a blackboard, because we change it every day.

So, we try and use ingredients that are either local or organic for everything, and everything's gonna be vegan as-is.

But you're welcome to add cheese or eggs to whatever dish you want.

- Half the people that regularly come here aren't even vegetarian, they just like really good food, and that's what this is.

The first time I ate here, I definitely wasn't a vegetarian, nor was I considering becoming one.

But when I had the food, it kinda opened me up to understanding that y'know, meat doesn't have to be a part of every meal.

- Coming through!

- When I'm describing it to people, I always tell them it's an authentic, old-style Mexican plate of food that's extremely healthy.

(pan sizzling) My grandma, my nana, like, she would make food but we didn't have any recipes.

And I used to love it, and it was all about family.

I don't have any recipes, we don't have recipes, like, I don't make, I never sit down and write recipes.

(speaking Spanish) - Hola, chica!

- Hey!

- How's it going?

I used to work two jobs for a long time, but at one point, maybe when I was on my, I was maybe like 28 I just couldn't do it anymore.

Like, late nights.

Ricardo!

Can you run food for me, please!

You stay on the window please!

- I saw her go from a, just carrying a cooler of food with a table and chairs.

- Butternut squash tamales at the farmer's market, yeah.

Little table with no money at all, and I was like so insecure, I was so scared.

I think I sold like maybe, I made like $60 the first time, yeah.

But I was happy because I sold some tamales!

So oh, maybe I can do this!

- And then, making the cart bigger, and then having that cart kind of planted at a restaurant a couple of times a week to opening this place.

- When I started here it was just the first half of the restaurant, so we didn't have this other space.

It blew up really fast and I don't think Wendy had expected it to to become that popular that quickly.

- And then she opened that side, and now she's opening downtown and it's just, I feel overwhelmed with like, just a lot of compassion for her.

Because I think, I think she's really, really an amazing human being.

(gentle accordion music) - She works harder than anyone I've really ever known, so.

I mean, she really started this from the ground up, truly.

She's a very admirable person with her intensity, you know?

- It's just, it makes me feel overwhelmed to know her.

(speaking Spanish) - I get up in the morning, I come to the kitchen, I'm really excited to get here.

It just feels good when I put a plate of food on a table for somebody and they feel good about it!

And then I see them eating the food and she's like, oh, yeah, this makes me feel good.

This feels good!

So it's more than just making, just a plate of food, like I don't see it just like that, you know?

I see it more like, something bigger than me.

Sounds crazy, but, that's how I feel it.

(gentle accordion music) Last month, we were saddened to learn of the death of Justin Schmidt, a friend of this program more commonly referred to as the King of Sting.

He was best known for allowing himself to be bitten or stung by all kinds of insects.

Then rating them on a pain scale to better understand their defense mechanisms I think I got the moniker King of Sting because, well, I've been stung by more things than anybody else.

You get stung and just... Wahoo!

Holy cow!

Saying, "ow" it keeps throbbing and throbbing They really, really hurt.

And the reason I was stung by more things than anybody else was, I was trying to get enough data to support or reject my hypothesis that the sting was important in the evolution of sociality.

This is the desert blond tarantula and they make wonderful pets.

they'll live about 20 years.

Once you get them, let go of my thumb there so I can get my hand free.

Whoops.

Don't.

They're kind of clumsy.

Back in you go, little girl.

I'm Justin Schmidt, Entomologist and Toxicologist.

I work at Southwestern Biological Institute and the University of Arizona Department of Entomology here.

I just have a few desert creatures here.

This one, I'm not going to touch this one is called a velvet ant and they call them cow killers.

and you say, Why would you call them a cow killer?

Well because if you pick them up you will be stung when they sting you say, Holy cow, that would kill a cow.

Basically, I study anything that's predator prey relationship but with particular emphasis on stinging insects.

We have more species of scorpions than any other state.

Aren't we lucky I think we have about 56 for sure.

They just hurt like the Dickens for most people.

And it goes on causes numbness and just sheer, utter pain.

They're so venomous that the idea for them is they run into a competition.

If you have longer legs and arms, you can kind of be at a distance away from whoever you're you're grabbing and keeping them so they can't get you and you go way up over the top and sting them.

Of course, once you sting them that's the end, you've won insect sting pain is a mechanism that allowed evolution of sociality.

In other words, if you're defending yourself and a little sting, little pain isn't much defense, but a lot of pain is.

And so it turns out that the more pain you can produce, the larger you can make a social colony, which is going from a solitary individual raising your own offspring to all of a sudden a big colony like a honeybee colony or ant colony.

Normally what happens is I'm out in the field somewhere and opportunity strikes.

Well, that comes with a sting or two ...or more.

If you have harvester ants, Quee can live up to about 45 years, which is pretty much the world record for longevity and insects.

So right down here we have a Maricopa Harvester Ant Colony Harvester ants have colonies that range from 500 to 15,000, depending on the species.

And they need to have powerful sting to protect them against things that want to eat them lizards, frogs, toads, things of this sort.

What we're going to do is this is called an aspirator that I've made, which is basically sucking tube so you can collect a few ants it's just a convenient way to collect the ants.

It's got a screen right here so that you don't want to suck the ant into your mouth that would not be a good idea.

I'm going to try and pick up a couple of them here.

I got two so far there we got three ants that should do.

So I had to dissect probably 10,000 harvester ants, to get enough venom in order to determine the toxicity and the biochemistry of the venom.

I look at two things of stinging insects.

first of all, the painfulness of the sting how much it hurts.

And second of all, how toxic how damaging is a sting.

The pain scale basically is one to four.

one being very minor is it hurts a little bit, but not serious enough.

Won't shut you down or anything of that sort.

And two is typically like a honey bee or a yellow jacket, and that's darn painful.

Anybody's been stung by either one of those know they really hurt.

Everybody used the same old, tired, boring picture of a honey bee stinging something.

It was so ugly and I thought, Let's see if we can get something better.

So I hired the photographer to help me get the better picture of what we wanted to show.

As you can see the stinger into my arm there.

And you can see the jewel little round silver white thing That's the venom sac.

You see the bee exiting ripping out of the bee.

So it shows all the action in one point, and the pain of that was basically a two because I had to sit there and endure the pain without yelling or jerking or doing anything rash like that or else we wouldn't get the photograph.

The three is something much, much worse, kind of like a harvest ant that hurts for 1-4-8 hours.

throbbing pain And 4 you don't want to go there It's like ten times worse than a three.

That would be an example of something like the tarantula hawk Whereas the Tarantula Hawk stings you and it's just kind of paralyzing you're in just such pain.

You can't function.

And they, of course, are given the name Tarantula Hawk because they will actually attack and sting a tarantula and paralyze the tarantula, lay one egg on, just one egg.

And that egg hatches and feeds on the paralyzed tarantula, one of these, you go, Oh my God, it feels like a 20,000 volt wire just zapped you when you get stung.

These things are a 4 on the pain scale.

In other words, it's about like 100 honeybees all at once.

You know, when I wrote "The Sting of the Wild" the reason I wrote it was, to instill a sense of joy and beauty and awe of what what I have for being a privilege to be able to study these things.

You don't have to be stung like I am.

You can.

You can miss all that but we'll take you on a safari and adventures of what happens in the field, how they affect the evolution of science And just interesting stories.

History, it brings us together.

And it's fun!

Justin Schmidt's research resulted in over 185 publications, 20 book chapters and two edited books.

His work was featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Marvel's Ant-Man and other programs like Arizona Illustrated.

He passed away on February 18th, 2023, at the age of 75 from Parkinsons disease He was home surrounded by family and other loved ones.

He will be missed.

Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

Hello, I'm Elaine A.

Powers.

I always include the A in my name because some of you might remember that there was a national figure salon chain named Elaine Powers.

Elaine Powers.

All you have to say is help Elaine I'm not involved in that at all.

There we go.

Yeah.

Good boy.

Now, Blue is a Blue Cayman hybrid iguana.

This is a Sonoran Desert tortoise.

I got her through the state foster program.

You never want to take a Sonoran Desert tortoise out of the wild.

I took early retirement because I had a desire to write science based books.

I have written about 27 books that are out in published.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week.