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Posted by Jeffrey (Scottsdale, United States) on 23 February 2012 in Documentary & Street and Portfolio.

As you can imagine from the way the raindrops are disturbing the surface of the puddle, it was actually raining fairly hard when I took this photo. In the distance, you can see where the mine's current owners were cleaning up the site. Our guide (who wisely stayed in the truck most of the time we were there!) explained that properly restoring the desert to its native state isn't as easy as one might think, because they had to hire a firm to survey the area and determine which plants and in what proportion are native there, then develop an appropriate seed mixture that can be added to a slurry that contains fertilizer and some sort of binder material to keep the seeds from blowing away once they are on the ground, and then apply it by driving around in a tanker truck and spraying it from a hose under high pressure.

He said the cost for the complete process was several thousand dollars per acre and here I just figured that it would regrow naturally in a few years. At least that's how the process worked for the weeds in my previous backyard, except they took only a few weeks, not years, to fully mature!