Every now and then you meet someone who is  making a difference and Susan Scherl is one of those people. Along with Dr. Kayomee Daroowalla and Karen Hoyt, she founded the HOPE Animal Shelter in 2005, initially using Dr. Daroowalla’s veterinary clinic as a home base. Two years later the shelter moved to its current location at 2011 East 12th Street, southeast of the Broadway and Campbell intersection.

HOPE is a happy temporary home to many of Tucson’s needy cats and dogs. Residents live in spacious walk-in cages populated with abundant cat towers, pillows, toys, and blankets. It is a welcoming and friendly environment. I have many years of personal experience in shelter volunteer work and have never seen a cleaner or more caring environment. Injured and unwell animals are kept in a separate area while they undergo treatment. HOPE volunteers also take adoptable pets to the Petsmart branch at Grant and Swan, every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from noon to 5 pm.

One of HOPE's residents waiting for a new home

The shelter employs three full time staff members, along with a cadre of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers who logged over 700 hours of unpaid time in just one month, earlier this year. As is the case with most shelters HOPE relies on the generosity of donors to keep afloat. Susan reports: “We always need money. Even if you can only afford $5 it will feed a few cats for a day.” And donating is as easy as could be. The HOPE website has a secure online donation option and also includes a wish list of urgently needed supplies, along with information about how to volunteer.

A volunteer entertains some of HOPE's cats in the shelter's main housing area

HOPE is Tucson’s only no-kill shelter caring for both cats and dogs and one of their biggest concerns is getting the word out about spaying and neutering. Unwanted kittens and puppies only add to the number of homeless and suffering animals in our home city. Low cost programs are available at a number of Tucson locations including the Humane Society of Southern Arizona, Animal Birth Control of Tucson, Arizona Spay Neuter Clinic, and the Eastside Spay and Neuter Clinic. Additional spay and neuter information is available at the HOPE shelter.

If you, or someone you know, is considering getting a new pet, visit HOPE before you think about a puppy mill. Adopting a shelter animal is a rewarding experience: you are giving a loving animal a new chance for a happy life, and adoption fees directly support HOPE’s important work. And maybe you’ll end up with a new friend for life.

Portraits of recently adopted former residents are placed together on one wall—a happy reminder of lives started anew

HOPE is open Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 pm, and Monday through Friday by appointment. Call (520) 792-9200 for more information or visit the HOPE Animal Shelter website. They also maintain a Petfinder site where you can see current photographs of pets hoping to be adopted. 1,200 abandoned cats and dogs have found homes because of HOPE.

One of their volunteers told me: “I first discovered HOPE after losing my dear cat Sid under some awful circumstances. It has been almost two years and I cannot express the amount of happiness I feel helping the shelter and the animals. If you are on Facebook please come join our cause and help support HOPE.”

Photographs by Caroline Palmer

When I was a little lad, growing up in London, my first great love was geology. After high school I went to work for an American oil exploration company based in the UK. Although I was privileged and lucky to have such employment, before I even had a college degree, I quickly learned that research work in the lab was not really for me. I wanted to be out there in the savage places: deserts, rift valleys, and volcanoes, cracking up slabs with my rock hammer, not studying seismic charts in an office.

So, at a fairly early age I devised a list of what I considered to be the geological wonders of the world and I intended on seeing every one of them. I have done quite well so far: the famous Vesuvius volcano in Italy, Oregon’s Crater Lake, The Grand Canyon, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the fjords and glaciers of Norway, Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Burren in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, and the steaming geysers of Iceland. But one vitally important name on that list eluded my every effort: the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

An abandoned tug boat settles slowly into the River Liffey, Dublin

Back in the 1970s and ’80s my eccentric but adventurous family typically added a couple of stops at noteworthy scientific sites to any holiday itinerary, in order to placate me. Before he retired, my father was an important figure in international trade and development and he did a lot of work in Ireland. My mother, younger brother Andrew, and I, often tagged along on his business trips, but we always went to the south—The Republic of Ireland. The civil war in Ireland, or “The Troubles” as the Irish called it, was in full swing in the 1970s, with explosives going off on trains and homemade petrol bombs being thrown, almost daily it seemed, at British armored cars in Belfast. Despite my most serious protestations along the lines of “It can’t be that dangerous,” we never did venture into the north.

My father now lives in Dublin, and a couple of years ago I made the long trip from Tucson to see him. After several days of pubs, dinners, conversation, and family obligations, I grew restless. Following a little gentle coercion, Dad agreed we should rent a car, just the two of us, and set off to see Belfast and the wild northern coast.

We stayed at a gorgeous old hotel in the small town of Bushmills in County Antrim which, very handily, is the home of the Bushmill’s whisky distillery, a fact that would later add a little spice to the trip. We arrived late in the day after a long drive, and Dad announced that he would enjoy a short nap. We were only a few miles from the Giant’s Causeway, but the shuttle bus that took visitors down to see it would have ceased operations by that hour. Dad encouraged me to motor over there anyway, and see if I could find my own way down the site.

The visitors’ car park was nearly empty, the gift shop closed, but Ireland’s northerly latitude means long, long summer days. So, I locked the car and started out on foot. It was a pretty good haul and somewhat damp and chilly for a resident of the Sonoran Desert. I saw a couple of windblown sightseeing stragglers, walking slowly and forlornly back to their cars. Eventually, I came up over a rise and there was the Causeway ahead of me—blissfully deserted.

Where the stone meets the sea: The Giant's Causeway continues its march against time into the cold North Atlantic

The Causeway, contradictory to colorful local lore, was not fabricated by giants or legendary warriors during some distant mythical period. It is the result of ancient volcanic activity that created tens of thousands of vertical, mostly hexagonal, basalt columns. This astonishing assemblage of geometric pedestals, of varying heights and sizes, arcs into a restless grey and green sea and looks at times like a monstrous pipe organ.

I clambered over every inch of that geological wonderland and filled two digital cameras with photographs. I was breaking in an expensive new Nikon and many times I had to shield it from spray as cold waves broke around me. And I imagined I could make out the distant voice of my late mother calling: “Geoffrey, don’t get close to the edge, it’s dangerous!” Something I heard a million times as a kid.

Rapid cooling of molten lava about 60 million years ago caused fractures and fragmentation, resulting in the formation of thousands of vertical geometric columns at the Giant's Causeway

As the sun retreated sullenly into the Atlantic, I tore myself away and proceeded back to the hotel. Bubbling over with amazement and excitement I expounded, at considerable length, about the Causeway to my amused father who had visited it some years earlier. Accomplished and open minded though my father is, they were still pretty much a pile of black rocks to him.

In the morning I was all fired up to go back and see them again in daylight. After breakfast we returned to the site, which had taken on an entirely different, and very disturbing, aspect. The car par was choked with tour buses, and dazed tourists shambled everywhere, sucking down mushy ice cream cones and squawking about the weather. It was appalling. I rapidly purchased a couple of postcards and said to my father: “I can’t deal with this nightmare, let’s get out of here.” He smiled and said: “Yes I thought it would be like this during the day. Aren’t you glad you made the trip last night?”

Seawater on basalt under a grey sky

Being resourceful and adaptable chaps, we cut our losses and headed over to the Bushmill’s distillery for some good cheer. I sipped a glass of vintage Irish whisky and happily added one long sought-after check mark to my childhood list.

Photographs by the author. All rights reserved. Copyright strictly enforced. © Geoffrey Notkin

I suppose one of the most conflicted elements of my personality is that I cannot stand watching television but I absolutely love making it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the programming I object to, but the commercials. There’s not much I find more annoying than having a paid actor yelling at me to buy a new car or hamburger when I’m trying to enjoy Star Trek re-runs.

So, understandably, some of my close friends were astounded when I admitted that I recently caved in and ordered digital cable. “But you have to understand,” I implored them. “It’s only so I can throw a broadcast party for my own show.” A pretty solid excuse right?

About 17 months ago my great friend and fellow explorer, professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold, and I started work on a new adventure documentary, Meteorite Men, for Science Channel. I was thrilled to learn that our Director of Photography would be the brilliant Randall Love who has worked for Lucas Films, Disney, HBO, the BBC, you name it.

The Logical Lizard (above left) and his long-time expedition partner, Steve Arnold, digging space rocks. Photograph by Caroline Palmer.

In the new show we travel to rural Kansas and dig for giant meteorites, buried for thousands of years; pay a visit to the brainiacs at ASU’s fab Center for Meteorite Studies and get to play in their gazillion-dollar iBeAM lab; then skulk along to a second hunting location, so secret everybody on the crew had to sign confidentiality agreements before we’d let them film. They were very understanding about all of our shenanigans.

Meteorite Men airs tonight, June 3, on Science Channel and Science Channel HD at 6 pm in Tucson. It repeats June 4 and 5 and complete Meteorite Men showtimes are here. If the idea of mixing rocks, treasure hunting, astronomy and adventure with some dry comedy sounds watchable to you, please tune in. I won’t spoil it by telling you what we found on the expeditions, but I promise you the rocks are the real stars of the show. Fallen stars.

In "Meteorite Men" we are hoping to find pieces of the famous Brenham pallasite. Pallasites are meteorites packed with extraterrestrial peridot gemstones, as shown in this detail. Photograph by Geoffrey Notkin © Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery.