Beavertail Supreme!

When you go to the Desert Southwest, there are several ways to hit the jackpot. One is to score on the slots in Vegas. Another is to find a profusely blooming cactus in the desert, and have it all to yourself to photograph. In the previous post, I was competing for space to shoot a fine blooming hedgehog. But a few miles up the road, I found an equally gorgeous beavertail cactus and had no photographic competition! However I must give kudos to a couple of women who were shooting the cactus when I noticed them from the road and thus discovered the scene...they had been among the posse of photographers in the cholla garden. They left this scene as I arrived. It's fairly unusual to find a cactus so in synch...usually a few flowers bloom one week, a few the next, and so on. To see a patch of cactus with a couple dozen blooms simultaneously in full flower is a rare treat!

Even a macro shot takes in a profusion of really gorgeous flowers!

In the Cholla "Garden"

This pic was taken in the well known cholla cactus garden in Joshua Tree NP. These cacti are known as teddy bear or jumping chollas. Both names are misnomers...the cacti may look soft and fuzzy, especially when silouhetted against the sun, but they're extraordinarily prickly and the spines are really sharp. They don't actually jump at you, but if you so much as lightly brush against the plant, a chunk of it will embed itself in your skin...very annoying and painful. One has to be very careful when walking around these things. But if you can stay unstuck, it's very pretty in a grove of teddy bears. Long ago, in 1973 I believe, I shot a fine and unusual picture of a full rainbow above this cactus patch.

I may have already blogged a closeup of the teddy bear, but the complexity of the spine design is worth another look. The cactus sprouts bright green flowers in spring, pretty but a little hard to spot from afar since they're almost the same color as the cactus. In late March, when this picture was taken, the teddy bears weren't blooming yet. In fact very few cacti were, with some dramatic exceptions...

This was by far the best blooming hedgehog I saw on my desert trip. It is located right in the middle of the cholla garden. This was the best pic I could get of this clump...there were several other photographers circling around the cacti, toting masses of expensive equipment, competing for space and the best angles. I managed to get off a couple quick shots with nobody's shadow in the way. If the cactus could talk, I reckon it would complain about all the paparazzi hovering over it.

More cool flowers

These fine blue flowers were common in the washes of the Colorado desert section of Joshua Tree NP. I haven't been able to find out what they are, but they're sure pretty.















I believe the larger blooms here are called ghost flowers. The smaller blue ones may be phacelia.
These were growing right next to the ones in the pic just above.

Red Flowers in Joshua Tree NP

In the lower part of the park, the Colorado Desert, two plants with red flowers are coming into bloom. This is a chuparosa. The flowers are long and tubelike; the objective is to attract hummingbirds who will pollinate the plant.

The ocotillo is just starting to bloom...this is the only one I found that was past budding stage.

This is a closeup of an ocotillo stalk...very cool! Although it's common for the plant to bloom at this time of year, its leaves and flowers are actually totally dependent on rain. If a winter is dry, the ocotillo will not bloom in spring. During dry periods, it looks dead...it's just a mass of spiny wood. After a good rain, at any time of year, these leaves will grow and flowers will bloom at the end of the stalks.

More Bartlett Lake Pics

A couple more pics from Bartlett Lake. Blow this one up for better resolution...there was really a nice variety of flowers here.

It's always cool to see a massive field of poppies in a dry environment.

The lizards thoroughly enjoyed the flowers too!

Magical Day in Joshua Tree NP

The Venerable Pinniped is currently in Yucca Valley CA, and his flippers are draggin'. So, I'm goin' to hit the rack soon. I'm on the way home from a pleasant week in the Phoenix area with my old high school buddy Dave...we've been friends for over 40 years! We saw the Sharks play the Coyotes, and went to two spring training games, and I got in some nice pool time and tromped around in the desert on two days. The weather was absolute perfection...seven days of total sunshine with high temperatures in the 80s, lows in the 50s. Today I returned to Yucca Valley, the same place I stayed at a week ago and on the same route. The Old Sloat doesn't usually retrace his steps on a return trip unless absolutely necessary, but in this case I figured that, as beautiful as Joshua Tree NP was a week ago, it was worth another visit. Was it ever! The flowers were even more profuse than they were last week, and some cactus have started blooming too. Over the next few days I plan to blog the blooming vegetation plant by plant...it's just fabulous! And it's only been about an average rain year. This pic shows the Joshua trees in late afternoon, silhouetted against the hazy mountains in the lowering sun. It was really a pretty afternoon in the park today!

Desert Blooms to da Max!

I read on the internet that there were good spring flowers blooming near Bartlett Lake, in the hills about 30 miles north of Phoenix. Uh, yeah! I have rarely seen flowers as profuse as they were near the lake, especially in a non-El Nino year!

Somehow flowers in the desert are just more awesome than elsewhere. You think ahead to say, August and September, when the landscape is roasted and bone dry after months of 100 degree plus heat; then compare it to this! Blowing the pic up makes the color even more dramatic.

Near the lake I found large fields of poppies, both yellow and white. I haven't seen the white ones in many places. There were also lupines, owls clover, goldfields, and several other species whose names I don't know. It was common to find 5 or 6 different types of flowers within a few square metres.

Sonoran Desert as Garden

Yesterday I went hiking in White Tank Mountain Regional Park, a few miles west of Phoenix. Since winter rainfall in Phoenix was officially about normal this year, I expected to find decent flowers, but in the southern part of the park they were much better than that...that area was a garden! Rainfall in the desert is very localized, and perhaps this spot picked up more moisture than others, because the flowers were delightfully profuse. The dominant color was yellow, from the brittlebushes pictured here and also from poppies, but there were many other types of flowers as well.

This is an absolutely typical stretch of the trail I hiked, lined with poppies and brittlebush.

The poppies were thick, with the rocky landscape providing a contrast to the lushness of the blooms.

Owls clover was also abundant; it needs perhaps a little more rainfall than the poppies and can be scarce in the desert, but not in this area! The entire hike was superb, an immersion in the peace and beauty of the desert at the best possible time of year. The weather was perfect too, about 80 degrees with a cool upcanyon breeze. A fabulous day!

Macro Shots

Up close, there's a nice contrast between owls clover and the poppies. There's just something fabulous about finding gardens of flowers in the middle of a desert that you don't feel in lusher climes.

I don't know what the name of this flower is, but it was common along with the poppies, owl clover, brittlebush, and others. This one was popping up right in the middle of a clump of chollas. In many places four or five types of flowers were blooming within the space of 2-3 square yards.

Early Bloomers

It's early for the cactus to bloom, but I found one clump of hedgehogs flowering. Oddly enough, though the flowers are aging in this batch, I didn't see any others even beginning to bloom. The hedgehogs are at their best in April.

The chollas flower later than the hedgehogs...their best time is probably late April into June. But I did find one bloom on a buckhorn cholla that was getting an early start.

Lizards return to their turf

The lizards are back in the desert, and very happy to be there, thank you! Here they're hanging out at some of the cool rocks in Joshua Tree NP. This is a popular rock climbing area so our saurian friends wanted to sample it...and they don't need no stinkin' ropes!

Here the critters have progressed to Arizona and are hanging out at White Tank Mountain Regional Park, enjoing the flowers and rocks.

Here's one of the White Tank locals, enjoying the strong spring sun.

Mojave Wildflowers

All kinds of wildflowers are blooming in Joshua Tree NP. The purple flowers are sand verbena; the yellow ones are desert dandelions, common and beautiful.

A different type of purple flower, profuse in the lower reaches of Joshua Tree NP.

Finally, a flower whose name I know! These are globemallows. They're common in the lower deserts...the Colorado and Sonoran.

Sp;ring in the Mojave

It's March, and rainfall has been adequate if not abundant; enough to fire up the flowers in the Mojave desert. This pic comes from just outside the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.

The Joshua trees are blooming really nicely right now; this pic was taken in the park.

The flowers of the Joshua tree bloom from February to May; they're quite flashy!

This one is just bursting out of its winter shell.

The Mighty Carmel Bursts Into the Sea

It's always interesting to wander down to Carmel River State Beach and see what's going on. From people to critters to weather to surf to geologic processes, you never know what you'll see...except that you will see something interesting. Over the past two days the morning high tide has blocked the river's flow into the Pacific, thus backing its water up into the lagoon just behind the beach. The lagoon rises, and then after high tide, on both days it has overflowed back into the ocean. The process when the river cuts through the sand berm and reenters the sea is really quite dramatic. At first, the water just trickles over the sand, slowly moving down to merge with the surf. But gradually, more and more water overflows from the lagoon, moving faster and faster, and in just an hour or two, the trickle becomes a torrent as the river gains strength and velocity, and tears away at the sand with amazing speed. In this picture, notice the little stick I've placed in the sand; it's about ten feet away from the river in the background.


This picture was taken just 15 minutes after the earlier shot! In that time the river ate away all but a few inches of the 10 feet of sand that separated the stick from the water. The stick was gone less than a minute later.








The tide was going out, and as the vertical difference between the level of the lagoon and the sea increased, the river carved deeper into the sand, dropping more and flowing faster and faster, roaring like a stretch of rapids up in the mountains. It carried scads of sand from the lagoon and beach to the ocean, and as it gouged its channel to the sea, standing waves would set up. Here's a nice set of them. These waves would only last a minute or two at most before dissipating, but then they would quickly redevelop, usually in a different area of the channel as the configuration of its bottom changed.

Here, a few minutes later, the river is raging, shredding the beach, roaring furiously in a torrent of whitewater as it meets the sea. When I arrived at this spot, the river was a few yards wide and a foot or two deep. You could stroll across it. In about an hour and a half, it had become a good twenty yards wide, probably at least six feet deep in the center of the channel, and the sand banks at its edge had increased in height from a few inches to about six feet. Anyone trying to cross would have been swept into the ocean, where 15 foot breakers posed an additional hazard. It was a dramatic scene!

Close to an hour after this picture was taken, and about two hours after I arrived on the scene, a good part of the lagoon's water had drained into the ocean and the level of the lagoon had dropped four or five feet. As equilibrium between it and the sea was achieved, the flow of the river slowed and the sand erosion and standing waves decreased.

Spring in the Great Valley

March is a beautiful month in California. The rainy season is still on, but the sun is warm and strong in between storms. If it's not a drought year, plants blossom, green up, and grow like mad. In the Central Valley, fruit orchards burst into bloom. This orchard is near Interstate 5 north of Los Banos...with the California Aqueduct in the background, carrying irrigation water from north to south through the valley.

Like Portland and Edmonton, Sacramento is a fine river city. It actually has two running through town, the Sacramento and American, with parkways and promenades along both. Here we're on the American River, with the snowy Sierra Nevada sharp in the background. Blow the pic up for a better view. The path on the American runs for dozens of miles; you can hike, bike, rollerblade or jog; or you can take a canoe or kayak down the river. It might appear in this picture that I'm out in the country, but I'm actually right in the middle of the Sac metro area.

Stormy Big Sur Beauty

For the last leg of the trip home from Las Vegas, I bypassed highway 101 and came up the coast after hearing that there was a high surf advisory in effect. It wasn't top down weather like I enjoyed when outbound 10 days earlier, but it was at least as beautiful.

A wider view of the misty mountains shows a waterfall descending to the sea. This is near Lucia. I had never seen this particular fall...blow the picture up for a better view. Below the cliffs at the lower right corner of the picture is a hidden beach that I'd never seen before...you have to get out of the car and peer over the edge to view it. There is a private road leading down to the beach, which, oddly enough, has a row of palm trees growing out of the sand. Wonder how they got there? There's no house or any other structure by the beach...maybe there used to be. Big Sur has a lot of hidden spots like this, many of them on private land.

Massive surf was indeed crashing onto the shore, and washing over rocks about 30 feet high near Garrapata State Park. Quite a spectacle.

More Desert Pix

I've been home for a week and am just getting around to posting pix from my trip back from Las Vegas. This is Panamint Valley, over the mountains to the west from Death Valley. It's almost as deep and spectacular as its better known counterpart.

Attention Steve's Bike Blog...The Trona Tornadoes are still going strong...I think. As for the town of Trona, it's a bleak place. Half ghost town, half industrial wasteland. Abandoned buildings are widespread, as are Borax works based on Searles Lake, an almost completely dry alkali flat adjacent to the town. At this time of year there are a few sprouts of green grass and a few puddles in the lakebed but it's still pretty godforsaken. Did I mention 110 degrees in summer?

Here's a prettier spot...Red Rock Canyon State Park on Highway 14 between Ridgecrest and Lancaster. Beautiful rock formations abound, with a good sprinkling of Joshua trees. Notice the two toned arroyo in the foreground; obviously sediment from both colors of rock visible in the pic flows side by side during wet periods. It's a little early yet but with this winter's adequate rain, this area should be awash in wildflowers by the end of March. I've been through here before when it's been a garden!