Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
The classic image of the saguaro is of arms lifted towards the sky, and many do grow that way, but the arms may twist and turn in all directions, even growing down, like this splendid old example along one of the off-map trails at Brown’s Ranch. I especially liked the unusual ones when we moved here as I could remember them and they helped orient me on a web of trails winding through an unfamiliar environment.
I enjoyed watching the IndyCars return to Portland after a long absence even if I had to watch on TV instead of at the track since they returned to Portland after I left. Congrats to Takuma Sato on the win and to Scott Dixon for extending his championship lead going into the final race. This is Scott signing autographs as a rookie at Portland in 2001, we were both a lot younger then. One of us went on to win multiple championships and one of us blogs about his cats but I’m not going to tell you who is who, I’ll let the mystery be.
The IndyCars came to Phoenix a week after I did but on the heels of the move and my first week at work I didn’t have it in me to go the race, maybe next time. It’s a good sign I didn’t fly back to the race in Portland, earlier in the year I thought if the heat of the summer drove me crazy I might fly back for the race and then go hiking in Washington but I’ve enjoyed my summer in the desert.
Green-winged and cinnamon teal were easy to see at Ridgefield but not so the blue-wings, so it was a special treat to find this lovely fellow in the dew-topped grasses growing in Horse Lake early on a spring morning in 2011. I spent the day at the little refuge, arriving at 6:30am and leaving at 5:30pm.
Lots of exciting camera news around this time as Nikon and Canon finally get serious about mirrorless cameras. I’m thankful for the capabilities of modern cameras, they make it so much easier to take even simple portraits like this one of my beloved Scout at six years old. But even my basic setup of 2007, the Canon 20D and 24-85mm lens, was so much more advanced than the film setup I started with in the 1990’s. Whatever camera you have, shoot the things you love with it, the memories will mean far more than whatever technical flaws exist in the image.
The sun had not yet crested the distant hills as this canyon towhee serenaded me atop a saguaro, a lovely reward for getting out of bed so early on the weekend. It was the only picture I took that day but it was a lovely day on the trails nevertheless. This morning I deliberately slept in as I knew I would be too tired to feel safe driving if I got up at 4 a.m. so I chose a good night’s sleep instead. I see many of the same birds in our backyard as on the trails (we even had a couple of Harris’s hawks perching in the palm trees recently) but with the towhees it’s a bit different, a pair of Abert’s towhees are regular visitors to our feeders but I’ve never seen them in the desert, while canyon towhees have never graced our yard but I’ve seen them many places around the preserve.
Two empty-handed magi discuss whose job it was to bring the presents for the infant king.
Templeton and Scout on the empty hardwood floors of our living and dining rooms in our house in Portland in 2004. We weren’t moving in, we had been there a couple of years. We weren’t moving out, we’d be there fourteen more. We just never had furniture in the front two rooms of the house the entire time we lived there. It was a bigger house than we needed but all of the smaller houses we looked at weren’t as good a fit in other ways. For all of that this house was much smaller than our previous home in Keizer which was ridiculously large for what we needed but again in other ways was the best home for us from what was available. That house was completely carpeted while this one had hardwood throughout but both cats quickly made adjustments to avoid running into cabinets and walls.
When we first moved here I assumed this was a baby cactus but upon further reading realized it was a pincushion cactus, a small cactus that cannot grow in full sun and thus relies on partial shade to survive. The teddy bear cholla it was growing next to has died and fallen over but the surrounding rocks provide some shade in the early light, though it will be exposed to the brunt of the sun in the middle of the day.
Memory is a fickle thing. I’ve been editing old images in with the new so I can bring some old blog posts back online and was ready to update the picture of Templeton watching the dying light late on a summer evening in 2007. I was a bit dumbfounded to find I had never put the picture online, though I seem to remember doing so. I even remember the name of the post! I looked at the old site though and it was nowhere to be found, I guess I meant to post it, wrote the post in my head, but never got around to it. Better late than never.
Many of the granite boulders have thick lines running through them, sometimes extending across an entire hillside, a clue about the Sonoran Desert’s distant past. I’m not a geologist but I would guess it is from debris that rained down on the Earth after the destruction of Alderaan.
Boolie 