Latigo Trail – Page 5

Morning Prayers

A Harris’s hawk silhouetted on saguaro blossoms at sunrise, surrounded by bees. A feeding frenzy often follows when the giants bloom though I didn’t get that sense so much this year. To be fair I wasn’t able to get up early very often on the weekends this spring, on this occasion I struggled to sleep and decided to make the best of it. It was a planned short hike, soon it was back home to join my wife and Bear for a hike in a county park.

📷: Sony A6600 | Sony 100-400mm | Sony 1.4X
🗓️: June 10, 2023

Saguaro Sandwich

Bear sandwiched between two saguaros on the Latigo Trail. The other day while making the long gradual climb back to the car on a western leg of this trail, he was so tired he let me take the lead, a first I think! Yesterday on a loop I stopped after a mile and doubled back to the car since he was flagging, so today I’ll give him a rest day and we’ll go for an easy walk in the neighborhood.

📷: Nikon Z fc | Nikon 24-70mm f/4
🗓️: October 31, 2023

Five Years in the Making

It took me 5 years to make this picture, not that there is anything complicated in the setup, rather it took me 5 years of hiking in the desert to see my first chuckwalla. Back on a spring Saturday I finally got up for a sunrise hike, mostly motivated by the hope of photographing saguaro buds and flowers. Flush with success I headed home and picked up Bear and brought him back for us to hike together, and thankfully so as it was on this hike I first spotted the chuckwalla.

I came back the next morning for some more saguaro photography but as I passed by where I had seen her the previous day, I stopped because the pattern recognition part of my brain told me something was interesting but couldn’t tell me what or where. I stared for the longest time before finally realizing the thin rock in a crevice between granite boulders was in fact a tail. It’s obvious in the picture since it’s highly zoomed in courtesy of the telephoto lens, and I’m down at a lower level and different angle where the gap is more pronounced. She’s sleeping back in the darkness and protection of the crevice.

As before I went home and brought Bear back and she was more visible though still deep in shadow. I didn’t have the telephoto with me and besides Bear was eager for our time together, and so was I, so I snapped a quick picture and we continued into the desert.

📷: Sony A6600 | Sony 100-400 | Sony 1.4X
Date: May 28, 2023

Second Shift

With the sun sinking low late on a summer day I met one of the most beautiful desert residents, a gophersnake. Taken two years ago, still my only sighting of a living one. Given the hot weather I suspect as my day in the desert was ending it was just beginning for the snake, starting the hunt as the temperatures slowly fell.

Desert Friends

This whale and I share a special bond, it always breaches the desert’s surface when it sees me on the trail, often bringing a favored friend along like a lizard, ground squirrel, or in this case a curve-billed thrasher. Taken on an early fall morning in 2022.

You Got Peanut Butter In My Saguaro

I believe the artists who created this scene are termites, the left side showing the protective mud layer they place over the hardened black areas at the base of old saguaros, the right showing where they have recycled most of the bark-like material and returned its nutrients to the desert soil.

Not a Candidate

It’s Fat Bear Week at the National Park Service where you can vote for your favorite chonk fattened up for the Alaskan winter. No matter how much you love him you can’t vote for this Bear however as he’s lost over 20 pounds since we adopted him. I didn’t take him hiking much over the summer since you have to be up pretty early to beat the heat and I couldn’t manage it. We’re back at it now but he’s gotten pretty out of shape and is gassed by the end of our normal hikes, so I’ve switched him to shorter hikes while he builds back his endurance.

Thankfully he does ask to lie down when he wants a break and on this occasion when we stopped for water it gave me a chance to photograph him as though he was paying homage to my favorite saguaro, which I call The Green Elephant. In truth he still isn’t interested in her, putting her in good company as he’s also not interested in bobcats, rattlesnakes, and tarantulas. He is interested in just about anything that moves in front of him but I’ll say this for the great matriarch, she doesn’t move much.

Consolation Prize

This picture is a little bittersweet as while watching animals feed on saguaros is one of my favorite things, I shouldn’t have been there. It was a Thursday and a succinct note in my hiking journal says “Couldn’t sleep, so a quick hike before work”. I’m thankful I have trails nearby as after a short drive and hike I got to watch this white-winged dove enjoying breakfast for quite a while. Too soon it was time to leave and get ready for work with hopes the next night would be more restful.

The Powder Room

One of my favorite sights of spring in the Sonoran Desert is when the birds have faces completely pancaked with saguaro pollen. When I finally got around to getting my first Nikon so I could do more macro photography I wanted to get a close-up of these large flowers, the desert’s powder rooms. However each saguaro blossom only lasts for about a day and I needed to find one on a day off when I was up early and with no wind and with a saguaro with an arm that bent towards the ground and was right next to the trail and which wasn’t covered in bees. It proved to be a tall order but on Memorial Day I was up before sunrise and found an obliging giant.

Due to some mix of the early hour and lack of practice and a general tendency to forget to setup the camera properly when I get excited, I left the shutter speed far too low and even with almost no breeze ended up with a little motion blur. Plus I should have stopped down one more stop so there would be less blur in the focus stack due to the large separation between stigma and stamens.

Nevertheless these shots will bring a smile to my face for years to come. As I wrote in my hiking journal while lamenting my mistake but hoping the pictures would come out: “It was great fun regardless”. The breeze soon picked up so I went home and got Bear and came back for a hike out to see the saguaro I call Witch Hazel, my first time seeing her in bloom.

Just a lovely day all around.

The Bird & The Bee

Diffuse light from the rising sun falls on a white-winged dove and a bee and the very tops of the saguaro flowers, but not yet on the ripening fruit or the saguaro below. One of a seemingly infinite set of pictures as I play with light arriving or departing the desert, taken on a rare pre-sunrise hike without Bear a couple of months ago.