Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
I call this location Eight Peaks as in the distance on the right you can see the mountains known as Four Peaks with their closely spaced four peaks. On this rocky hill before us, the Four Peaks repeat in miniature form. Taken on the Rock Knob Trail with my shadow stretching out into the cholla, Bear’s shadow hidden by the desert’s own.
In January while walking Bear we passed some large granite boulders and my pattern recognition self thought he saw an owl deep in the shadows of one of the boulders. The rest of my selves thought he was being ridiculous given the distance and while I had seen owls in the area, mostly what I see are protuberances in the rocks that at a distance look like owls. He was so insistent there was an owl there I took a picture and zoomed in just so I could prove him wrong and we could continue on our way.
Except to my delight and chagrin there was an owl there. If the owl seems blindingly obvious in the first picture I took it two months later on a rare occasion when I brought my super-telephoto into the desert and happened to find it in the same spot, with the high magnification and exposure for the shadows the hidden subject is easily revealed. The second picture was taken on the day in question and is still a moderate telephoto shot, zoomed in several times compared to these naked aging eyes, but even so you get a feel for what I was seeing on the day. The owl is in the shadows of the boulder on the right, with some rocks-not-owls on the boulder on the left.
It was a nice find and helped me understand more about the owl and how it manages the brighter parts of the day. The zoomed-in shot is a nice reminder that while I think of the boulders as being solid monoliths they are rather beaten up from so many years of wind and weather, and not so homogeneous to boot.
So I cut that same self some slack weeks later when he thought at first glance he saw a bullfrog in the middle of the desert. In this case all it took was a second glance for the frog to turn into the greens and yellows of the paddle of a dying prickly pear. Though I saw many bullfrogs in my years in the Northwest it was a particular bullfrog that triggered the recognition, a giant fellow sitting undaunted beside a trail in Portland, when I later looked at my notes I realized that sighting was 18 years ago. So if I’m still alive in 18 years I suppose no matter where I am on this great blue ball I’ll be seeing owls in shadows that aren’t really there, except maybe they are.
A jumble of driftwood and rocks and organic debris at Oregon’s Yaquina Head in the fall of 2017. I have no interest in endless stretches of sandy beaches but rocky coasts that cradle a diversity of life are a balm to my soul. This was supposed to be the start of more frequent trips to the coast to focus on tide pool photography but it turned out to be my last, as a few weeks later my team got laid off and the wheels were set in motion that months later would bring us to Arizona. We’re a little short on oceans in the desert and since I don’t like to fly I won’t be visiting the Northwest anytime soon, but I do still have many unedited images from my years there and working on them lets me revisit my old home.
Yesterday as Bear and I took an afternoon walk around Cone Mountain, I took a few snapshots of the desert in bloom as mementos of our time together on the trails. Later on as we circled the mountain, as we passed a boulder closer to the trail than this one, the tall grasses began to shake and rattle. I instinctively told Bear to leave it (we’ve been practicing whenever my beloved lizards scamper across the trail) but he wasn’t showing any interest in any case. To be sure he understood what I wanted him to ignore, I backed up a few feet, still far outside striking range, to make sure he saw the rattlesnake. He looked at me the same as when I stop for a picture, ready to go when I am, so we continued on our way.
I’m delighted he didn’t try to position himself between me and the snake, or show any interest at all, but the snake was fairly hidden in the tall grass so perhaps it would have been a different story if the snake was slithering on the trail in front of us. Odds are highly in favor of it being a western diamondback but it was so obscured I couldn’t tell with a quick glance and didn’t take a picture since I didn’t want to risk disturbing it any further or to take my eyes off the pup.
Bear gets formal snake training in a few weeks but I’m glad to see he passed the test, this was his first rattlesnake. It’s a test he’ll have to pass repeatedly to be allowed to hike in the desert in the warmer months. Sadly our afternoon hikes will come to an end soon as hot weather is fast approaching, then it will be early morning hikes only for him. There are more dangerous things than rattlesnakes.
I dubbed this mushroom The Artists’ Studio when I realized a prolific pair of artists was painting the rock face. Bear and I had seen both owls on our walk earlier in the afternoon but I came back out with my biggest telephoto hoping for a close-up near sunset and only saw the one. I got those pictures but my favorites were the environmental portraits I took with the Nikon Z 24-200mm lens, perhaps not surprising since I’ve been craving these types of images for a while now.
This first image is my favorite of the two, the second was taken a few minutes later and further up the trail so I could include the mountains in the background. The lighting is more direct here and the light getting much softer, often a look I prefer, but in this case while I like both I prefer the shadows from the side-lighting of the first picture.
Always fun to see a humpback whale breach the desert floor, this one had the most adorable barnacle clinging to its mouth.
A couple of days ago I visited my favorite copse of ocotillos at sunrise, when I realized they were going to be partly in shadow for a while I started goofing around with self-portraits. The jacket is a holdover from my time in Portland where I was frequently a pedestrian, I have a small army of jackets and hoodies in bright orange to make me more visible. On this morning it was a little cool and windy so I put up the hood of my wool hoody to take the chill off. I have a wool cap on underneath, I’ve never liked the cold but after a couple of years in the desert I’ve lost any tolerance of it. The mask didn’t go unappreciated not just for a little warmth, and not just because I didn’t need to smile for the camera, but because it hid the tears streaming down my cheeks from being up so early.
I can’t tell the story of the Sonoran Desert, only my time in it. I’d love to revisit this shot when the ocotillos leaf out or bloom but this is their normal state, bare arms soaring into blue skies, and I hope in some sense it shows how beautiful the desert is even when it’s not trying to be spectacular.
For this shot I put myself at the edge of the large flat boulder, the plants are growing between this one and the next, so I could be as close as possible to the same plane as the two ocotillos in front to give some context as to their size. All of which is to say no optical tricks, they get pretty big.
Natural artwork in the stone on a rainy winter’s morning on the Slate Trail at Cave Creek.
My award for the cutest member of the desert that will still stab you six ways from Sunday goes to the diminutive hedgehog cactus with its almost comically long needles. I found this little clump in the slate at Cave Creek on a rainy winter’s day. Rain, I remember rain. It was wet I think.
Submarine Rock is one of the massive boulders that fell down from the mountains as part of the landslide 500,000 years ago. At first I wasn’t sure which rock was Submarine Rock as at first glance I thought “whale” and there is another large boulder out-of-frame to the left (it’s casting the shadow on the front) that looks to me like a World War II era submarine breaching the surface. Submarine Rock now lies halfway into my hike as it is in the middle of the short loop at the far end of the Marcus Landslide Trail. Normally I can’t get out this far during the soft sunrise light, even if I’m hoofing it, while it was no different on this morning smoke from fires in the distant Superstitions left the light a soft red for longer than normal.
Boolie 