The Grand Canyon in 1971 and 1983

I posted about our visit to Grand Canyon National Park back in January 2015. My scanning project has digitized the pictures I have from 2 earlier visits! The first was in March of 1971. The two pictures below were probably taken through a bus window.

We hiked down a little way down the Bright Angel Trail. The wind was cold and a light snow started to fall. You can see some of the accumulation in the rocks.

But the sun came out soon. I remember getting sand in my contact lenses (this was before the soft contact lenses were invented…so it hurt a lot) and being very teary eyed on the hike up because I was afraid the lenses would blow away if I tried to take them out.

Back at the rim – it’s easy to see that the clouds with the snow are moving away…and the dust on the color slide that I didn’t get off before I scanned it.

Skipped forward to late May of 1983 – we got up at dawn and caught the sunrise on the rocks.

We started early for a hike down to the plateau.

We could see the river soon enough.

See how brown the river looks? I looked up when the Glen Canyon Dam came online because I knew that when it did the sediment in the river was dramatically reduced...but discovered that it was completed in the 1960s. The Wikipedia entry did mention that in the spring and early summer of 1983 the water level in the dam was very high (and climbing) because of the runoff from the heavier than usual snow that fell the previous winter. The dam almost failed and a lot of water was being released…along with sediment...during the time we visited the Grand Canyon!

It appears that there were people on rafts in the river in 1983!

The path down is a lot of switch backs then a downward slope of the plateau.

We were walking but there were people on mules on the same trail - all the way down.

Looking up to the sky…..from inside the canyon...good memories.

Mercury Transit

Mercury past in front of the sun on Monday morning this week. My husband set his camera on a tripod with a solar filter in our driveway and got one reasonable picture before the haze became thick clouds over the whole of central Maryland where we live. The small dot to the bottom of the disk is Mercury; the upper one is a sunspot.

My daughter had better luck in Tucson. The transit was already underway before the sun came up but it was a clear, sunny day. The transit lasted until about 11:30 AM local time. She had organized an event on the mall at the University of Arizona – complete with solar telescopes and a scale model of the solar system. When I talked to her later in the day she said they had several 100 people stop by to take a look through the telescopes and understand what was happening….and how it relates to the way exoplanets are discovered! She spent 2+ hours in the sun talking to people – sharing sunscreen with the other volunteers.

Tucson Souvenirs

Earrings! They are my favorite souvenirs – not too expensive and small enough to be easily packed for the trek home.

The most unusual earrings I purchased this time were the ones that used cholla cactus stems as a large ‘bead’ (upper left). I noticed the cholla cactus around Tucson because they seemed to be more colorful than just about anything else.

I bought the hummingbird earrings since we did see quite a few hummingbirds during our walks…. again, the earrings are a good reminder of one of our trip highlights.

The bear earrings were a serendipity. I bought them as a reminder of the excellent black bear lecture I attended just before our trip….and I liked the symbolic representation. When I saw the arrow inside the bear symbol I thought of the 20,000 calories a day the bear needs to eat in the fall (does the arrow represent the digestive tract?)!

Raptor Free Flight at Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

We saw the morning and afternoon Raptor Free Flights at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum when we were there in January. The museum brings out birds that are trained to swoop for bait providing great views of the birds in flight and out in the open area of the desert museum’s land. The views of the birds during the free flight would be very time-consuming to duplicate in the wild and lots of people – including me – were taking pictures.

We saw two different kinds of owls: A Barn Owl

and a Great Horned Owl. I couldn’t resist taking several perspectives of this bird. The wings are more complex structures.

The Prairie Falcon was probably my favorite...swift and beutiful.

There was a ferruginous hawk at the end of the morning program - quite a size contrast to the praire falcon!

All of these are solitary hunters. The Harris’s Hawks, the last birds in the afternoon Free Flight, live and hunt as a group so their free flight is as a group. Their acrobatic interactions were too fast for me to photograph!

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a favorite outing during our Tucson vacations. The drive through the Tucson Mountain Park to get there just sets the stage for a day enjoying all the wonders of the museum. There are lots of different kinds of cactus – of course. I tend to look for cactus that have something a little different: bigger spines or spines in an interesting pattern, colored fruit or spines…or outer flesh that is not green at all. I like the landscapes of different kinds of cactus growing on hillsides.

 There is a hummingbird aviary and hummingbirds outside too.

There was an Anna’s hummingbird at a feeder that moved slightly and the color of the head changed completely. Hummingbirds have prism-like cells within the top layers of feathers on their heads…and the color we perceive varies based on the refraction from those prism-like cells.

Some other birds that we saw:a female Gila Woodpecker (since it did not have any red on its head)

And male Gambel’s Quail.

There were a few plants that were blooming. I didn’t notice the aphids on the close-up I took of one small flower until I looked at the image on my computer monitor!

And then there are rocks…some with brilliant colors

And some just a collection of small stones between plants

And an outcrop on a hillside – red with its iron.

Tomorrow I’ll write a second post about the Raptor Free Flight programs we saw on our visit to this museum last month.

Saguaro National Park – Rincon Mountain Distract

Our January visit to Tucson included a morning drive in Saguaro National Park – Rincon Mountain District. It was quite different than the last time we visited in June 2013. It was too early for the desert spoons or saguaro cactus to bloom although the cholla provided some rosy/orange color to the landscape.

Here is a close up of the cholla – the brightest colors of the winter landscape.

I like the whites and greens of some of the plants of the desert…but these leaves are not for touching any more than the cactus with their spines.

There was snow on the peaks of the Catalina Mountains to the north. The ocotillos looked like gray thorn sticks; some had a few remnants of last year’s seeds. In a few months the ocotillos would be green thorn sticks with orangey red blooms at their tips.

The visitor center is low and has enough vegetation around it to be almost hidden even in this desert landscape. The loop road beings at one end of the parking lot.

I noticed young saguaros with nurse plants still protecting them from the harshest heat and sun.

The accordion pleats of the cactus body are not always as orderly as I’d assumed. Sometimes they need to grow more pleats as they get larger!

The beginnings of the saguaro ‘arms’ almost look like another cactus growing on the main trunk.

The plants on the rocky slope of the Rincons from one of the loop road overlooks have water nearby this time of year – probably from snow that melting higher up in the mountains.

From our vantage point we could not see any snow in the Rincons. Either it had melted or was still on the peaks out of our sight. We think of deserts as having very few plants but this one has quite a few plants…all that survive with very little water as look as they are undisturbed.

Madera Canyon

The drive between The Paton Center for Hummingbirds and Madera Canyon was scenic … through the Santa Rita Mountains. We had visited the canyon back in June 2013 and headed straight for a bird watching area near a gift shop that we had stopped at previously.

I saw a woodpecker as I was getting out of the car…did not manage a good picture…and then did not see it at the feeders at all.

Then again – is this an Arizona woodpecker? They are brown and the female does not have any red at all so I think it is. I didn’t realize what I was getting when I took the picture.

There were squirrels cleaning up the seen under the feeders --- but the feeders are positioned to keep squirrels from getting the seed directly.

There were quite a few Mexican Jays at the feeders

And the nearby trees and railings. Some of the railings have numbers to help people talk to each other about the location of a bird they are pointing out to someone else.

The biggest birds were the Wild Turkeys. They too were under the feeders although the adults spent most of their time parading. Two of the juveniles managed to fly up to the feeders – perch on the roof – and eat the seeds.

There were a few hummingbirds. This is the only one I saw well enough to identify – as an Anna’s Hummingbird.

The Yellow-eyed Juncos were fast but I was patient enough to get one good picture! I had a hard time identifying it as I was writing this post because it is not in All-About-Birds!

Paton Center for Hummingbirds

Tucson Audubon’s Paton Center for Hummingbirds is located just outside of Patagonia, Arizona. January is not the best time to visit but that is when we were in the area. We didn’t see hummingbirds but there were plenty of other birds around although they were in winter plumage – so not very colorful.

There are numerous feeders and benches. The birds are not as wary of people as they are of potential predators. We say a larger bird fly over and all the birds disappeared from the feeders into the brush piles.

There are different kinds of feeders…with different kinds of seed. The feeders for the hummingbirds had no birds around them while we were there but it was a cold morning.

There were tussles at the popular feeders…lots of acrobatics to either keep or find a place at the feeder.

Sometimes it was uncomplicated…with only one bird at a feeder…munching.

This is definitely a place I want to visit again – in another season. If I lived in the area – I’d volunteer to help keep the feeders full. Kudos to the Tucson Audubon Society for acquiring it in early 2014!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – January 2016

I enjoy the big celebrations of the year....but the little celebrations that happen daily are the ones that keep me going all year long. Here are my top 10 for January 2016:

The most recent celebrations have to do with snow:

• Getting home from the airport in the ice and snow (it had just started coming down…so nothing had been treated yet)
• A snow big enough to cover everything and close just about everything – snow days and snow ice cream

I travelled to Tucson, Arizona this month and about half the celebrations are associated with that trip (and I still have a lot of posts in the works about that travel):

• Birds of southern Arizona (hummingbirds and turkeys!)
• Mount Lemmon (snow at the top)
• Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (plants and free flight raptor programs)
• Tohono Chul (steps to the roof as plant stand, rocks, small meditation garden)
• Tucson Botanical Garden (butterfly exhibit…cactus…rocks)

January 2016 included my 43^rd wedding anniversary....maybe that should be a ‘big’ celebration!

There was also a funeral in the family this month – a sad event but also a celebration of a person’s life and of continuity of family over long periods of time.

And last but not least, I spent more than a third of the month away from home ---- so it was a celebration just coming home again (in time for the big snow).

Intimate Landscapes – January 2016

This is the fourth month for my Intimate Landscapes series (after reading Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here)) featuring images from January that are: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

There is only one picture from Maryland this month – the frozen edge of a stream with pebbles showing, dark leaves caught on the surface, green and brown plants around the edge.

All the other images are from Arizona this month…I’ve saving the wintery ones for February since I had so much to share from Arizona. The colors are often subdued- the greens of saguaro and desert brush, the browns of twists of dead wood and occasional water, the whites of rocks.

And then there are sudden bursts of color that draw the eye – oranges…and yellows.

I made a slide show of the other intimate landscapes that appealed to be in Tucson – a vine growing on a purple wall, the color variation in prickly pear, a lone flower in front of a white wall, a very small cactus surrounded by black rocks and fallen leaves from its nurse tree that shades it during the hottest part of the summer, small saguaro getting big enough to show among the palo verde and cholla, groupings of cactus with colorful spines, young saguaros lined up in rows between lighter leaved plants and yellow flowers with palo verde in the background….such are the intimate landscapes around Tucson.

Tucson Mountain Park Sunset

We managed to get to our favorite sunset location twice during our recent trip to Tucson: Gates Pass in Tucson Mountain Park. The first time we managed to get there just as the sun was going down – got the last parking spot with no time for set up. I still managed some reasonable pictures of the west horizon,

The light reflected off the mountain to the north east almost behind me, and

Then, as the sky darkened, some saguaro on a mountain in the foreground silhouetted by the fading color.

Five days later – the evening before we were flying home – we tried again. We got to the location early enough but the clouds were thick enough at the horizon that we didn’t see much at the time the sun was supposed to be setting.

Then the show started. The lower the sun got, the more the sky filled with color.

At first it was a haze of pink

Then the color intensified.

What a colorful crescendo to our last day in Tucson!

Mount Lemmon

We drove up the Catalina Highway from Tucson (about 2000 feet above sea level) to Summerhaven (about 8000 feet above sea level) last week. It is the curvy two lane road that goes up Mount Lemmon. Starting out in Tucson – the Saguaro and ephedra are common.

The pattern of spines on this barrel cactus was full of complexity

Making the prickly pear spines on the flat pads look relatively simple.

A little further up the mountain – there are more ocotillo and water gurgling the stream beds. The snow was melting above.

Further still there are desert spoons and grasses with hardy trees.

Here there was a prickly pear with some fruits still attached.

And then the vegetation changes to pines and there are waterfalls cascading down the mountain.

Sometimes the slope is so steep that there is not much vegetation at all.

Finally - we get to snow! The temperature is still in the 40s but the sound of water trickling down the slopes surrounds us.

The overlooks have more people. There is something about snow this close to Tucson is a draw for tourists and natives alike.

The white of the snow drapes over rocks – in every nook.

When we got to Summerhaven we stopped for a big cookie and hot cider….and then came back down the mountain.