They’re about a month late, but we finally spotted prairie crocuses yesterday. This week has also featured a sprinkling of fresh green leaves, and a large number of runaway grass fires. It’s a very dry spring.
Tag Archives: Photography
Yellowstone: Water and Wildlife
My oldest child told me what kind of bird this is, but of course I’ve forgotten already. I just thought it looked cool, standing there.
Water over multicoloured rocks.
Yellowstone: Paint Pots
New this week: A previously published short story of mine, The Significance of Snowflakes, is now available for free in your choice of e-reader formats. If you’d like to read it, click here and scroll down to the download links.
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Foliage
New this week: A previously published short story of mine, The Significance of Snowflakes, is now available for free in your choice of e-reader formats. If you’d like to read it, click here and scroll down to the download links.
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More photos from Yellowstone last October. One interesting thing about the highly mineralized water: It very rapidly fossilizes what falls into it. The delicate detail in some of the springs is exquisite (see third image).
Yellowstone National Park
On our way home from Arizona, we managed a two-day whirlwind stop in Yellowstone. It was the destination of our first-ever family road trip, and is responsible for making us into wilderness travel addicts.
Our provincial mascot: the bison
Actually, we saw him in Yellowstone last fall, but nonetheless, yay Manitoba!
Meeting the California Condor
So we drive north from Sedona and we decide to take the 89A. It’s longer, but if time and weather permit, the idea is to try for a glimpse of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Which doesn’t work out, because the rain of the lowlands is a blizzard up top.
But it doesn’t matter, because sometimes the journey is the arrival. The 89A takes us across the Colorado River southwest of Powell Lake, on the flats near the Vermilion Cliffs. After winding our way through clefts in the rock, we come to Navajo Bridge.
And that’s when my husband yells, “Buzzard!”
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce #73 and #54, two of the ugliest birds ever to avoid extinction. As we learned at the South Rim interpretive presentation, all condors are numbered. While they’re called the California Condor, they were brought to Arizona for an important reason: There are so few left in the world that it was decided to establish isolated populations, in case one population got wiped out by disease or disaster.
Condors need high verticals with strong updrafts and cliffs for nesting. Thus, the Canyon was chosen. But when the introduced birds began to nest, the rangers discovered they’d chosen cliffside holes with ancient bones in them. No one had reason to find them before. They were the ancient skeletons of condors past.
When they took off, we breathed a sigh of disappointment and went out on the walk bridge to watch them disappear downriver. But they didn’t. They can’t smell and they can’t hunt, so they scavenge by sight. Which means that, while they attract people attention, people also attract their attention. If they see a lot of movement on the ground, they come sailing by to find out what’s on the roadkill grill. (No wonder they were perched beside the highway.) Continue reading
Grand Canyon: North Rim and Vermilion Cliffs area
Highway 89A – the blue across the top is the windshield tint. My bad.
Sedona in Storm
Sinagua Petroglyphs
If ever you get a chance to visit the V-Bar-V Ranch site in Arizona, absolutely go. It’s one of the more fascinating stops we made when we toured the Sedona area, and the docente there was a fabulous source of information. He gave us at least an hour of his time for questions and discussion of the site and what’s known or not known about it. We never would have gotten a fraction of the wealth of it otherwise.
The Sinagua Petroglyphs are the only solar-plus-lunar calendar in the USA, and very possibly in North America. They’re a reverse sundial: a wedge of light falls through a cleft in a rock outcrop and casts its beam on the shadowed cliff face where the petroglyphs are.
The petroglyphs are visible when the light slants across them. When in shade or direct light, they hardly show. As the sun moves across the wall, different glyphs come in and out of view.
Corn — this symbol indicates planting times on the calendar section of the petroglyphs.
