Paths

Because of the recent viral outbreak I haven't been able to do any kind of hiking. All of the trails nearest me have been closed down either because of lack of workers to keep the trails clean, or because the lack of social distancing has become a problem. This means my main way of walking and getting any kind of exercise is walking the sidewalks in the neighborhood.

When I retired last May, a very dear friend of mine gave me a retirement T-shirt with a message on it. For those of you who know me well, this T-shirt pretty much sums up my approach to life in general. On the shirt is a large bootprint and in the tread of the boot is the saying, "Of all the paths you take in Life, Make sure a few of them are dirt." 

Sidewalks are not dirt, but today I was able to take the message to heart by walking this exercise path in the park north of my house. I walked five laps and it made all the difference in the world today.

Are You Talking to Me??

I recently got a pretty decent shot of an Eastern Fox Squirrel while on a walk in a local park. California has basically three types of tree squirrels, two of which are imported and obviously considered invasive species. The Eastern Fox Squirrel and the Eastern Gray Squirrel were both imported during the early 1900s and have flourished in this area, pushing out the Western Gray Squirrel. For more information on how you can tell them apart, check out this website.

While on my walk on a short nature path in the park, I spotted this Fox Squirrel eating on the path. It immediately scurried up the closest tree and sat in the crook of the first large branch of the tree to continue its snack. Most of the shots I took of it consisted of two paws on the branch and two paws holding and eating the nut, typical squirrel posture. Then it paused, put one paw down and clutched the nut with its one paw. The look made it look like it was pointing at its own chest. It then looked directly at me and that gave me the title of this blog entry: Are You Talking to Me??

Bluebirds

We have several kinds of blue colored birds here in Southern California. The most common one that I've seen where we live is the California Scrub Jay, a brilliantly blue colored bird with a raucous screech. They inhabit the foothills of our local mountains and are found in abundance. As you move upslope in the mountains, you'll start to encounter the Stellar's Jay, which is similar to the Scrub Jay, except that the Stellar's Jay has a crest on its head and its head is colored all black.

A couple of days ago, I was wandering around in the park just north of my house, keeping my social distance from others enjoying the nice spring weather. I heard first, then saw this pair of Western Bluebirds. There were actually two pairs of them and I ended up getting shots of both females and one of the males. There are three types of bluebirds in the United States, Eastern, Western, and Mountain bluebirds. Eastern and Western are similar looking, but the Mountain bluebirds are almost totally blue, which is how I knew these were Western bluebirds because of their orange tinged belly feathers. I was able to get several really good shots of the females, but this is the best one I could get of the male as he was playing hard to get with my camera. Sometimes that happens when you're dealing with the natural world.

Sidewalk Art

Most everyone is practicing shelter in place and keeping their distance from each other. That doesn't rule out walks, as long as we keep our distance. It's about the only thing we really can do at the moment, until we develop a good herd immunity to this disease.

Yesterday, while out on a walk, I encountered in front of several houses, some sidewalk chalk art. Most of the artwork was in the form of inspirational messages, hellos to the neighbors who walk by and other cute photos. 

At this particular spot, however, there was some serious talent residing within the house. I hope, whoever created this piece of art, continues to be inspired and continues to hone their craft. The sad part about this is that it rained last night, heavily. I actually walked by the spot again this morning in the hopes of getting a before and after photo of the artwork, but it was not to be since there literally wasn't even any streaks of chalk on the sidewalk.

But looking at it another way, the rain gave the artist a blank canvas to work with in the near future.

Flowers are easy

This is going to ramble a little bit becasuse I'm starting to get cabin fever, as I'm sure most people are who are taking "Shelter in Place" seriously. During the past couple of weeks, I haven't been able to do my normal routine as my favorite hiking trail has been closed down for the duration of this problem, so I've resorted to walking along the streets in my neighborhood. The last couple of days I started taking photos of flowers that I saw since Spring has definitely sprung in our neck of the woods. There's a lot of pollen in the air and I'm definitely congested due to seasonal allergies.

But I digress. Most of the shots I've been taking recently have been with my iPhone. It has a good lens, but it's not nearly as good as my Canon 80D lenses, so today, I dusted off the Canon and took it out on my afternoon walk. It's the first time I've really used the camera since my trip to Idaho last summer. First thing I had to do was charge up the camera's battery, as it was deader than a doornail.

Now, several years ago I got myself involved in a 365 project. Challenge yourself to go out every day and take at least one photo per day and publish it online so others can see it and possibly critique it. I ended up starting on January 1st of that year and for the next two years, I diligently went about documenting every day of the year by taking photos. Some days were better than others, but I felt that it made me a better photographer and the one thing I learned was that flowers are easy. In other words, it's hard to screw up a flower photo. In fact, during my 365 project, someone challenged me again to not take a single photo of flowers for the entire month of March. Do you know how hard that is? Sometimes, you don't have the energy to go out and take photos and it's easy just to step outside, especially in March and take a quick photo of a flower and call it good for the day.

I did end up completing that particular challenge, but it was difficult. With that in the back of my mind, I decided that today, I wanted to concentrate on things other than flowers. I'd actually noticed that Painted Lady butterflies were starting their migration north from Mexico and were starting to show up in the neighborhood, so that was a great subject. Last year, Southern California had a huge migration of Painted Ladies due to the unusually wet winter we'd had and they proceeded northward in droves. I'm not sure how large this year's will be but last year, it was estimated that over a billion butterflies of that species alone migrated northward. That's a buttload of butterflies.

Because it is Spring, there are a lot of insects besides butterflies out and about. It's like a bountiful smorgasbord out there for insects. Which flower do I want to pollenate today? Today on my walk, I saw bumblebees, butterflies, honeybees, dragonflies, and lizards.

Another reason for getting my Canon out, was I really wanted to explore things that were a little bit farther away from the path and it's hard to capture those things with an iPhone camera. So I concentrated less on flowers, but on other things, and so you get photos like a lone pine cone that's probably dropped all of its seeds but is still hanging on a branch surrounded by pine cone flowers awaiting pollination so they will eventually create new pine cones.

The lizard photo. I ended up stalking this little guy, probably no longer than 3 inches or so. I think he was actually kind of pissed, because I'd seen a painted lady flit by and land on the rock right were he was, then it darted off and I did see the lizard had lunged at the butterfly. So I guess this guy was pouting because he missed his mid afternoon snack. But it worked for me, because I got a nice portrait of a lizard.

Needless to say, I won't stop taking photos of flowers, but as I noted above, flowers are easy and if you concentrate only on the flowers, you're going to miss a lot of subtle beauty all around you. So I'm going to be walking around over the next couple of weeks, practicing my social distancing, but at the same time, exploring my world through my camera lens once again. I'm looking forward to it and I hope you will enjoy it with me. It's where I can wander at the moment.

El Malpais

I still haven't covered all of my road trips from this past summer and fall, nor have I even covered all of my road trip from 2017. And so it goes. With the social distancing now in effect in the country, I have more time to deal with stuff here and not do those frivolous things like hiking and geocaching. Well, I'm still doing the former and practicing social distancing at the same time. But, on to the real subject of this particular blog.

Part of the fun of solo road trips is you can stop where ever you want to stop and explore things that might not happen if you're with other people due to a set agenda. As I was driving between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Flagstaff, Arizona on my October road trip, I spotted signs for El Malpais National Monument. I'd never been there before, so why not stop and visit?

One of the drawbacks to doing something like this however, is if you have somewhat of a set schedule, stops along the way sometimes get short circuited, because you don't have enough time to do a proper visit. This was the case with this particular stop. I basically saw some of the "greatest hits" of the monument, but really didn't get to explore it in depth. Had I had more time, I probably would have spent the night here, camping in the campground and then moved on later the next day, but I didn't have camping gear with me on this trip anyway, so the point was moot.

The park is rich in volcanic activity, with sandstone bluffs sticking out above several different lava floes in the park. There were several earth caches that I worked on during my brief stay in the park, so I learned that there were at least 7 different periods of volcanic activity across the plains as I looked out from the top of the sandstone bluffs. Much like my time at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho this past summer, I could actually see the different floes, because each had a different characteristic and age to it based upon the amount of vegetation that was growing within the floe.

I did a couple of short hikes to viewpoints, at one point hiking along the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), one of the big three trails in the United States that run north to south. The CDT runs from the Mexican border in New Mexico all the way into Glacier National Park in Montana. Because it's a relatively new trail, unlike the Appalachian Trail (AT) or the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the route is not as clearly defined.  In fact, right here in the monument, there were two possible routes you could choose if you were hiking through the park along the CDT, one which went inland seen in the first photo, or the other which went along the road and was a little bit shorter. Either would count if you were hiking the trail, but if I were backpacking the trail, I think I'd opt for the part that went through the monument as opposed to along the road. In my opinion, road hiking is not that exciting.

The last thing in the park I explored that day was the La Ventana Arch in the southern part of the park. La Ventana is a natural arch formed due to wind erosion. Looking at the photos I took, it's a little bit difficult to see the arch, unless you see the sunshine on the back part of the sandstone bluff behind the arch. I was there in the morning hours and the sun was not in the right place. I'm sure the view would look differently, were it later in the day and the sun was shining on the arch as opposed to in your face in the morning hours when I was there. Still, I got some pretty cool shots of the arch, one of which I'm using right now as my wallpaper on my desktop computer. Needless to say, I intend to visit the park again if I'm driving along I-40 in New Mexico. At least this time, I'll know what I'm getting into and save some extra time to explore some areas more in depth.

Many people I know who really enjoy our country's national parks, tend to forget about the smaller national monuments. That means the crowds are smaller and there's more space to enjoy the quiet solitude of a particular spot. This is definitely the case here at El Malpais. I'll be back sometime in the future.

Yuma

This is a geocaching article, so if you're not interested in that silly hobby of mine, you can stop reading now. I won't be offended in the least. It's been almost a month since the Yuma Mega Event at the beginning of last month and I really need to write about it.

The Yuma Mega Event is hosted each year by the South Western Arizona Geocachers (S*W*A*G). This was the 17th annual and the first one I've been able to attend. It's never fallen on a good weekend to go and half the fun is getting there and driving home and all of the caching that you do on the three or four or five days, depending upon how long you stay. This time, we left early Friday morning and got home late in the afternoon on Sunday.

A synopsis of the weekend would be as follows:  We did a lot of caching, and I do mean, a lot. There are events happening all weekend and because the S*W*A*G group has been doing this for awhile, it's a pretty well oiled machine with regards to organization. New caches popped up all weekend, giving many people opportunities for first to finds, if they wanted to go that route.

We opted to just cache in the desert on the way to Yuma, stopping here and there on the east side of the Salton Sea. Once we got into Yuma, we checked out the park where the Mega Event was going to happen and also found a couple of caches that had been placed earlier in the day. There was a flash mob event later in the evening that was a lot of fun and then we started working on some of the Adventure Labs that had been placed in and around the city.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Adventure Labs, they are a new cache type that can best be described as virtual multi-caches. You need to visit an area and get information that you input into the Adventure Lab app which will score you a cache find. Because there's nothing to find, it's more like a virtual cache, but it comes in groups of five or ten places to visit, so you literally get credit for 10 cache finds if you find all of the locations from a particular Adventure Lab. In the second photo, we were looking for a particular Adventure Lab Location. The Adventure Labs kept us busy until nightfall and then we found a great Mexican restaurant and had dinner.

The next day was devoted to the Discover Yuma series where we raced around on a scavenger hunt, finding clues and new caches all in the pursuit of Discover Yuma Geocoins. We finished the Discover Yuma series around 1:30 in the afternoon, then hit the power trails out in the desert. Power trails are just that, usually dirt roads where there are caches hidden approximately every 528 feet, the minimum distance needed between geocaches. It's a great way to bump your numbers up while having fun with a group of people. And we did both. 

Another event that evening, followed by some more caching, more eating of Mexican food, finishing up the Adventure Labs which we didn't get the day before. and finally crashing for the night.

Sunday morning, it was time to head out to the Mega Event. A Mega event is one where there are at least 500 cachers attending. Lots of people, but the park was big enough and they had one more Adventure Lab in the park that it didn't appear to be that crowded, because everyone was spread out. We participated in the Poker Run. I got two pair, but nothing worth writing home about since the winning hand as a full house I believe. Geocaching venders were there, Signal the frog, the mascot for the Geocaching website was there, so I scored a location less cache for the trip as well. 

Locationless caches were all the rage back in the early days of geocaching, but they were shuttered. Locationless caches had you find something of interest that no other geocacher had already found. For example, one location less cache I found was about Presidential Statues. I "found" the statue of William McKinley in downtown Arcata, California. Once I found it, that meant that no one else could find that particular Presidential statue. Other geocachers would have to find their own. I liked location less caches because it made me more aware of my environment. I kept a half a dozen location less caches in the back of my mind. Once I found one, I'd add another one to the mix. All in all, I found 25 before they were shuttered. Because geocaching is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, they brought back the location less for this year. Signal was going to be at several Mega Events all around the world and all you had to do was get a photo of you with him to get credit for a find. And so I did. As of this moment, Signal has been logged 3724 times. I'm sure that by the time I publish this article, that number might be larger.

The event went on all morning and afternoon, but once we'd accomplished what we came to do, we decided that we wanted to beat the traffic out of town and headed for home, caching obviously on the way home. 

I'd heard stories of what a good time everyone had and I definitely wasn't disappointed with great expectations. It lived up to everything it had been billed by some of my friends and it's something I'm looking forward to going to again next year. There's literally so much to do out here that you could spend a week participating in everything and just scratch the surface. I think I actually need to go back there at a different time, perhaps in November when it cools down after summer and just cache in the some of the areas to the east of town. I've signed a challenge cache that wants me to find 1000 caches in two different states. Most of my 16,000+ finds are in California. This area could get me up to 1000 finds in Arizona very quickly.