Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Here are some cholla cactus, lots of this stuff around this area.

Here is a nice barrel cactus!

who says water is hard to find in the desert, we found this and we were almost a mile from civilization!!




Here is Barb walking towards the Oasis in the canyon. it had a stream running thru it. Believe it or not it took another 15 min for us to get up to those trees because of all the large boulders. this area had over 1000 of these California Palm trees here until a major flash flood in 2004. when we were hiking up to this area we saw hundreds of the big Palm tree logs scatted thru out the wash and lots of boulders, large and small. Hard to believe that a large enough rain in the desert could cause that much destruction. this area contains several Big Horn sheep that you will see in the following pictures.


Here is one out on that rock, see it in the middle of the photo, there are actually 4 or 5 of them on the rocks but we didnt know that until I viewed the picture I took of this one. they really blend into the background and we were at least 1/4 mile from them. I used a telephoto to bring them in closer.
Here is what is left of the Palm tree Oasis from the flood 7 years ago. there are many small palms starting to grow below these so someday they will be replenished in this area.



Here is the Male BigHorn, we stumbled upon this group on our way back down the trail. they were about 50 feet from us. Really great to watch them.


He decided to attach this bush.




This is the city area of Borrego Springs, CA from the trail. we had hiked from the visitor center parking lot about one mile to the trail head, then 1.5 miles up the trail and back 1.5 miles and met a nice gentlemen on the way down that told us all about this area. Him and his wife gave us a ride back to our truck and we were very happy as we were worn out and still had a mile to go.
Tomorrow we will visit more of the Metal Art Scupltures in the desert, one of which is 350 ft long. I will post the pics tomorrow night or Thursday Morning.
Then we will be leaving for the Quartzsite area to spend a couple more weeks in the desert with our camping group from Oregon. there is usually about 80 people there so we will have a lot of fun. Keep checking back for more pictures.