Wretched excess

If you're getting tired of wildflower photos, I may be able to promise that I've just about reached the end.

Last weekend my hiking partner, Glenn, and I made a foray out to Timp Point, a trailhead on the Rainbow Rim Trail. He'd never been out there and I wasn't going to recommend Parasnotowitz to anyone, so we went to Timp. We drove the one highway out of the park to the short Forest Service road on the upper right of this map. Then we made a series of rights and lefts, or maybe it was the other way around, to get to Timp on the lower left. We were the only ones parked out there but as the day went on we met several bikers. This is maybe the only trail around that's open to bicyclists.

Once again, I found a fairly unremarkable trail. It goes far inland through the forest and, with the exception of a few late bloomers, there wasn't much to see. No reptiles this trip.

Here's another view of a cranesbill geranium, petal-less, but with a bud on the next stem over. I'm captivated by the colors.

This is a penstemon. I made a mistake in calling a similar flower a penstemon a while back. I think it was a foxglove, but it's much different from foxgloves I've seen in the wild in western Washington. The description I'd seen for the penstemon said one of the five stamens was bearded, and now I've finally found a flower to fit the description.

Thistles are hangers-on but the earlier blooms are now going to seed. One look at this seed head explains more than anything how easily they propagate.

At the North Timp trailhead, the turn-around point of our hike, we met a bicyclist from Virginia, who lives not far from where I lived. He'd been biking all over the South Rim from Flagstaff to Sedona, and  had made his way around to the North Rim. He'd ridden down from Jacob Lake without cookies!, spent the night at one of the other points, and was on his way into the park. These bicyclists make me feel so lazy, logging 50 miles or so a day. Just the thought of it makes me ache all over.

The view here is lovely. Soak it in 'cause there isn't another.

We hung around for a while before heading back. Glenn is a rock hound with a lapidary setup in his garage, so on our way over he looked for rocks while I looked for flowers. According to Glenn, collectors can take 15 pounds of smaller stones and one rock, meaning something bigger, on Forest Service or BLM land. He'd picked up three or four small ones but at North Timp found his rock, managed to break off part of it, but was still left with a bowling-ball size chunk that he put in his backpack to carry back to the truck. I told him we could drive around to pick it up but he carried it. His pack must have weighed 50 pounds.

It's amazing what you see in one direction that you didn't see going the other way. Heading back to the truck, I found this strange plant, one I've never seen before and sure hadn't seen it earlier. It has a waxy look and feel to it.

Here's a different view of the same plant. The yellow-green disc is about an inch across. I don't know what stage of bloom it's in but I think the drooping parts are spent flowers.

There were a couple of feathers lying along the trail. This is probably from a flicker, a member of the woodpecker family, and is the underside; the top is all black.

When we got to our turn-around, Glenn asked if I'd seen the skeleton. What?! What kind of skeleton? He didn't know but it was something big. How in the world did I miss this, which he pointed out to me on our return trip? There are no elk here and it's much too big for a deer, so it could be a cow. There's open range between the park and Jacob Lake, (in fact, the bicyclist said on his way from Jacob Lake he rounded a curve and found a cow grazing on the side of the trail) so HH surmised this one could have wandered off from the herd. What surprises me is that scavengers didn't scatter these bones.

I've worked thistles to death, I know, but there's no way I can ignore their glow. You'd think they could light the night.

Almost every bee I saw on the thistles were this kind, and all of them bottom-up into the center of the flower. This one's a good pollinator; it's covered!

What a find! Who's ever heard of a polka-dot feather?

Luckily, yesterday I was on-site when the Bookmobile from Flagstaff appeared. I've seen the monthly schedule but have somehow missed it every time. I turned in my driver's license to the librarian/driver (who, interestingly, is about my age and got his library degree the same year I got mine, and got it at Wayne State University in Detroit, where I got my undergrad degree. It really is a small world.) I'm now a happy owner of a Flagstaff Public Library card. The more library cards, the better. He just happened to have a book on bird feathers - that's it, just feathers - and I found this one. It's from a woodpecker, either a downy or hairy; I couldn't tell the difference between the two birds from the photos.

Along the trail, a gigantic bee-like thing lifted off from a thistle and came at me. I warily stepped back and watched it lumber away. Later, I saw another one working so hard to get from flower to flower and was able to get a few shots off. This flower is a little on the small side, but it still shows the gigantitude of this critter, which may be a carpenter bee. Wikipedia says males don't sting and females will only if provoked. I wonder if walking into the bee's flight path counts as provocation.

So, to get off the subject of wildflowers after this, here are some of what I dredged from the archives to cap the season. I know the names of some, but not all. If you're sick of them, it's best to stop reading now.

Salsify. These are the showgirls of the floral lineup. They're three or four inches across in exuberant bloom.

This is salsify's seedhead. When I saw the first one, among what looked like buds, I thought this plant went from bud directly to seed. Later I saw that the salsify closes after bloom, then forms a seedhead "bud," and then opens to a three-inch puff of shimmer. They're really beautiful.

I found this on the Widforss trail some time ago, nearly at the far point of five miles in. I wanted to see it in bloom but wasn't willing to go back out there just for that. Later I saw milkweed in bloom along the highway and recognized that it was this plant. Here is another delicious color combination.

 A white lupine along the path I walk to work.

Out in The Basin lived this soft lavender lupine among its brilliant purple cousins.

Aster.

Skyrocket.

No idea what this is, but in looking at slide after slide of flowers in the park, I know enough to say with some uncertainty that this is a composite. Each little bubble in the center is a flower and each thing we call a petal is a ray flower. 

Pinedrops! I saw a slide in the collection I was working on and thought this was the same. It's a root parasite and doesn't come up every year. There was a small cluster on the Widforss, I think, and they were the only ones I saw anywhere. They're endangered in Michigan and threatened in Wisconsin, New York, and Vermont.

I found this along a path that leads to the Grand Canyon Lodge. It was only an inch or so off the ground but when I saw the purple I got closer. The camera revealed these delicate clusters.

A sego lily. I didn't see a lot of these and they weren't around for long.

Locust blossoms. They're the rose on the thorny shrubs that take over paths and wild country very quickly.

Here's another low-growing flower, name unknown.

Not a wildflower but a grass. It would be possible to study grasses all summer here. We noticed one day that in plain view of our house, we could see at least a dozen different kinds. This is one of the more unusual ones. When green, it's loosely closed but opens like this when it's going to seed.

Funny, but I just now noticed the bug on the petal. I took the photo because of the backlighting and never noticed the occupant. Observant, huh?

Last one here, but at least hundreds more on the hard drive. Wild roses had been in bloom in several places, but never where it was safe to stop along the road. We finally found one I could get to.

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Thought of the day:
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing exceeds like excess. - Oscar Wilde

Parasnotawitz

Last weekend I headed out to the Rainbow Rim trail in Kaibab National Forest, which is actually a series of trails that hops from one of five points overlooking the canyon to the next. Because I'd heard that the road into the closest one, Timp Point, was closed for re-gravelling, I went out to the farthest point, Parissawampitts, with the idea of hiking to Fence Point, the next one over.

The sign in the background is a trail map. It shows the distance from Parissawampitts to Fence as 5.5 miles one way. OK, I can do 11 miles, I thought, so off I went. It's apparent that this section of the trail doesn't follow the rim but I did expect it to be a nice inland hike. Right.

There were exactly two measly sightings of the canyon and unremarkable ones at that. Does that mean I'm jaded? I hope not. My thought is if it takes me at least an hour to drive on graveled Forest Service roads into the back of beyond, the experience should be commensurate with the effort expended.

The experience was more like pulling the handle on a slot machine, or like it used to be pulling the handle before all the fun was taken out of it by electronic machines: if I just kept going I would surely hit pay dirt in terms of scenery. I never did but I found other treasures, including end-of-season wildflowers. 

I love these skyrockets, a Gilia species that's in the Phlox family. I've seen them here in scarlet, hot fuchsia pink, lavender, and now this spotted orange. Aren't they fun?

Here's one still in bud. No one would ever think to put these colors together except Mother Nature. Unexpectedly gorgeous.

I have no idea what this is. Try looking up 5-petaled yellow wildflower and see how far you get.

This confection is a cranesbill geranium, a genus that contains more than 420 species, according to Wikipedia. These have no relation to the Pelargonium species you buy at Home Depot, which are perennial evergreens native to South Africa.

I also found some feathers which I think I might not have seen at all if I hadn't been moving slowly, trying to keep the heart rate down. See, there's an upside to everything!

This one looked scorched but that's just its natural coloring.

Nice subtle coloring on this one; detail in the next photo down.

Steller's jays are some of my favorite birds. They're brash and noisy, in-your-face birds. When I lived in Washington the first time I fed them by throwing peanuts in the shell onto the deck. They picked up one peanut after another, seemingly weighing them, finally settling on one that would be choked down, only to start again to select another one or two. Here is a feather that displays their electric blue that's so distinctive.

Some flowers are done for the summer, leaving behind sculptural reminiscences of themselves.

This is what's left when the cranesbill geranium loses its petals.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and was lucky to see this critter, about 14" long. Surprisingly, it didn't move out once it reached this spot. I got several shots, then made a wide berth to leave it undistubed.

I take it back; there were three measly views on the trail.

I'd been trudging along with the end of the trail nowhere in sight, when a mountain biker came from the direction I was hiking toward. "How much farther?", I asked him. "About a mile and a half." "You gotta be kidding me." I'd been on the trail forEVer. A big roll of the eyes and a big sigh of resignation, and I kept going until I thought how stupid it was. All the way over I kept thinking I had to go back. It's not a loop trail but an out-and-back, and nobody was going to give me a ride. If I had to see Fence Point, I could drive there. With this epiphany I turned around and slogged my way back, my final reward (other than a 2-liter bottle of water I'd left in the truck) being this horned lizard. He also scuttled across the trail and then seemed content to stay where he'd landed. Pretty, isn't it?

So I didn't make it the 11 miles but think it was more like 9. Good enough for me. I got home and threw a nice, fat, Costco steak on the Forman grill. I try to avoid meat but this was one time it called and would not be denied.

The next day I went to work and told the back-country Ranger I'd been out there but for the life of me couldn't remember the name of the point I'd started out from. What came out of my mouth was Parasnotowitz. She knew exactly where I'd been.

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Thought of the day:

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. - Michael J. Fox

Grand Canyon, Magical Canyon

It would be so very easy to overwork the word magical around here, so maybe I'll use it one more time and then try to give it a rest.

I worked from home on Wednesday. I woke up feeling a little punk, it was raining, and I said to heck with it. I have enough work loaded onto the computer to keep me busy for a long time, and I got more work done than I would have had I gone in.

Being home, too, gave me a better view of the weather than if I'd been at the office. It rained and it rained and fog moved in and out of the trees all day, making me think I was back in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, I kept thinking I should go down to the canyon and see what was happening. I've seen some slides of something called an inversion, a term I'd never heard before, and thought conditions might be ripe for one; that is, where clouds are sunk into the canyon and only the peaks of the formations break through. But it was raaiiinning and I just couldn't work up the motivation to drive five minutes down the road, until it quit raining late in the day. Then of course I kicked myself for not going earlier.

Many people were gathered to watch and were treated to a show of clouds constantly changing and moving through the canyon. There have been many times I've looked at scenery and known, just known, that it would not translate to a decent photo, and this was one of those times. So what follows are my paltry efforts to capture the magic that had people speaking in whispers, almost reverentially. 

At the bottom and off to the right of this first photo is the Transept Canyon, a relatively small box canyon that the Widforss Trail skirts. Fog billowed up from the bottom so continually it was though there was a machine cranking it out.


Then, in a matter of a very few minutes, it cleared.

This scene is just to the left of the one above, with fog streaming along its base.

I didn't expect to see a circular rainbow here but I've seen one before, when I took a aerial tour over a fjord in Alaska. Lots of clouds there too, and I saw this kind of rainbow with the shadow of the plane in its center; that's obviously not a plane, but moi in the middle. Maybe you can see it's actually a double rainbow. Makes me look good, kind of framed in light, doesn't it?

At times the Lodge was completely obscured, a strange, isolating feeling, and then just as they continued to do, the clouds moved on.

Clouds capped the peaks and stayed there for a while, but we still had the drifting patches in a colorful canyon.

I love this phenomenon, just as it happened at Cape Royal, where the setting sun drains the color from almost everywhere but the sky. This is the same formation as the top two photos.

More of the same area, with a look up the Transept Canyon, the source of the fog machine.

I don't see many Grand Canyon sunsets, but I manage to catch spectacular ones when I do.

I mentioned the heavy overcast on Wednesday and its similarity to Pacific Northwest winters. My last couple of winters there were so depressing that the psychotropic drug I've taken for decades wasn't keeping up. On my doctor's recommendation I bought a full-spectrum light box that I sat in front of every day, which made a world of difference in my mood. It further made me think of Robin Williams, that brilliant comedian and actor, and what his depression drove him to do. I've tapped at that door myself and have the utmost compassion for anyone who pounds more heavily on it. 

It can be safely said that if you haven't experienced unrelenting depression you can't understand how it holds you in what I call The Pit, how it drains color from your life, removes all motivation to do the most basic things, and makes you just not care about anything. It can't even be described as a wasteland; there is nothing but a void. There's no pulling oneself up by the bootstraps or thinking happy thoughts or snapping out of it. 

I've lived through my times in The Pit but I couldn't tell you how. Maybe pure luck and it wasn't my day to die. I don't know, but what I do know is the sorrow I feel for those whose despair was so consuming that they couldn't hang on any longer.

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Thought of the day:

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. - Lao Tzu

Cape Royal sunset

Sunsets aren't as easy to come by here as they were at Petrified Forest. I can't just walk out my door to take a photo when I see color in the sky, partly because I don't see much sky, but also because a wide open view is a 10-minute walk or, in the case of these photos, a 45-minute drive. One day my next-door neighbor asked if I'd seen the sunset the night before; the sky was a kaleidoscope of color due to smoke over the canyon from forest fires, and she'd seen it down near the rim. I didn't see one speck of sunset and felt cheated.

A couple of afternoons later I was peering through the trees at clouds collecting in the west, so with hope in my heart, HH and I hopped in the car and sped off to Cape Royal. As the crow flies, it's probably two miles, but by road it's more than 20. The road is narrow and winding so it takes a while, and then there's a bit of a walk to get to the point. I hustled down the trail and got there just in time. If I'd done the speed limit I would have missed it. Don't tell anyone.

I was amazed when I processed these photos. The color, or lack of, was seen by the camera but not by me.

The formations to the south held a rosy glow for a while.

In the west, highlights of magenta were all that was left when the rest of the canyon went gray...

...then, when the sun was just about gone, nearly all color departed. It makes me think of Mordor.

Finally, an unexpected blaze of color in the sky and on plants in the foreground, thanks to light reflecting off the clouds. I did not see this through the camera. You can draw a line from the sun to where it bounces off the cloud, then down to the plants. What a phenomenon.

When the sun was gone, a near-monochromatic hue remained, fading into dark for the night.

I drove home at a more sedate speed, mostly because we were behind what I could see was a new motorcyclist, but also because I thought I'd stressed HH enough. I could tell by his reaching for an imaginary brake or bracing himself on the dash that he was a little uneasy on the way up but, really, I wasn't going that fast.

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Thought of the day: 

A sunset is life's way of saying, Good job! You survived another day! Here's something pretty. - Anon.