Christmas tree flowers

It's December, and I am missing pohutukawa ... (link for my non Kiwi readers if such there be)

But - look what I found in Arizona. This will do til the real thing comes along.

I think it's a calliandra

Christmas lights by sea (Lake Havasu light parade)

As I said, strange and lovely are the Christmas lights of the desert. Especially if you watch them on a lake that is spanned by London Bridge (that's the actual London Bridge, not some cheap local knock-off.)

Christmas lights by land (Ethel M cactus garden)

Strange and lovely are the Christmas lights of the desert. We saw them here by land at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory. 3 acres of inexplicable seasonally festive wow ...

On snowbirds (Quartzsite, Arizona and surrounds)

Hand painted stone marker
at the entrance to Quartzsite cemetery

Quartzsite makes me twitch every time I see it written down. I suppose it is a quartz site, but my brain keeps wanting it to be quartzite. Anyhow this town is southeastern Arizona has a few thousand people for 2/3 of the year, then round early January suddenly swells to tens of thousands as the annual snowbird migration kicks in. So for my money, November/December is not at all a bad time to visit - the temperature is already very pleasant, but the winter season hasn't yet really started.

Snowbirds - aww. 'Snowbird migration' sounds fluttery and adorbs. Cue Anne Murray, amirite? What this actually is, though, is a massive influx of retired folks who come south for winter in their RVs. If Vegas has from time to time seemed to me like a city inexplicably spread out over a desert valley, then this is like a cross between an RV park and a - huh. Retirement home? Skin growth? I can't come up with nice similes for this. (Better stop then, because a) being kind, b) it behooves me to show some sympathy, given how easily I could imagine us hooking into this peregrinatory lifestyle and c) I saw this early snowbird in Quartzsite last week, he was driving 25 in the left-hand lane of a 35 mile road, sporting a 'Gun owners for Trump 2016' bumper sticker on the back window of his around-town vehicle.) All up, I feel that buffalo migration would be closer. Land behemoth migration gives a better idea but doesn't quite have the ring. And after all, they are white (the RVs, that is, overwhelmingly so. Demographics? IDK) and they are coming south for winter.

ohai, im in ur desert campin in my rv

So, the empty desert flats around Quartzsite come alive for a few months a year when the weather is
cool enough for enjoyment. I can't help wondering how the local infrastructure copes - water supply, sewerage, health care, etc. There are more RV parks in and around than you can shake a stick at, and the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages otherwise unallocated federal land throughout the country, has even set aside some 'long-term visitor areas' where you can pay a season fee to pick a site and stay. That's at one end of the accommodation spectrum. At the other are parks with low stone walls and wrought-iron arched gates for each site so you can get the full illusion of suburbia: parks with cafes, gift shops, and other services on site.

Ohai, I'll be ur rv suburb today

We stopped at one of the cafes. It was not a cafe as urbanite would know it, but 'recognisable through cross-cultural gear meshings' as Stephenson has it (Cryptonomicon, page ref gah who am I kidding.) The decor was country diner/restaurant, and so was the menu. The pink fundraiser baseball caps on sale were an ... authentic cultural touch? Lucky find? Future heirloom? (Motto picked out in rhinestones: 'Make Quartzsite Great Again!')

The main street as I saw it seemed to alternate between fast food, gas stations, and either Wilderness Gems or Geoff's Emporium, for those of you from that Auckland ambit: dusty stores full of amazingly varied discount stock lines (USB 0.9 cable, anyone? Mini slot head screwdriver? Not-quite-vintage old-new-stock postcards of other places in Arizona?)

There's a huge gem and mineral show here at the end of January. (Also plenty of good rockhounding around the area, of which more another time.) The number of rock/gem/mineral/bead/jewellery shops seems in proportion rather to the winter population than the summer, and includes what is without exception the best jewellery supply shop I've ever seen. (It has a camel out front, just in case. Camels are part of local history as the 'ships of the desert' were trialled for desert travel and freight service in the late 19th century).

Camel sculpture outside the big gem and jewellery supply

Tomb and monument of Hi Jolly, camel wrangler supreme

There's an enormous open air flea market too ...

sunset light from just north of Quartzsite

The surrounding land is brown and flat, with hills rising on all sides at various distances - closer to
east and west, which makes sense as we're still in the Basin and Range geological province here. However it's Sonoran desert, which means saguaro cactus, a novelty I didn't get tired of yet. It can be quite beautiful (in parts - in its own austere way - on a blue clear day) and we saw a couple of really lovely sunsets.

I say brown and flat, but it is already dotted with white even at Thanksgiving as early arrivals pick out their spots and hang up their hats. Come mid January, and they'll be cheek by jowl.

Small rooms of Yuma

It was mild enough when we went there last month, but Yuma gets as hot in the summer as you'd expect for a town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It's an interesting little place in its own quiet way, just south of the confluence of two mighty southwestern rivers: the Gila and the Colorado.

Bobcat

Yes! Please tell me more about your bobcat encounter!
(Image by ucumari)

Okay, so I was very lucky the other day: I saw a bobcat. Only for a few seconds as it made its way up the river bank, and of course I had no camera in hand. It was heading away from me and I first recognised it by the absurd stumpy tail. Then when I called to Simon to come out of the tent and see, it turned and showed me its round tigery face. (And its teeth, actually.) Then it loped off into the trees.

This here is exactly the look it gave me.

So much fun bobcat fact! Very learn!

• http://www.defenders.org/bobcat/bobcats 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobcat

Also, since it was an Arizona bobcat ... this is so, so NSFW, you been warned ...
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/bobcats_cactus

Best shipwreck ever (Sandbar Resort, Parker AZ)

Looking for somewhere to eat, we were attracted by the riverside location and all the pretty Christmas lights. When we went in, everyone was outside on the deck - and when we went outside on the deck, it looked like a private party. I asked.

"Yes it is," said the man behind the bar, "but you're invited."

One up, one down, no tarantulas (Boy Scout and Sloan Canyons)

Truth in advertising

Two canyon hikes a couple of weekends ago. Neither of these are ever likely to set the pond on fire, but I love them both for peace and solitude, for the utter off-grid stillness of the desert ... give or take a plane or two and sporadic gunfire. They also both feature a slog uphill through ankle-deep loose gravel, sand, or both, which is a reasonable workout.

Sloan Canyon is less than 20 minutes' drive away from home to the trailer that houses the 'visitor contact station'. One small claim to fame is that you can't get there from here, according to Maps. It has an island of paved road but you have to cross to it on unmarked dirt roads that are really just construction tracks for a new mega-subdivision. Having found the contact station and parked, you walk up a not-too-steep wash, the walls rising steadily higher. One turn, two, and the city is left behind.

Last turn before the city disappears

Petroglyphs

Looking up the canyon

Mosaic Canyon, Death Valley,
walking up the 30+ foot long marble slide.
Yes, I slid back down. No, there is no photographic evidence

This canyon is noted for the variety and profusion of its petroglyphs from several cultures and periods, probably the closest place to Vegas where you can see such a number of them. I was struck by their being out in the open - most of the petroglyphs I've seen so far are under rock overhangs or otherwise sheltered.

Another really cool thing about Sloan Canyon is its rock slides - not as in landslides, but as in slides made of rock, polished by water as it roars down in flash floods. They're not as extensive as the marble one at Mosaic Canyon in Death Valley ... but on the other hand,

Slide at Sloan Canyon - approx 7 feet tall

they're a lot closer to home. And you can slide right down them. It is a lot of fun.

The park ranger at the contact station thought we might see tarantulas - it was the time of year where they're out and about. He showed us a photo of one on his phone, taken just outside the door. Well, we didn't. I guess all those fierce critters are pretty rare, really. I've still only seen tarantulas and scorpions in captivity, and rattlesnakes in the freezer at El Dorado Canyon (yeah, thereby hangs another tale). Anyone who knows me knows I'm not the world's keenest arachnophile, but I will admit to being curious to see one in the wild. (On an intellectual level, that is. If and when, I'll probably have nightmares after.)

Descending into Boy Scout Canyon. This is the first spot that
Harry would have really objected to

Boy Scout Canyon is less well known - it's in one of our guide books, and it has hot springs that we didn't get to yet but will one day. It's further east and involves a drive down dirt roads around the edge of a local gun club's firing range. You start driving down a wash, and go as far as your vehicle can - not far, for a 2wd passenger car that you care about at all. We parked, laced our boots and walked.

It's pretty plain at first sight and even at second. But look closely, and the high walls are full of long slow stories of accretion, of persistence, of cataclysm. The sky looks impossibly blue against the purplish brown of the hills. We keep stopping to look at the shapes of the rocks, and glitter of small crystals among them - at a nook in the canyon wall with shrubs in natural bonsai - at ripples in the alluvium where it's been stirred by wind and water, braided with trails.

We didn't see any animal bigger than a lizard throughout our walk down and in, back up and out. That includes humans - there were bootprints, but we had the place to ourselves. Your own footsteps scraping through the loose underfoot, your own voice and gentle breathing sound in your ears, so you stop, hold your breath a moment, and the silence is so deep you can hear your heartbeat. Cellphone reception? Nope. Just us - and distant echoing reports of people firing their weapons. Just as well. We might have thought we'd stumbled into paradise.

Sunset, looking towards the Black Mountains and McCullough Hills

All that wide blue sky (Kanab and Paria)

"But for me, oh it was the acting" (31s)
Only not in this case.

We saw the new Magnificent Seven a few weeks ago. (That was my allowance of murders for the month, can't watch any more for a while.) The story was interesting enough - it's a remake, and one of the classic plots, so no real surprises. The film likewise, especially in its context as one of a series (Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven, and even The Avengers is not stretching the point too far.) The costuming was not bad, though the female pseudo-protagonist showed way too much bosom for a respectable woman of the period who wasn't at an evening party. (And not enough actual, y'know, character development. Ugh! Say it with me, boobs are not characters ... unless you're a comic strip.) Several of the characters were very striking - such a villain! - but for me, oh it was the scenery.

Image by Geraint Smith via jerrygarrett.wordpress.com

'Bonanza' set near Kanab, UT
On private property and unmaintained,
it is slowly succumbing to weather

I am enchanted with the cliffs and mesas of the region they call 'Indian Country' (which is gah, idk, hopeless understatement, much of the continent was Indian Country. However.) The ground in such shades of orange and brown among the green, it is no wonder the sky looks so blue. M7 was shot in New Mexico (and Louisiana, but that can't possibly be the landscape shots) but it could just as well take its place with dozens of earlier westerns filmed at Paria, Utah, or other locations not far from Kanab.

It is hard to convey in words how satisfying to the eye is the sweep of a long sagebrush flat, or a mesa rippling with golden-headed grasses, with the unpredictable shapes of the hills rising beside - the weird angles where different layers have been pushed, pulled, folded, or have eroded at different rates, the effect of patient wind and furious water, or long-dead volcanic eruption. In this case, too rivers and streams - though in our further west country, it is much drier.

from a prominence above old Paria town, GSENM, UT

Abruptly I want to learn how to ride a horse. (Up til now been afraid of horses for decades.) And oh, so looking forward to our trip to New Mexico later in the year.

Cans, stripes, luck (Carrara NV)

It was a lovely cloudy day on Sunday. I'm still delighted by stunning blue sky days here, but sometimes a brewing storm can be even more beautiful. It wasn't heavy enough to be raining down to ground level much, but the virga/walking clouds were trailing lightly over the hills, and the sunlight was dappling the land through huge crazy cloud patterns.

Raffle prize - a chunk of halite from California.
Approx 25 cm across. Yes, it's pink.

We started out by driving over the hill to Pahrump, where Simon had won two raffle prizes at last week's rock and gem show. (Our batting average lately is astounding, actually. Last time I entered a raffle was at the rock and gem club meeting a few weeks ago, where I also won two prizes, one of them the grand prize. Hey statistics, you just keep looking the other way, okay? Okay.) The prize pickup was handled in a particularly Nevadan way, by meeting up in a casino car park.

Pumpkin spice everything

Fall color at Bellagio Conservatory

It's definitely autumn - the days are getting shorter very quickly, although the temperature still gets up above 30 C (mid 80s F). By far the strangest thing about autumn here is not the disparity between the cool angled light and the heat of the sun. Nope, it's the pumpkin spice everything that grips the nation, providing a welcome orange change from red, blue, and the presidential election (mind you they even have an orange-frosted candidate this year).

Here, for your delectation, is a list of pumpkin spiced, pumpkin pie, or pumpkin products I have seen this month.

Shooting sheep and scorpions (tracks and traces at Valley of Fire)

At Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada's oldest and one of the loveliest, I've done the White Domes walk several times. It's beautiful, with its deep natural stairs, slot canyon, and pale fine sand underfoot. This time, though, I wanted to see petroglyphs. There are so many petroglyph sites within reach of Vegas that it seemed a shame that the most memorable ones I've seen are at Newspaper Rock 'way over in eastern Utah.

So we stopped at Atlatl Rock, named for the dart throwing tool that appears in the petroglyphs. There's a steel walkway up to the viewing platform, built into the rock beside the petroglyphs. It's amazing to me that people made these representational works about 4000 years ago, and we can still clearly recognise some of the shapes.

Goldengrove unleaving (Autumn aspens on 143)

We took a drive from Panguitch up the hill. The road climbs through farmland and forest, past a lake and alongside creeks, from about 6500 feet to nearly 10,000.


The autumn foliage was at its fleeting loveliest, the sky flawlessly blue ...

So here's some melancholic autumn poetry for you.

(It isn't magic all the time
It's only magic when I rhyme.
- Johnny Fartpants (attr.*))

"That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
 - Shakespeare


“At no other time does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost."
- Rilke

"Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing"
 - Rilke again


("Margaret, are you grieving
over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?"
- Hopkins

How things from high school stick with you! Shout out to the girls of De Valon House, Miss McLafferty, pre-photocopier duplicating machines of all kinds - can you smell the spirit? - and autumn nostalgia.)

Itinerary

Highway 143 Panguitch - Brian Head - Parowan

---

*So Simon claims. Weirdly, this Viz character was written by Simon Donald. Coincidence? I Don't Think So. I'm onto you, SDM. 

Hidden treasure (Casto Canyon)

Early Autumn foliage at Casto Canyon

It's kind of off the beaten track though really not far off it: less than 3 miles north of the Bryce Canyon turnoff, and then about 3 1/2 miles in on an unpaved but well-graded road. To - just a canyon, in about the middle of nowhere.

A wide stony wash, still wet in places from recent rains. Red-orange sandstone walls, lucent against the sky, subtly echoed in the autumn foliage. The rain has washed off and settled the dust, leaving all the rock richer in colour and the sky a crazy clear deep blue, near-cloudless.

Still plenty of heat in the sun, but a cool breeze.

Speleothems and leaving it better than you found it (art, vandalism, and Lehman Caves)

As part of our visit to the Great Basin National Park, we went to the Lehman Caves. You can only go into the caves as part of a guided tour with a ranger. (This makes sense when you hear about incidents such as this vandalism at Racetrack Playa or the eejit munters described in this article.) Both this logistical fact, and a part of the tour itself, got me thinking about what the difference is between graffiti and vandalism.

The caves are a seemingly endless succession of vistas into baroque formations of limestone - fantastical columns, shields, and spikes. These have a collective name: speleothems (an abnormally ugly word). It's an astounding and beautiful place. I allowed myself 50 'wow's and I'm pretty sure I got through them all as we walked through alien gullets and otherworldly landscapes, past and even under massive shields, cave bacon, cave popcorn, shallow pools.

Hound them rocks (garnets and agates just as they growed)

I've been fascinated by rocks and minerals for a long time. I think it started when I first was given a couple of tumbled stones - agates, memory's eye says - by Amanda Brown in about Standard 1 (that's Year 3 in new money.) I also remember buying tumbled gems for maybe 10¢ apiece at a shop on Waiheke Island in a summer holiday there. Then, of course, I was 'into crystals' as a teenager and even worked for a gem merchant later in my teens. About 25 years ago I acquired an auction lot of unlabelled mineral specimens. I have always enjoyed having them around, the vari-coloured odd rough shapes, weights, textures of them. Now I think they came from the southwest, because I keep seeing familiar colours and shapes in collections hereabouts: petrified wood, fluorite, gypsum. On two recent trips, I've gone a little out of my way to reach rockhounding sites to bring home more piles of rocks: Garnet Hill, near Ely, NV, and a spot on the road between Cedar Breaks and Brian Head. 

Leave no trace except a pit

Garnet Hill is a BLM site where you can - with luck and a hammer - find small dark garnets
embedded in their native cream-coloured rhyolite. It's a well established site, and not everyone follows the 'leave no trace' approach.

Hammering away

Worth a visit, though, even if you don't want to look for gemstones, as the road up from Ely is both short and beautiful, and the hill affords a view over the huge Ruth copper mine, an open pit that stretches around a third of the horizon. We wanted to do both big and small, so when we got to the carpark, we headed uphill rather than down, and enjoyed the views from the top as well as the rockhounding. 

Panorama from Garnet Hill with the logical opposite of leave no trace - Ruth open pit copper mine

That speck is actually a garnet

The garnets themselves are not gem quality, being too dark to see through. They come as big as walnuts - or so it's said. We didn't spend the many hours that might have netted such large specimens, but in the hour or so we were there, we got the technique of breaking the rhyolite open with hammer and chisel, and found a few to bring home ... all big enough to see with the naked eye, and that's about as much as you can say for them (the biggest is maybe 5 mm across). 

A hill made of agate - view towards Cedar Breaks

Cedar Breaks agate is easier to see from a distance. The pale lumps on the hill are the bones of it showing through, and it is made of agate. The range of colour and pattern is amazing. Luckily, the site is well above 10 000 feet, so I couldn't carry away armloads of it (also there's a 25 lb per day limit.)

I had taken a rock hammer, but really I didn't need it, as there were so many beautiful pieces just lying on the ground, from small flakes and shards to chunks as big as your head. I kept mine, but brought away several lovely pieces ... and already can't wait to go back for more.

Drive to a Bristol tea party (down 93 in White Pine and Lincoln Counties)

After adventures in Ely and Great Basin National Park, we drove home via 93. This highway runs from the Mexican border nearly to Canada. So our route was only a scrap of it - but we've now done most of the Nevada section of it. Which is a start.

Any road around the middle to south of the state of Nevada takes you through Basin and Range country, where the valleys run roughly north/south between those thrilling stripy ranges. Millions of years ago, the crust was stretched thin (lots of vulcanism) and twisted sideways (lots of broken and up-tilted macro chunks of crust.) (Whenever I read about these huge geological processes I just imagine what would happen to piecrust or to sand at the beach, seems to help me visualise it. I expect I need professional help of some kind ...) Since then, erosion has shown us a thousand fascinating ways that stone can weather.

This section of 93 is in the true Great Basin desert. No Joshua trees, not much creosote, but rippling seas of grey-green sagebrush, hip-high or taller, and yellow blond grasses. 'Cedar' (juniper, actually), pine, and aspen cloak the lower slopes of the ranges. Our route starts at a higher elevation, and though crossing several ranges, overall trends downhill.

The best of all earthly drinks (Waiter, waiter, percolator)

Thanks, Enterprise Mfg Co

So, I like to focus my effort for maximum impact (this is my new way of saying 'lazy') and therefore although we have not one, but two, hand grinders, we usually just buy ground coffee. Since it's not espresso we're making, the ultimate freshness of just-ground beans doesn't seem to matter quite so much. Also, laz- I mean focus.

But I have at last seen the ultimate coffee mill, at the Beatty Museum. Machines of this type date to the 1870s - this one may be later, as Beatty didn't really take off til the early 1900s. It would probably have been used in a mercantile store, of course.

Probably will not work for camping. Guess we'll keep buying ground beans for now.

Our camp coffee pot has been mentioned in dispatches already. Made by the legendary (in Sweden, anyway) Berggren, maker of beautiful things, it's a vintage enamelled percolator with cheery coffee-based song lyrics - in Swedish - in gothic script around the sides. 

The verse is the first two lines of a coffee song ("Kaffevisan" - you have to love a language that has a
word just for songs about coffee.) 

"Kaffetåren den bästa är
av alla jordiska drycker"

Or "coffee is the best of all earthly drinks".

I bought it together with a kettle ("En vaktad kittel blir aldrig bränd" - a watched kettle will never burn - huh, it's about caution not about impatience :) and we use them for camping and other travelling, for a comforting brew-up or the essential morning fuel or heating dishwater or whatever.


Yeah coffee songs. I know "Java Jive", the Manhattan Transfer version. And? Think I could do with more, would give me something to sing under my breath while I watch the percolator perc away over the camp stove at 5 a.m. of a Sunday morning. They're out there, I just need to learn them.

I thought the Kaffevisan on my coffee pot might be beyond me - the first version I found struck me as kinda weird. But this one looks more doable although it may require all the cheerfulness of a Nevada morning sky as well as quite a lot of ... well ... coffee. 

Must go and make another pot now.

Meiklejohn Peak experience

Last year we stayed in Beatty on a trip to Death Valley and one of us spotted Meiklejohn Peak on a map or in a book. It's on the eastern side of Bare Mountain and is known for its large white butte (cue many stupid puerile jokes from me, along with remarkable restraint and some moderate and justifiable eye-rolling from others in the back seat of the rental car. You know who you are.)

In which we strike gold at Tonopah (Whitney's Bookshelf Used Book Store)

Oh a real, proper, second-hand bookshop. Feels like home just to walk in. The front window had already told us there was a wide and deep collection ... the owner greeted us warmly as we came in, and gave us the keys to the city - or, at least, showed us the filing system.

The Teen immediately vanished into the back reaches, while Simon and I browsed the local and mining books first. (I'm still looking out for those books on Pioche history!) I found Michael Moore's Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West, which had been on my list for a while. Score! 

Earth, bearing strange trees (The International Car Forest of the Last Church)

There is a huge art installation in the desert on the outskirts of Goldfield. Vehicles of several kinds have been arranged on or in the ground and painted in a variety of eclectic themes and motifs.

And that's all I can say in words. Nothing can really convey the heat or dust, the mountain-bike-park irregularity of the tracks, the arresting strangeness of the art itself, or the weird stillness of the air ...

Fairy tale kingdom - Bailey's Hot Springs

Three views of Bailey's Hot Springs from 95

Friday night we camped at Bailey's Hot Springs and thereby stumbled into a fairy tale. Of course we had brought our own castle with us. To have a moat, however, is a novelty.

Peacocks about to cross the moat, I mean stream. 

Our hostess directed us to a meadow by the spring-houses, where grasses and herbs are flowering. The spring water is piped to the top of this sward, falling with the constant sound of water into a narrow stream that arcs across to, and continues alongside, an otherwise perfectly ordinary gravel RV park. Once the tent was pitched, the stream curved around three sides of it - moat, check.