Zion National Park

Zion National Park 15 January

Bighorn sheep. The beautiful patina of wet sandstone.

Wednesday is wolf day (Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, NM)

Good idea.

Idly checking my phone in the cozy living room of the Inn at Halona in the middle of Zuni Pueblo. When I'm away from home, Google always likes to suggest cool things to do nearby. Creepy, yet convenient. (Huh, is that the internet privacy debate in a nutshell?)

If we'd known it was down more than five miles of dirt road we might have had second thoughts. But we did not, and the road was called Candy Kitchen Road, and so off we went. (NB there was no candy kitchen - we was robbed!)

The Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary rescues wolves and other canids, mostly from misguided attempts of private owners to keep them as pets or in personal collections. There are lots of levels of 'experience' available, but we just did the walking around tour, which came with free bonus squelching in thick, clayey, mud.

Wolf actual

While we waited for our tour guide, we were treated to a group howl. I recorded the tail end of it, as it were ...

What if I never find out who's a good boy?

All the photos are through wire fence - if you think about it this is probably a good idea, too. There was a variety of wolf species and wolf-dog mixes, all resplendent in their furriest winter coats.

I learned how to tell a wolf from a dog (eye colour, ear shape, tail, skull shape, hips, stride, and a few things that you'd need to actually get up really close to check, such as a pea-sized gland half-way down the tail!) What intrigued me the most was the guide's stories about wolves' behaviour, personalities and interactions - they sounded much more like cats than dogs.

Some of them were real attention-seekers, trotting out ready to be admired - our guide told us though that some residents are kept far away from visitors. A lot of these animals have been treated horribly, neglected or abused, before they're rescued, and some never psychologically recover well enough to feel okay around people.

we r not shibes, lol.

Not only adorbs but we can sing, too. 

They also have a few dingoes who had been smuggled out of Aussie (world's thickest customs officer apparently believed that they were Shiba Inu).

And most unusually, several New Guinea singing dogs. I had no idea these were even a thing.

Fox is so fluffy

And last of all, a dear round red fox was curled up in his corner.

Phone, you were right.

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

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.

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.

Cima Dome / Teutonia Peaks (a Mojave desert hike)

One of our favourite desert spots is the Cima Dome / Teutonia Peaks walk in the Mojave National Preserve. Simon went there in the winter and saw animal tracks in the snow. I've so far only been in the spring, but I've been trying to make up for lost time by taking visitors out to enjoy the cactus in flower, Joshua tree forest, other wildflower blooms in great profusion (especially desert sage) - and of course, the solitude.

Two loops and a spring: the goodness of side roads

Panaca Spring

Lazy Sunday morning in camp, reading and sleeping, maybe somewhat in denial over having to go home. My reluctance to leave only increased as the campground steadily emptied out around us. It would clearly be almost deserted by night ... and a quiet campground is pretty much my favourite kind. But we had clichés to insert and eventually we packed up and shipped out.

Go straight home though? Yeah nah. Side roads for the win.

Lincoln County rematch

John Muir once said "The mountains are calling and I must go." I hear it a little differently ... it's the desert that calls. (This is a mystery to me. More on it anon.) For now, the desert was calling us and we had even managed to persuade the teen to go, so on Friday we packed up Harry's boot good and tight with a thrilling array of camping equipment, shut the cats in with all their necessities, and got on the freeway north. We had unfinished business with Lincoln County.

Arrow Canyon Range NV:
The dark grey band makes the fault lines conspicuous even at 70 mph.
And look! Moon!

The second time up a highway can be a little as a song that was sung or a story told. That is to say, it can be a bit tedious or it can catch your breath like it did the first time.

Having fallen for Nevada's stripy hills and mountains, it's never less than a quiet pleasure for me to drive through its valleys and see those improbable blocks of rock slowly sinking into their blankets of sand and sediment.

And on this particular drive, there's a stretch of 93 after the road turns north for the first time and the valley is bounded on the east by the spectacular Arrow Canyon range, gorgeous with horizontal bands of colour in the early evening light. The moon already risen, and that crazy Nevada blue sky ...

Traffic had slowed us down a bit leaving LV, so instead of enjoying the sunset at our campsite, we enjoyed it with the almost full moon over the Delamar Valley as we passed through.

Kershaw-Ryan State Park has a modest first-in, best-dressed campground. It was about a third full when we arrived and made a couple of circuits in the gathering twilight - looking and calculating for daytime shade. We pitched the tents hurriedly by lamp- and moon-light, which definitely makes it sound more romantic and enjoyable than it was, then sat down to a supper of cold baked chicken and herbed sweet potato salad. (Somewhere during this period the mosquitoes discovered me. I'm not sure why I got the 'most delicious' vote ... anyway, the welts have mostly gone now.) We didn't stay up late to watch the stars, although we did take some time to enjoy the cliffs by moonlight. (Also, there was a Welcome Frog or at least a resident frog by the ablutions block and I saw it eat a bug, just like that. It is these small things that make me happy.) A campfire would wait for Saturday night.

Jacket keeps it warm :)

I was up bright and early at about 4:30 on Saturday morning. The sky was already lightening and it
felt cold (well, I say cold. It was probably 16 or 17 C.) I got the coffee going and enjoyed the sunrise, painting colour everywhere. The campground, in the lower part of the canyon, is about 20 years old. (It was rebuilt after its predecessor was washed out by flash floods.) On either side the ash-flow tuff cliffs catch the light beautifully at every hour of day.

Stove and coffeepot did their mighty work; yoghurt and cereal (or thereabouts) for breakfast. Then Simon and I went for a walk up the canyon while the teen stayed in camp reading.

I'm still nursing plantar fasciitis (or fascists, as autocorrect would have you believe) so we took the car up a mile or so to the visitor parking and walked from there. The canyon overlook walk winds up through gardens and pleasure-grounds (I think that's the right word when there's a wading pool and a terrain for playing horse-shoes?), past 40 foot high thickets of wild grape. The trail then divides, into or across a wash. We went across and up through juniper scrub, the trail twisting back on itself to traverse layers of rock to the mesa above, which afforded a view over the canyon to the valley beyond and even a glimpse of the Union Pacific line.

We saw deer or maybe bighorn sheep tracks and, more excitingly, big cat tracks - could have been bobcat or mountain lion, hard to tell. The prints were about 3 inches wide, and some of them were very clear, but too hard to photograph. 

To return, we scrambled down into the wash and followed the riverbed. Whatever big cat had been up to the summit had also been down in the wash - possibly to drink, possibly to hunt. We skirted a bulrush-fringed pool guarded by a tarantula hawk wasp (which is, alone, a sufficient argument against a benevolent creator) and scrambled down a couple of small dry waterfalls. Then I came round a corner and saw a snake - the first one I've seen alive and face to face in the wild here, as opposed to watching its flickering back depart. It tasted the air and high-tailed it into the grasses and low shrubs. I'm pretty sure it was a mountain gartersnake, most of a metre long, with handsome pale lemon and dark green markings.

Back at camp, it was time for a nap before we headed out for the afternoon.

Itinerary

Friday: From LV, I15 then 93 through Coyote Springs, Alamo, ET junction, and northeast past Delamar to Caliente. Turn south on 317 to Kershaw-Ryan State Park.
Saturday: Kershaw-Ryan State Park ...

Springs and the Calligraphy Highway pt 1

Leaving Las Vegas at 5 o'clock on a Friday has a direful sound as of much traffic. (Note to self, start earlier to pack the car.) Actually, though, it was pretty sedate and orderly, and didn't slow us down more than five minutes. With the temperature around 110/43, Mt Charleston still had a wee scraping of snow! The I15 northeast from Vegas runs through broken country, hills (well, big lumps or small hills) whose origins are currently mysterious to me. Clearly a lot of it is sedimentary. There are cuts that the roadway passes through and low bluffs showing handsome sandstone (?) stripes. (Below one of these is nestled the finest collection of heavy machinery you could hope to see. And all for sale!)

The turnoff north-east onto 93 is only about 20 miles out of the city, amidst a local centre of power generating excellence. Some of these power stations are coyly hidden in the hills, their smokestacks visible only at particular turns of the highway. The 93 is a comparatively lightly used highway with plenty of scope for easy overtaking. It passes through a valley, where hills rise on either side, showing classic Basin and Range stripes at various angles, soft pediments sloping down into the basin floor. A line of broken land appears to the east, and the road runs over washes with increasing frequency as the road and river converge. The valley narrows, and the road disappears into the range. After the winding road through, the road comes over a summit and down the hill, and suddenly there is green. Trees, grassy flats, and still on either hand the sagebush and joshua tree desert close by, showing that this verdure is from the ground or from irrigation, not from the sky. We see deeper grass, and uncountable wildflowers. Then, at last, standing water - a lake.

Pahranagat Lake has rushes and tall trees round its margins. As we drive along the lakeshore, more than once we startle a heron into flight. (The ducks, geese and fish are less excitable; the dragonflies so constantly in motion that we can't tell whether we disturb them or not.) On the other side of the single dirt road, desert - sandstone, cholla, agave. We already had plans for the night, so we didn't camp, but we did stop for a picnic tea overlooking the water.

So it was nearly sunset by the time we came to Ash Springs. This is 5 miles north of where we planned to stay, but there was supposed to be a warm spring, and we wanted to get there while it was still light. We need not have bothered. Unfortunately (and this is a very common story in rural Nevada) the Spring itself was closed, locked, ringed with barbed wire and adorned with stern signs from Uncle Sam telling us to stay out lest, I don't know, the National Guard be called out to teach us the error of our ways. As we later heard, the wall around the spring needed repairs, and people kept leaving broken glass there, and so forth, so the BLM closed it. We watched the sun set instead, and the spectacular light over the valley.

Retraced our path south to the Alamo Inn. Its rustic decor might not be suitable for fastidious princesses - but it was scrupulously clean and we thought had a charm of its own. Besides, the owner is a personable, hospitable local guy, as friendly and helpful as you could ever hope to meet. We were sitting outside in the comfy chairs having a beer and some dessert, and he came over to tell us we'd be able to see the ISS about 9 o'clock, if we were interested. Well, yes. I fired up the iPad and opened StarWalk - just as well, too, because the sky was still darkening and the space station was not very easy to spot. We had a great chat with the owner and a couple of other guests as we all watched the station pass by near the northwestern horizan. Then an excellent night's sleep - the walls were still warm with the heat of the day, but the air conditioner knew its business.

We already knew, thanks to our helpful host at Alamo, that Crystal Springs no longer allowed bathing. The story was that the Mormon Church had bought the surrounding land and didn't want bathing there, probably for the usual reasons (vandalism, noise, etc.) I'd seen a photo of the springs, though, and we thought it was worth a stop anyway. It was.

Crystal Springs is at the very beginning of the Extra Terrestrial Highway (Area 51 and all that.) Himself had read about the Alien Research Center not far up that road and wanted to check it out, so we went up to have a look. However, we were unable to carry out any alien research on this occasion. Presumably the management had been Taken Up - the signage was present but the doors were locked.

Back on the 93, which takes a sharp bend north-east at that junction. Beautiful Joshua Tree forest on either side, chollas coming into flower in bronze and green, and the road in some places lined with lovely white flowers (prickly poppies), orange desert globe mallow, and a variety of yellow, blue, and purple flowers on sage-green low shrubs. Our Alamo Inn host had said it's a once in a lifetime year for wildflowers. His 84 year old father has lived in the area much of his life and never seen one like it. On the one hand I'm glad and grateful to be here and enjoying them .On the other, as himself says, next spring might be a disappointment.

Our host had also mentioned the Delamar playa, in the valley to the easy of Alamo. We didn't take his suggested road, as it was a backtrack south, but when we saw the turnoff south of the 93, we were tempted by the excellent condition of the unsealed road, into what became quite a diversion.

It's 21 miles down that unpaved road to the Delamar dry lake (or playa). We left a plume of dust behind us and Harry's back was thick with it. We were lucky enough to spot a small herd of pronghorn, but they're wary and quick, so we didn't get any good photos of them.

The playa, or dry lake, is a vast flat of broken natural pavement. I think Simon enjoyed taking a right turn off the road and just carrying on out into the middle! There was another group of people there playing in a jeep. With our usual good timing, more groups were arriving as we were leaving.

We pootled around some rocks that are supposed to have petroglyphs. Without hiking boots, long pants or gloves, we weren't really prepared for climbing or scrambling. We did see an amazing dust devil, but Pahranagat Man eluded us for this time.

Back up the power line road, we decided to try and look for the Delamar Ghost Town. Nothing's signposted, so we were just guessing when we took a likely seeming road east towards the mountains. Google maps says it's called North Cedar Wash at first - but we went in about 15 miles, up to an unnamed summit, seeing a beautiful variety of country, flora, fauna, and artefacts on the way:

• creosote scrub 
• blooming cacti and wildflowers
• ruined stone house
• old mine shaft
• cedar/piñon forest
• oak stands
• wild horses
• wild roses
• the perfect back country campsite 
• corrals apparently in the middle of nowhere
• a dead rattlesnake (first rattlesnake we've seen in the wild)

Eventually, after a few stops for hesitant inspections of the track by our unpaved-road expert driver (not me, that is!), we came to a short steep slope by a wash that even we couldn't pretend would be okay for Harry, and turned around just past Bishop Spring. (We think Harry is okay. He didn't seem too flustered but we asked a lot of his gearbox!)

Dirty Harry at some apparently unnamed summit in the Delamar mountains.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant!

Stopped under the shade of a juniper tree for a late picnic lunch, and then carried on back out to the highway.

To Be Continued.

Itinerary

Friday: From Las Vegas north on I15, take Apex exit onto 93. North to Pahranagat Lake, Ash Springs, back down to Alamo NV.
Saturday: Crystal Springs, Alien Research Centre, Delamar Playa, Delamar Mountains, Bishop Spring ...