This is the third winter we are spending in Las Vegas, Nevada. The benefits of spending the winter in the Mojave Desert are many: the temperatures remain fairly warm compared to the rest of the United States (important for even the best-insulated recreational vehicles out there); the campground at which we stay has a number of amenities that we appreciate; and the Entertainment Capital of the World has a lot to offer, extending far beyond casinos, theatrical entertainment, and concerts.
One of those attractions we’ve really enjoyed visiting is the Springs Preserve, a beautiful 180-acre piece of land just west of downtown Las Vegas owned and operated by the Las Vegas Valley Water District. True to its name, the Springs Preserve is the original site of the city’s water source – it has since dried up, for the most part, but the property continues to offer a number of different attractions: botanic gardens, several museums (including the Nevada State Museum), a recreated “boomtown” that shows what early Las Vegas was like, hiking trails through the desert, and much more.
We’d been to the Springs Preserve many times in the previous two years, but never to its Butterfly Habitat because it closes for the season, due to cold weather (cold for the Mojave Desert, anyway) in late November. Nancy and I made visiting the Butterfly Habitat a priority for the early part of our 2025-2026 winter in Las Vegas, and we’re glad we did.
You’re familiar with the lifecycle of a butterfly, which includes four distinct metamorphic stages: adults (the ones that fly around) lay eggs on the underside of plant leaves or along stems; the larval stage hatches from those eggs as a caterpillar; the larvae encase themselves in a cocoon or chrysalis; and the adult emerges after a few days or weeks to fly around and the females lay eggs once again.
Butterflies have four wings: two forewings and two hindwings. Some butterflies live only for a few days as adults, and others, like monarchs, can live up to a year. The average lifespan of an adult butterfly is a mere two weeks, which makes seeing them extra-special.
Incidentally, Clark County in southern Nevada is home to Las Vegas and about 135 species of butterflies. They visit the Las Vegas area year-round, heading up to the higher elevations of the nearby mountains to wait out the sweltering summers and some species find warmer microclimates in the winter months. The butterflies at habitats like that at the Spring Preserve, none of which are native to Las Vegas and few of which are even found naturally in this country, come from several suppliers in the United States as eggs or caterpillars.
Here’s a look at the twelve (12!) different species of order Lepidoptera we encountered at the Springs Preserve Butterfly Habitat.
Before entering the habitat, which is fully enclosed to keep the butterflies and their food sources warm, staff and volunteers speak about the rules. If you’ve been to a butterfly habitat before, you’re familiar: don’t touch the butterflies (the scales on their wings are incredibly fragile), don’t step on the butterflies (they sometimes land on the sidewalks of the habitat), and make sure no butterflies leave the habitat on your clothing or body as hangers-on (no one wants to see non-native butterflies loose over the streets of Las Vegas). Although the habitat is a fairly good-sized structure, once we were inside the building Nancy and I probably didn’t move more than 10 feet from the entrance for a good 10 minutes. There was just too much to see! One of the first butterfly species we saw was the zebra longwing (Heliconius charitonius), also known as the yellow-barred heliconian. There were many of these black-and-yellow butterflies flitting about the entire habitat. The species has a wingspan of between 3 and 3 3/8 inches (75-85 mm). The color pattern is aposematic: the stripes warn predators to stay away from it. Zebra longwings are native to the gulf states, but sometimes can be found as far west as Kansas and as far north as South Carolina.Here is another species we saw frequently in the habitat: the postman butterfly (Heliconius melpomene). Like the previous species, the postman’s bright colors warn predators to look elsewhere for a meal. In the wild, they are found throughout Central and South America – particularly on the slopes of the Andes Mountains. This species has a wingspan of 1.375 to 1.5 inches (35-39 mm).This is an image of another postman, showing the underwings as it perches on this plant stem. Postman butterflies can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, which allows them to distinguish between different species of butterflies. The postman butterfly has been on the planet for a little over 2 million years (not this particular one; the species as a whole – after emerging from its cocoon, a postman butterfly lives for about six months in the wild).Cattleheart (Parides iphidamas) butterflies in the wild get their nutrients from a plant called pipevine. The adult butterflies ingest a toxin from pipevine, which keeps predators from eating them as well as the caterpillars. This species, too, is found in Central and South America. Nancy and I both appreciated the dark coloration, coupled with the bright magenta spots on the hindwing, of this species.Here is a butterfly probably familiar to all, the monarch (Danaus plexippus). Monarchs are one of the great migratory species of the animal kingdom. While many butterfly species make their way across relatively short distances to warmer climes as the seasons change, monarchs fly thousands of multi-generational miles each year. Their wings, spanning 3 1/2 to 4 inches (8.9-10.2 cm), carry them from southern Canada, throughout the western, central and eastern United States, and finally into Mexico, and then back again in the spring. (Unlike some other migratory animals, like birds, the trip takes roughly four generations each season – but it’s still an admirable feat.) By the by, this is a male monarch – you can tell because of the little black dots on the black stripes on the hindwings near the end of the thorax.Here’s one of the larger butterflies we saw in the habitat, the common blue morpho (Morpho helenor peleides). The wingspan of a common blue morpho is an uncommon 3.0 to 7.9 inches (7.5-20 cm). Those of you fortunate enough to be viewing this blog on color screens will notice there’s not much blue on this bug. Here’s the deal on blue morphos, which are from Central and South America: they don’t much care for cold temperatures. Daytime highs in Las Vegas had plummeted into the mid-60s during our mid-November visit, and it had briefly rained the night before. All butterflies are cold-blooded and rely on their environments to regulate their body temperature. In order to conserve heat, this blue morpho kept its wings closed the entire time we were in the habitat. If it had been a little warmer, we probably would have seen the brilliant blue of the tops of its wings – judging from the pictures I’ve seen online (I have a color monitor), they’re just gorgeous. The underside of the wings are pretty attractive too, of course. Some of the butterflies we saw, like this paper kite (Idea leuconoe), appeared to be yearning to be outside the habitat. However, it was much warmer, and the butterflies had much easier access to food sources, inside the building. Paper kites are natives of southeast Asia but can also be found in northern Australia and southern Taiwan. They have wingspans of 4 3/4 to 5 1/2 inches (12-14 cm). I really liked the subtle yellow-to-white coloration on this butterfly; while it doesn’t necessarily scream “DON”T EAT ME! SERIOUSLY!” like patterns we’d seen on other species, I’d probably refrain from doing so anyway.Speaking of escaping the bonds of the butterfly habitat, one of the volunteers there said that they really have to keep on eye on this species, the great southern white (Ascia monuste), to make sure it doesn’t follow visitors out the door.This picture happens to show the butterfly’s proboscis, which uncurls so that the butterfly can ingest nectar and other nutrients. In visiting a number of different flowering plants, many butterflies are important pollinators. Great southern whites are found on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States and on south to Argentina, with individuals occasionally straying to Kansas and Colorado. Great southern whites have wingspans of 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches (63-86 mm), a little bigger than half the size of the previously pictured paper kite.Hey, who let this giant owl into the forested butterfly habitat? I’m just kidding with you right now. This species is, in fact, a forest giant owl (Caligo eurilochus), another huge butterfly that has absolutely gorgeous multicolored top wings but this cranky guy never opened his wings during our visit. When they do open, the wingspan of a forest giant owl measures up to 6 3/4 inches (17 cm). In the wild, this species is found in Mexico, Centrai America, and down to the Amazon River basin. There are about 20 species within the owl butterfly genus, which gets its name from the eyespots on its underwing. The scientists are still undecided about the purpose of the eyespot; it might be an adaptation to mimic a large bird’s face, or it might serve as a target so that predators attack the wing rather than the body of the butterfly.This pretty species, Julia butterfly (Dryas iulia), is native to Brazil and up to Texas and Florida, and can sometimes be found as far north as Nebraska. Their wingspans measure 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 inches (82-92 mm). I liked how the color of its wings matched that of the blossoms of this lantana plant. There are 14 recognized subspecies of Julia.This is a terribly out-of-focus photo, but it’s the only one I have of this species. Its wings are not green, but rather display the color of the leaves on which it’s perched. The butterfly’s wings are transparent, giving it the name glasswing (Greta morgane oto). It is found in Central America and northern parts of South America, with occasional forays up into southern Texas and down to northern Chile. Its wingspan measures 1 to 1 1/4 inches (2.8-3 cm). This little butterfly looks pretty delicate, but it can carry up to 40 times its own weight – it, too, is a noted migrator. Malachite is a mineral that is bright-green in color, and it gives its name to this species of butterfly. The malachite (Siproeta stelenes) butterfly is fairly large, with a wingspan measuring between 3 1/4 and 4 inches (8.5-10 cm). It is found throughout Central and South America, and occasionally makes its way into Cuba as well as the southern parts of Texas and Florida. If you’re still reading this with a color screen, you’ll notice that the green on the wings isn’t particularly bright, so why is this butterfly called a malachite?This is why. Remarkably, this is the same butterfly species, malachite, as the one pictured above (although not the same butterfly; this one has a black body). It illustrates the huge difference between coloration patterns on the top and bottom of the wings of some butterflies.I’ll close with a couple of photos of another butterfly that illustrates the sharp difference between coloration of the top and bottom of its wings. We saw a lot of these butterflies, the common green birdwing (Ornithoptera priamus); in the wild they’re found in the western Pacific islands and northeast Australia.Again, this is the same species, common green birdwing, as in the preceding photo. Those are some bright colors, and even the bug’s thorax and abdomen are getting fancy. There are more than 20 subspecies of green birdwings.
Nancy and I spend a lot of time observing wildlife, mostly birds. It’s a relaxing pastime for us, and it’s a great way to get out to appreciate nature. The visit to the Springs Preserve Butterfly Habitat was incredibly rewarding, and I noticed, among the vibrant colors and the wide variety of sizes and body shapes, a big difference compared to other wildlife encounters. There were no birds chirping or calling to another, there were no hooves or paws passing through the grass, there were no sounds of grass being pulled from the ground or leaves being stripped from trees as food. Butterflies are totally silent, and they’re absolutely beautiful.
As I noted, the Springs Preserve Butterfly Habitat closes near the end of November and then closes for the winter months. If you find yourself in the Entertainment Capital of the World and want to do something pretty quiet, the habitat is a great way to get away from the noise and bright lights of Las Vegas. Check the habitat’s website (www.springspreserve.org/explore/butterfly-habitat.html) for current operating hours.
Works Consulted
Interpretive signage at the Springs Preserve Butterfly Habitat
“Field Guide to Insects & Spiders,” National Audubon Society, Borzoi Books, 2006
Wikipedia articles on various butterfly species; if you use Wikipedia, please consider supporting it financially
September 28, 2024 – Near Pagosa Springs, Colorado
At the entrance to Chimney Rock National Monument, one can see Chimney Rock (center horizon), Companion Rock (to the left of Chimney Rock), and the mesa on which an ancient Puebloan great house still stands (at far left).
The scientific pursuits of geology, archeology, and astronomy combine in a number of interesting ways at Chimney Rock National Monument, located about 20 miles of Pagosa Springs in southwestern Colorado. In late September 2024, the Goddard was parked for a couple of weeks in Pagosa Springs, allowing us to enjoy the spectacular fall colors of aspen trees as well as a visit to Chimney Rock National Monument. We joined a geology-focused tour of the monument led by a volunteer guide, a former geologist in the oil and gas industry. In addition to learning about the rock features of the monument, we also learned about the history of the human habitation of Chimney Rock and visited the highest-in-elevation ancient Pueblo in the American Southwest, the Great House.
I took this photo from the road entrance to Chimney Rock National Monument using a telephoto lens. For perspective, Chimney Rock on the right rises more than 300 feet above the dark gray shale layer below it.
Between the years 925 and 1125, more than 2,000 Pueblo Native Americans lived in the Chimney Rock region and, although no more than about 250 people called it home at one time, they made it a substantial settlement for two centuries. The inhabitants built a number of stone and timber structures that are still standing today, and they traded goods with other Pueblo communities up to 150 miles away. Today, archaeologists know of 200 ancient structures collected within eight distinct villages at Chimney Rock.
Initial archeological investigations began in the 1920s by J.A. Jeançon, a Smithsonian Institution-trained archeologist working on behalf of the Colorado Historical Society, and his assistant, Frank Roberts; they and their crew surveyed and mapped dozens of structures and found thousands of artifacts.
Today, the U.S. Forest Service, which manages Chimney Rock National Monument, is leaving many archeological sites undisturbed out of respect for existing Puebloan and other Native American cultures, and with the understanding that less-invasive archeological techniques may be developed in the future. More than two dozen Native American tribes have an affiliation with Chimney Rock.
The monument, surrounded by the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, is closed to the general public each year from September 30 to May 15. The closure allows Native Americans to access the site for private ceremonial purposes, and the Chimney Rock area is also a major thoroughfare for elk migration.
Geology! These three rocks, all of which were collected earlier at Chimney Rock by the volunteer geologist conducting our tour, tell a really interesting part of the story of the area. The ammonite fossil at far left shows that Chimney Rock, which today gets about 14 inches of precipitation annually, was once covered by an inland sea. Ammonites were incredibly diverse and numerous aquatic cephalopods (related to modern squid and octopi) that flourished for hundreds of millions of years until the Earth’s collision with an asteroid 65 million years ago. The petrified wood in the center indicates that large trees used to grow on shorelines left when the land rose and the sea receded. Finally, the basalt at right was ejected from an erupting volcano in the area. (Yes, I know the ammonite photo also demonstrates that I was, at the time, in gruesomely desperate need of my semi-annual mani-pedi.)
The true importance of Chimney Rock lies, of course, in its ties to ancient and current-day Native Americans. But from a geologic perspective, the story of Chimney Rock begins, seemingly as do so many on this website, with a great inland sea. One hundred million years ago, much of present-day North America was under a shallow but vast sea that connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. At its largest size, the Western Interior Seaway stretched from today’s Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian range in the east. At its deepest points, it was only about 3,000 feet from the waves on top to the sea bottom – very shallow for a sea. The size of the sea varied widely over the course of its 34 million years of existence; it finally drained away for good about the time of the end of the Cretaceous Period, or 65 million years ago when dinosaurs ceased to rule the earth.
While it was relatively shallow, the Western Interior Seaway’s 3,000 feet of water depth carried a lot of compression capability. Clay at the bottom of the sea, as well as dead plants and animals, accumulated over the eons to build a 1,000-feet-thick layer of mud. That layer would solidify, over millions of years of water weight pressing upon it, into a dark gray layer of rock called Lewis Shale. When the western part of the American continent began to rise, the waters of the inland sea drained away to leave shorelines of sand and tidal flats. Dry periods alternated with years upon years of wetter conditions, leaving layers of coal and fossilized animal skeletons.
About 40 million years ago – 26 million years after an asteroid impact killed all of the non-flying dinosaurs as well as a goodly amount of other life on Earth – volcanoes began erupting in the Four Corners area of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. This activity built the Colorado Plateau, a huge high-desert expanse of the southwestern United States covering 130,000 square miles of those four states, roughly centered in the Four Corners area.
The erosional forces of wind and water began to have their way with the soil covering today’s Companion Rock and Chimney Rock, and then glaciers from the last Ice Age of 4 million years ago carved deeply into the former mud of the inland seafloor, now compressed into shale. Finally, the glaciers melted and the resulting floodwaters exposed sandstone – formerly the beaches of the receding inland sea from tens of millions of years earlier but compressed into a rocky layer – and eroded away nearly all of that sandstone layer with the exception of Companion Rock and Chimney Rock. The scientists believe that the two sandstone features have been exposed for about 25,000 years, protected by what was probably the thickest and hardest layer of sand during the time of the Western Interior Seaway and is now a layer of sandstone more resistant to erosion than other rocks had been. However, they too, with the relentless work of water and wind, will gradually fall to the valley below.
This view, looking east on a hazy late-September morning, shows the dark-gray Lewis Shale layer below the light-brown Pictured Cliffs Sandstone layer, of which Companion Rock and Chimney Rock are the tallest remnants. This valley was carved by glaciers and the flooding of the melted glaciers as well as the Piedra River. To the immediate left of the two natural rock towers is the Great House, built by ancient Puebloans . The San Juan mountains, volcanic in origin, are on the far horizon.This is the trail leading to the monument’s Great House, one of the square exterior corners of which can be seen at the top of the photo. This is the same trail that was used by the ancient Puebloans to make their way from the valley floor to the Great House. The trail is situated on a relatively thin ridge of sandstone. Everything brought to the Great House – building materials, foodstuffs, water – was carried by the ancient Puebloans, by hand, up this trail.These sandstone rocks are on the trail to the monument’s Great House. Our geologist guide noted that the natural fracturing of the sandstone made selection and collection of the rocks much easier for the Puebloan builders of the structures in the monument. Note also the brownish markings in the rocks: they’re about 6-8 inches long, and are the fossilized burrows of a prehistoric crustacean that lived in the sand of the inland sea that once inundated much of North America. The animals dug these burrows into the existing shoreline sand, and the holes gradually filled with clay and mud containing iron to leave behind the brown fossils seen on the trail today.Archeology! This south-facing exterior wall of the Great House has an interesting story. Most of the rocks comprising the Great House and other structures were replaced, in place, over the last century by archeologists and during a major project in the 1970s involving Native Americans. The structures had simply fallen victim to the forces of erosion over the course of 10 centuries of non-occupancy. However, the modern-day wooden shelf in the center of this photo is protecting part of a stone wall that was laid by Puebloan hands a thousand years ago and managed to stay intact. Note the different size and color of the rocks surrounding the original work.The rock formations are still quite a good distance from the Great House; Chimney Rock itself is 315 feet tall. Scientific analysis of some of the wood beams still left at the Great House shows that construction began in the year AD 1076 and then expanded in AD 1093. Those particular years would prove to be significant in discovering why Great House was built where it was.This picture was taken looking southwest from atop one of the Great House’s walls. Many of the rocks in the walls have been replaced over the years, but some parts of the walls feature the original masonry and stonework. It’s estimated that the Great House was built using up to six million stones, all of which were hand-selected, hand-shaped, and hand-carried to this site. All of these walls were once taller, and roofs covered the buildings. On the far horizon, in the center of the photo and between the left and right hillsides, lies New Mexico. Visitors from Chaco Canyon, 90 miles away, would approach the Chimney Rock villages through that low valley. Similarities between the architectural styles of the buildings at Chaco Canyon and Chimney Rock, as well as those of cultural artifacts, such as pottery designs, stone tools, and projectile points, demonstrate that the two communities shared many ideas over the two centuries of Chimney Rock’s existence. Similar artifacts show that the residents of Chimney Rock may have traded with still other Native Americans living up to 150 miles away.
Jeançon began his excavation of the Great House Pueblo in 1921. He noted that some of the walls were still 14 feet tall. The building contained at least 35 rooms and two kivas, the round structures believed to be the center of the ancient Puebloans’ spiritual and perhaps social lives. An archeologist has estimated that to build a structure of this size and complexity, in addition to the 6 million rocks, the builders would have needed 5,000 log beams, 25,000 tons of water, and 25,000 tons of dirt to make an adobe mortar. All of these materials would have had to have been carried up the steep trail by hand.
Considering all of the labor needed to build Great House and the many other structures, one is left with the question of why the residents stayed here for only two centuries. There are three prevailing hypotheses for the ancient Puebloans’ departure: it’s possible that the area was depleted of food and other resources; societal changes or perhaps warfare made it in the residents’ best interests to leave; or the community, representative of other Puebloan cultures of the time, simply decided that it was time to find a new home. Whatever the reason for their departure, it’s believed that the residents of Chimney Rock, along with many other ancient Puebloan communities, moved south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona; their descendants can be found today among the members of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and other Native American tribes.
While at the Great House, I took a picture of Companion and Chimney rocks with my telephoto lens. The distance from the Great House to the rock formations makes them look smaller than they actually are; as I noted earlier, Chimney Rock, the structure furthest away, is taller than a football field is long. The top of Companion Rock is a nesting area for peregrine falcons. Because of their spiritual significance to Native Americans and to protect the birds’ nests, both rock formations are off-limits to hikers and rock climbers.
That covers some of the geology and archeology at Chimney Rock National Monument; let’s move on to the skies above. Nancy and I learned a new word the day we visited the monument: archeoastronomy. This vowel-heavy construction refers to the study of the ways in which ancient cultures studied the skies and how they used that information to guide many of their day-to-day and seasonal decisions, including when to plant crops and conduct spiritual ceremonies. Around the world, very old cultural sites, like Stonehenge in England and hundreds of temples in Egypt, show that ancient peoples were keenly aware of the movement of the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
Observing the skies and the objects contained in the vast expanse above also played a major role in the ancient Native Americans’ religious lives. In North America, evidence of the significance of celestial movement to Native American cultures can be found in many places, including at Chaco Canyon and at Chimney Rock.
The most significant alignment of celestial objects and Earth-bound structures at Chimney Rock is known as the Northern Major Lunar Standstill. (That was another term and concept new to Nancy and me, neither of whom are anywhere close to unfamiliar with astronomy, but I guess that’s a big reason that we’re doing this: each time Nancy and I leave the Goddard to visit a museum or national park, we ask each other, “Are you ready to do some more learnin’?”)
Many will be aware that the rising and setting of the sun appears to move across the horizon as the year progresses: on the day of the summer solstice it appears to rise and set in its northernmost latitude (and makes for the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere), and then the sunrise and sunset appear to occur further south each day until the winter solstice, making for the shortest day of the year. It then appears to move north again to complete the second half of the solar cycle.
The moon has a similar cycle, appearing to rise at different locations from north to south like a pendulum over the course of a month. The Northern Major Lunar Standstill, or MLS, occurs on a recurring cycle of 18.6 years when that pendulum of the moon’s rise appears to stay in the same location on the horizon for a period lasting about 16 months.
Here’s the significance of the MLS to the manmade and natural stone structures at Chimney Rock: during the lunar standstill and when viewed from the Great House Pueblo, the moon appears to rise between Companion Rock and Chimney Rock. Archeoastronomers don’t know this for an absolute certainty, but it appears that the Great House was built where it was so that its ancient Puebloan residents could observe this event that occurs on a cycle of just under two decades. The years AD 1076 and 1093, when the structure was built and later expanded, were both years in which lunar standstills occurred. It’s quite possible that many ancient Puebloans from around the Four Corners region traveled to the Great House to view this powerful spectacle alongside the residents of Chimney Rock.
As it happens, in late 2024 the MLS was nearing the end of its cycle at Chimney Rock – our U.S. Forest Service geologist guide showed us pictures on his cellphone he’d taken of the moon rising between the two rocks just a few nights before our visit. We briefly lamented not being able to see the event ourselves, but the guide noted that very few people are allowed to be at the Great House at night. It’s of extraordinarily powerful spiritual significance to modern Puebloans, of course; it’s also incredibly dangerous to walk the trail to the Great House at night because of the trail’s position on a very thin ridge. The Forest Service and its academic partners in astronomy have a camera situated at the Great House, and the transmission showing the moon’s rise between Companion Rock and Chimney Rock is seen by many people down at the monument’s visitor center.
I’ve long had an affinity for this wildflower, desert paintbrush, so I was happy to see this specimen blooming just a few steps from the Great House.Astronomy, again! While researching the information for this posting, I happened to notice that the Griffith Observatory, based in Los Angeles, was hosting a livestream of the moonrise from Chimney Rock on the evening of October 21, 2024. Nancy and I were very happy to watch this event from our living room in the Goddard as it was parked in Flagstaff, Arizona, three weeks after our visit to Chimney Rock National Monument. To sum up, we watched an astronomical observatory in southern California conduct a livestream of the moon rising between Companion Rock and Chimney Rock, 350 miles away from where it was happening in southwest Colorado while we were camping in northern Arizona. As I often say, we’re living in the future.
I’ve been reading “Riders of the Purple Sage,” one of Zane Grey’s early books that helped shape the Western novel formula. Publishing the book in 1918, Grey (1872-1930) was inspired to write a Western story after reading Owen Wister’s “The Virginian” (1902). It would be the most popular of Grey’s 90 books (it’s estimated that he wrote 9 million words in his career). Later prolific western authors like Max Brand and Louis L’Amour were heavily influenced by Grey; L’Amour himself wrote 89 novels and 14 collections of short stories. “Riders of the Purple Sage” has been adapted for film five times: in 1918 and `1925 (both were silent movies), 1931, 1941, and a 1996 TV movie starring Ed Harris and Amy Madigan (who have been married to each other since 1983).
Although I’ve read “The Virginian” and lots of Louis L’Amour’s books, I’ve never read a Zane Grey novel (my only point of reference to Grey was knowing that Colonel Sherman Potter of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital was a big fan). I’ve been struck how, in “Riders of the Purple Sage,” Grey deftly describes the canyons, mesas, and flatlands of southern Utah, the setting of the book. The characterization and dialog in the book are definitely of their time, but the story itself is pretty exciting and Grey was quite skilled at painting, in words, how the incredible scenery of the region appears.
Reading “Riders of the Purple Sage” reminded me of when we were in southern Utah and northern Arizona for an extended visit in 2023. We’d planned to stay in Fredonia, Arizona, for four weeks so that we could visit a couple of national parks and monuments in the region. Mechanical issues with The Goddard, our fifth-wheel trailer, extended our stay for an additional week. We were unable to lower the front jacks of our trailer, which meant that it had to stay hitched to the six-wheeled towing unit. A very competent RV technician was able to help us manually lower the jacks and we were able to unhitch our F-350, and he later fixed the jack-lowering issue (turns out a rodent probably chewed through a wire while we were camping at the south rim of the Grand Canyon; lesson learned is to never go to the Grand Canyon again). At any rate, our extended stay while waiting for RV parts was a fortunate one as we were able to visit the north rim of the Grand Canyon, which, due to snow, didn’t open until early June that year.
This post, however, is not about either rim of the Grand Canyon but rather a manmade lake in Utah. Our campground was in Fredonia, Arizona, about four miles south of the Arizona/Utah border. We spent quite a bit of time in Kanab, Utah (itself about four miles north of the border), partly because we found a reservoir near Kanab that offered great hiking and birding opportunities. We visited the lake three times in late May and early June, and this post has pictures from all of those excursions. We saw lots of different species of birds, and we were fortunate to have timed our visit for some pretty impressive displays of blossoming plants.
The average depth of Jackson Flat Reservoir is only 28 feet. It’s primarily a holding reservoir for irrigation water, but the lake receives plenty of non-motorized boating, hiking, swimming, fishing, and stargazing enthusiasts. The sage in this photo isn’t purple like in the Zane Grey book, but maybe it’s due to the time of day that I took the picture.
Jackson Flat Reservoir, located between Kanab and the state line, had been in its planning stages for nearly two decades when construction began in 2010. The reservoir meets local agricultural irrigation needs, and is also a wonderful boating, swimming, and hiking destination for Kanab residents. Built to a capacity of 4,228 acre-feet, the reservoir attracts a large number of waterfowl and other birds to southeast Utah.
Birds with predominantly black coloration are frustratingly difficult to photograph unless the lighting is just right; I really like the pattern on this common loon (Chondestes grammacus) so I decided to include the picture in this posting. Nancy and I watched this bird for quite some time; it would disappear under the water for up to a minute at a time, and it was kind of fun to guess where he’d pop back up. Their diet consists mostly of crustaceans and small fish. Common loons are found all over the United States – it’s likely how they got their name.Writing of “common,” here’s a common raven (Corvus corax) behind a juniper bush, looking much like a Muppet. True to their name, these birds are the most common of corvids (a family of birds that also includes crows, magpies, and jays), and, weighing in at 3.2 pounds at maturity, they are the largest of the passerine order (basically birds that perch, about half of the species on the planet). On our walks around the lake, we saw several ravens being chased in the air by red-winged blackbirds that were presumably defending their nests.Writing of which, here’s a red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) patrolling water’s edge. “But Ken,” you might think to yourself, “this bird is neither red-winged nor black.” I would agree with you, and likely add that it looks like one of the 70 million species of brown-colored sparrows. This is, however, a female red-winged blackbird, which do not have the black color and red wing markings of the males of the species. You can differentiate a female red-winged blackbird from a sparrow by looking at the beak: it’s much more pointed and angular than say, …… the beak of this brown-colored sparrow. This is a lark sparrow (Chondestes grammacus), a species we seemingly see sparingly, but is actually fairly common and distributed throughout most of the United States and Mexico. To remind us that we were in an arid desert environment, there were several varieties of cactus growing around the reservoir. This is tulip prickly pear (Opuntia phaeacantha) featuring riotously vibrant colors on its blossoms. Whenever I see bright colors like this on flowers, or a bird, or a tropical fish, I think, “There’s a color not found in nature.” But they are literally found in nature. This is the road over the dam of Jackson Flat Reservoir, with the cliffs of southern Utah in the distance. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s western border is just to the right edge of this photograph. The reservoir’s dam contains 800,000 yards of dirt and rocks. One thing I like to do when seeing a reservoir’s dam is to cry out “Dam!” I wonder if Nancy ever gets tired of me doing that. I should probably ask her sometime. We see a lot of dams.Some of the waterfowl we saw were far away from the trail that goes around the reservoir. This was a new species to us, so I decided to include it even though it’s a terrible photo. This is a black-necked stilt (Chondestes grammacus). It’s found in the western United States and down into Mexico, and in quite a bit of South America as well. They are about 15 inches tall, with long pink legs and a wingspan of close to 30 inches. Like other shorebirds, black-necked stilts use their long bills and beaks to feed on freshwater shrimp, as well as crayfish and small fish. Species like these have no business being in the arid desert of southern Utah, except for the existence of Jackson Flat Reservoir – it’s a great benefit to area residents to be able to see birds like this.Indian paintbrush has long been one of my favorite wildflowers. There are more than 200 species of this plant; I’m pretty sure this is Wyoming Indian paintbrush (Castilleja linariifolia), which is the state flower of … Wyoming.THIS IS A TALES OF THE GODDARD LIZARD ALERT. Movement at the side of the trail around the reservoir attracted our attention to this western fence lizard, a very common reptile in the western United States. Note the blue patch on his throat; that blue shading also extends to his stomach (I’m guessing; I didn’t pick this rascal up to check) and leads to another name for the lizard: the bluebelly. There are five subspecies of western fence lizards; they have a SVL (snout-vent length) of 2.25 to 3.5 inches.As I wrote earlier, we happened to time our visits to Jackson Flat Reservoir when many flowering plants were blossoming. The flowering of this plant, desert globemallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua), lasted throughout our entire stay in the region: it was everywhere. It generally grows to a height of three feet, and is host to the caterpillar stage of a number of butterfly and moth species.Writing of which, here’s a butterfly species called the mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa). This butterfly is found in both North America and Europe. Because it feeds on sap from trees and shrubs, it’s not a significant pollinator.Back to birds: here is a couple of double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum), contemplating a cooling dip in the waters of Jackson Flat Reservoir. Although they are definitely water birds, their feathers are not waterproof and they are often seen standing on the shore with their wings spread out in order to dry off. Their diet is exclusively fish-based.One of the facets of birding that I really like is the opportunity to see pairs of a particular species. The males and females of many species are often seen close together, and you get the opportunity to see how the two genders differ in appearance. This is a pair of ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis), easily identified by the male’s bright blue bill which only appears that way during the summer months (it’s gray the rest of the year).There are a number of really distinctive-looking birds of which I’d only seen pictures or video footage of, but never in real life until Nancy and I started full-time RVing. I’ll never forget seeing a wood duck in real life for the first time (at a state park in Albuquerque, New Mexico), or a scarlet tanager (at a campground in Tucson, Arizona), a common loon (on a lake in western Michigan), a northern cardinal (at a campground in Oklahoma) or a greater roadrunner (at a campground in Albuquerque). I’ve now seen all of those species several times in the last three years, but it’s always a thrill to see them again. The Gambel’s quail (Callipepla gambelii) is another of those birds: I first saw them at a regional park outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and I’ve seen them many times since then, but it’s still really fun to encounter them because of their distinctive appearance. This species is native to the American Southwest, and is also found in parts of Colorado and Texas.Gunther found this lovely stand of desert mallow on a walk near our campground in Fredonia. During our stay in northern Arizona, we saw about 50 kajillion of these flowers; at times, the landscape looked like a sea of pink-orange coral. But “Riders of the Pink-Orange Desert Mallow” doesn’t really have the right zing, and Zane Grey was probably right to title his novel the way he did.
Our country’s national monuments and parks provide opportunities to appreciate nature in a variety of forms: mountains and cliffs, seashores and inland beaches, forests and grasslands, along with the animals, plants, and rocks that provide those landscapes with so much interest. The really good monuments and parks, however, present those opportunities along with an introduction to the cultural forces that helped shape them as well. Despite its small size, Capulin Volcano National Monument in far northeastern New Mexico (it’s less than 20 miles south of the border with Colorado) is a shining example of the best that the National Park Service has to offer.
The 1.25-square mile national monument is located in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field, an eight-thousand-square-mile area containing dozens upon dozens of volcanos that erupted over the last nine million years. We visited Capulin Volcano National Monument, featuring the region’s best-known volcano, during our stay in Raton, New Mexico, in May, 2024
This is a region where the grasslands meet the mountains – the Great Plains end and the Rocky Mountains begin. Along with its relatively recently created cinder cone volcano, Capulin (pr. kah-poo-LEEN), the monument preserves an incredibly diverse environment for plants and animals, and interprets the area’s human influence extraordinarily well. This is an area through which a great many people passed, whether they were on foot pursuing giant Ice-Age mammals in search of food, in horse-drawn wagons making their way from Missouri to New Mexico on the Santa Fe Trail, or on horseback following great herds of cattle on their way from Texas to northern pasturelands and railroads.
But let’s forget about people for a while and talk about volcanoes. Just below the now-quiet surface of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field, the Earth’s crust is relatively thin and unstable, so, in the distant past, magma roiling near the surface of the planet made its way upward in a variety of ways. Volcanic features are everywhere you look in the region: it’s home to about 125 cinder cones, volcanic necks, and a single shield volcano. Chances are that if a geologic structure rises higher than the surrounding grassland, it was once an active volcano.
The cinder cone of Capulin Volcano rises almost 1,300 feet – about the height of New York City’s Empire State Building – above the northeastern New Mexico plains . The crater’s rim measures about a mile in circumference, and the crater itself drops 400 feet below the rim. The highest point on the volcano is 8,142 feet above sea level, and standing at different points on that rim affords views not only of a goodly part of New Mexico, but of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas as well (they all kind of look the same, to be honest – someone should probably repaint the states’ borderlines).
Erupting about 60,000 years ago, Capulin is the youngest large volcano in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field. Geologists consider Capulin extinct, but the rest of the field is considered only dormant and the potential exists for additional volcanic activity in the future. Considering, however, that Capulin erupted that long ago, it’s unlikely that we’ll see anything happening anytime soon.
Capulin Volcano National Monument: By The Numbers
Date established as a national monument
August 9, 1916
Total area
793 acres (1.25 square miles)
Yearly visitors
67,000
Highest point
8,142 feet (top of cinder cone)
The monument has a very fine visitor center with a number of interesting displays that explain the geological, biological, and cultural history of the area. This is a recreation of the skull of a Bison antiquus, which lived in the region about 10,000 years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch . They were about 30 percent larger than modern-day bison (and I don’t know how close you’ve been to a bison, but they’re pretty good-sized themselves; bulls regularly weigh more than 2,000 pounds). Fossilized bones from Bison antiquus were first discovered in 1908 by George McJunkin, a former Black slave who became a bronco-busting and bilingual ranch hand in New Mexico. That find would become one of the most important archeological discoveries in the nation’s history. McJunkin was inspecting pasture conditions following a torrential rainstorm when he happened upon the fossils. He knew he’d discovered something important, but couldn’t get any experts interested in the discovery and he died in 1922 without realizing exactly what he’d found. In 1927, an expedition from the Denver Museum of Natural History (now Denver Museum of Nature and Science) found, in the same area, fossils of the same species. However, those newly discovered fossils had projectile points embedded in them, which proved that humans lived in this area during the Ice Age – about 7,000 years earlier than first believed. The projectile points and the native American culture that used them were named after the New Mexico town near where they were discovered: Folsom, which is about six miles north of Capulin Volcano National Monument.Located where the northeastern New Mexico grasslands meet the Sangre De Cristo mountain range, Capulin Volcano National Monument provides habitat for a wide variety of wildlife. Spotted towhees (Pipilo maculatus) were by far the most plentiful birds we saw while visiting Capulin, but the national monument is home, either year-round or for migratory stopovers, to more than 70 bird species. Spotted towhees are more commonly seen on the ground, scratching through leaf litter in search of insects, but in the springtime males especially will make their way to the tops of shrubs to let loose with their pretty call. This fellow was hanging out near the parking lot on the crater’s rim.
After enjoying the visitor center, Nancy and I drove the Goddard’s six-wheeled towing unit up a road that spirals around and up the Capulin cinder cone. It’s an interesting drive that brought us to a small-ish parking lot at the top of the crater, with a trailhead for the one-mile Crater Rim loop. The easy hike provides great views of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field, and many of its geologic features.
During its 10-year-long eruption history, Capulin ejected volcanic ash as well as small gravel-sized cinders and larger rocks, called bombs, thousands of feet into the sky. In all, the ejected material covered almost 16 square miles of what is now New Mexico. The cinders, which measure 2-64 millimeters in size, built the majority of the cone’s structure by falling back to earth and piling up around the eruption site. Volcanic bombs measure in excess of 64 millimeters (2.5 inches). Upon its return to the ground, this bomb, roughly the size of a car engine block, landed on the rim of the crater. This spot, then, would have been a good one to avoid at the time. The western side of the rim (where the parking lot is located) is about 300 feet lower than the opposite side; the scientists believe that’s due to wind gusts picking up cinders and then dropping them while Capulin was erupting. The Goddard’s six-wheeled towing unit can be seen on the right side of the parking lot on the other side of the rim. On the left side of the photo, on the farthest horizon, you can see the snow-capped Spanish Peaks, located a few miles west of Walsenburg, Colorado. We’d move the Goddard to camp at Lathrop State Park, very close to the Spanish Peaks, following our stay in Raton. This is a variety of chokecherry (Prunus virginiana), a large shrub or short tree that was formerly found all over the volcano but now grows primarily in the crater. It blooms between April and June, and its fruit is used for jellies and teas. Spanish-speaking ranchers who settled in this area called it by its Spanish name, “capulin.”Viewed here looking southeast from the rim of Capulin, Sierra Grande (elev. 8,720 ft.) is the only shield volcano as well as the largest volcano in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field. Rather than an eruption of ash, cinders, and lava rocks, the mountain was made over the course of many fluid lava flows from 3.8 to 2.6 million years ago. The panhandle of Oklahoma is about 50 miles east of Sierra Grande (to the left in this image). The ripples in the land between Sierra Grande and Capulin are called pressure ridges; they’re formed when flowing lava on the surface begins to cool while hotter lava continues to move underneath the hardened rock.From 1821 until 1880, the Santa Fe Trail connected Independence, Missouri, with Santa Fe, New Mexico. Traders, settlers, and the military used the trail to move through what was then the homeland of several different native American cultures, including the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Jicarilla Apache. This is looking east from the top of Capulin; the dark streak on the horizon on the left side of the image is Black Mesa, Oklahoma, about 80 miles from the volcano. When travelers heading west on the Santa Fe Trail saw geologic features like Black Mesa or Capulin, they knew they were approaching their destination in northern New Mexico and their journey across the Great Plains was nearing an end.This pretty yellow flower, prairie thermopsis (Thermopsis rhombifolia), was growing next to the Rim Trail on Capulin. It is one of the first flowers to blossom in the national monument each spring.
Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, two Texas cattlemen, wintered their herds near Capulin Volcano in the 1860s while driving cattle from Texas to Colorado and Wyoming. More than a quarter million head of cattle found their way north over the Goodnight-Loving Trail. The outstanding novel “Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry, which was adapted into a very good miniseries, was inspired by the development of Goodnight-Loving, the greatest of the western cattle trails..
This is looking north from the rim of Capulin. Folsom was once a robust town with many businesses and a railroad, but a flood on August 27, 1908, destroyed most of the community’s buildings. That damage, however, was why George McJunkin was out inspecting pastures in the area and came upon the unusually large fossilized bison bones that would upend American archeological thought. Baby Capulin (elev. 6.870 ft) is another cinder cone that was probably formed from the same magma chamber as Capulin Volcano, but perhaps 10,000 years later. A violent meeting of magma and groundwater resulted in the creation of Mud Hill, the structure topped with a crescent of evergreen trees just this side of Baby Capulin. The horizon in this photo is in the state of Colorado, the border of which is about 20 miles away.Each of the hills, mesas, and mountains in this view looking northwest from the Rim Trail on Capulin is the result of volcanic activity. Beginning with the first eruptions about 9 million years ago, magma from the eruptions flowed down valleys and then hardened as it cooled. Over the ensuing millions of years, the pre-existing sedimentary rock eroded away, through the action of water and wind, much faster than the harder volcanic rock, leaving behind the exposed buttes and mesas of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field.
Upon returning to the rim’s parking lot, Nancy and I decided to take a picnic lunch into the bottom of the crater. It’s a very pleasant hike as well, with many interesting rock formations and chances to see additional wildlife.
If you’re into basalt, you could do worse than enter the crater of Capulin Volcano. This picture was taken near the vent of the volcano, at the bottom of the crater.This image was taken at the lowest part of the Capulin crater. The rim parking lot is just over the crater’s far side.When we were hiking on the rim trail, we saw what were clearly six or eight mule deer, along with some lighter-colored animals, down in the crater. We thought the other animals were perhaps desert mountain sheep. During our lunch inside the crater, however, we discovered, upon being much closer to them, that the lighter-colored animals were also mule deer – they are the lightest-colored deer I’ve ever seen. A ranger at the visitor center (yes, we went back with questions after lunch) said that several years ago, a blond-colored mule deer showed up in the national monument. It must have some strong DNA. A Spanish-speaking family happened to be at the bottom of the crater at the same time as us, and I asked them what the Spanish words for mule deer are; they replied, “venado bura.” ¡Ese es un venado bura muy rubio!Following our lunch in the bottom of the crater and our fact-finding mission back to the visitor center, Nancy and I went on a third hike at the foot of Capulin. You can see the start of the road that spirals up the side of the volcano, along with a few of the tens of thousands of volcanic bombs that erupted from Capulin.
We’d been to Capulin Volcano National Monument before, but we can’t remember when – it was at least 15 years ago and probably more. Nancy and I did agree, however, that we got much, much more out of our visit in 2024, but we don’t know why. It’s not like we were desperate for volcanos; we’d seen plenty in the summer and fall of 2023, and the spring of 2024, in Idaho and western New Mexico. I wonder if those experiences, along with visiting other national parks and monuments that don’t happen to feature volcanos, helped us appreciate Capulin all the more. It’s a great, great national monument, filled with opportunities to learn about our planet’s violent past as well as see some really beautiful plants and animals.. Raton, New Mexico, is less than five hours directly south of Denver, Colorado, via Interstate 25, and then Capulin is about half an hour from Raton.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area Near Las Vegas, Nevada – January 6, 2024
Impounded behind the concrete and steel of the magnificent Hoover Dam, Lake Mead in southeastern Nevada and southwestern Arizona is, by volume (and when full), the largest inland reservoir of water in the United States. There are a couple of U.S. reservoirs that have a larger surface area, but they don’t have the depth of Lake Mead (when full). The reservoir, made by the result of damming the Colorado River, is the primary feature of Lake Mead National Recreation Area – the nation’s first NRA as well as its largest at 1.5 million acres, or just over 2,400 square miles. For perspective, Lake Mead NRA is a couple hundred square miles larger than Kit Carson County in far eastern Colorado.
When full, Lake Mead has a surface area of 247 square miles, a surface elevation of 1,229 feet above sea level, and a maximum depth of 532 feet. When it’s full.
Lake Mead is, at the moment, not full. Not even close, really. In fact, it’s a couple hundred feet below its capacity, and it hasn’t been this empty since it was first filled after the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1937. A multi-decade-long drought in the southwestern United States, as well as unprecedented demand for agricultural and municipal water in the multi-state region served by the reservoir, have led to a stunning drop in the water level of Lake Mead. The reservoir’s capacity is so large that one inch of water in the lake equates to about 2 billion gallons. Two billion multiplied by 2,400 inches (200 feet) means Lake Mead has 48 trillion fewer gallons of water since the reservoir was last full in the mid-1980s. That number is so large as to be effectively useless, but in terms of acre-feet (which is the amount of water needed to cover an acre with 12 inches of water), Lake Mead is currently a little over a quarter of its capacity.
Geologists and hydrologists, along with other concerned -ogists, are working, and have been working for several decades, to address this issue. Many millions of people rely on Lake Mead’s water to continue flowing through the reservoir, providing electricity as well as drinking, municipal, and agricultural water. Mother Nature, while a powerful force in her own right, will take a long time to refill the reservoir: even after the remarkable upstream snowpack of the 2022-2023 winter in the Rocky Mountains, the reservoir rose only a few inches. It would take many consecutive decades of consistently above-average snowpack to refill the lake. That’s highly, highly unlikely to happen.
While the situation awaits a hopeful solution, that change in Lake Mead’s water levels also presents new opportunities for recreation: the receding water has left behind areas for great hikes. Recreation managers have developed at least 14 hiking trails all around the area, ranging from short and easy strolls to a 34-mile-long bike loop to strenuous hikes that are meant for the truly hardy among us.
Which neither Nancy, nor Gunther, nor I, are. We lucked into a great hike called the Owl Canyon trail on the first weekend of 2024, and saw some pretty cool sights while enjoying a 4-mile out-and-back trail.
We saw several of these beautiful buttes along the trail to Owl Canyon. The creek flowing below the butte at lower left is Las Vegas Wash, a 12-mile-long arroyo that channels most of the excess water from the Las Vegas metropolitan area into Lake Mead. The wash contains water from urban runoff, reclaimed water from golf courses and parks, and stormwater; in short, it’s probably best to not dip your tin cup in it for a cool, refreshing drink – although the plants and rocks of the wash do filter a lot of the contaminants out of the water before it reaches Lake Mead. This photo was taken perhaps a half-mile from the trailhead, which was a boat ramp that used to provide watercraft with access to Lake Mead. More on that later.Thousands of these small white mollusk shells can be found in several locations along the Owl Canyon trail. They point to a time, years ago, when this entire area was covered by a vast body of water: Lake Mead, which, when it’s full is about 60 percent bigger than the area covered by the city and county of Denver. As recently as the 1980s, mollusks like these were free to frolic or fritter away their days or whatever it is that mollusks do. Now, every foot of the trail we were on is high and dry.
Here we see an intrepid hiker and her ill-behaved dog (it’s Nancy and Gunther) approaching the mouth of Owl Canyon, about a mile and a half from the trailhead on the boat ramp to the west. The canyon can also be accessed by a trailhead resulting in a shorter hike (2.2 miles out and back) coming from the northeast, but we wanted a bit more of a challenge for this first hike of 2024.
As you can probably tell from the earlier photos, it’s rather arid in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (it’s in a literal desert, the Mohave, and the region is a convergence of the Mohave, Great Basin, and Sonoran deserts). Depending on which resource you use for reference, the area gets between 4 and 6 inches of precipitation each year. Except for a great blue heron, a small family of mallard ducks, and a large flock of goldfinches, we didn’t see much in the way in wildlife on the day’s hike. However, we did see some examples of desert plants that we hadn’t yet encountered on our travels. This is a specimen of desert stingbush (Eucnide urens), also known as velcro plant. It’s found in the desert regions of the southwestern United States and Baja California. It looks a lot like holly leaves seen around the December holiday, but, true to its name, the serrated leaves have stinging hairs to protect the plant from browsing animals. It’s yet another desert plant one wouldn’t want to lick (although the desert bighorn sheep native to the area seem to like them quite a lot).The walls of the canyon, which were under the waters of Lake Mead for many years, is made of a conglomerate of many different kinds and sizes of rocks, ranging from particles of sand to basalt stones the size of footballs or larger. Owl Canyon existed before Lake Mead; it was carved by an intermittent watercourse to create a winding natural path through the desert.The previous photo of the canyon walls’ conglomerate was taken near a spot in the canyon where we stopped for lunch. This photo was taken from the same spot. It shows Gunther alertly listening to Nancy about further instructions regarding the hike, especially to be constantly aware of impending threats from wildlife. (He’s really just waiting for Nancy to offer him some of her tuna salad sandwich; ultimately, he was disappointed to be denied the same.) The bandana he’s sporting around his neck was acquired gratis from a pet grooming service in Idaho over the summer; it looks like I neglected to iron it before we left on that day’s hike.Owl Canyon gets its name from the many holes in the rock walls that have eroded away, providing perches for owls and other roosting birds. Walking through its winding course was a ton of fun, although Gunther appeared to be ready to leave at any time.Of course, Gunther was right to be terrified. One drawback presented by the canyon’s winding rock walls was the inability to see anything around an upcoming bend, such as these remarkable multi-stone sculptures located just before a culvert in the canyon, until they suddenly appear before you. They were encountered on our return path through the canyon; they weren’t there when we walked through the culvert earlier and gave us something of a start. Their sudden appearance shall forever remain a mystery. (Seriously, a family also walking through the canyon must have put quite a bit of work into stacking these stones, and they did it in pretty short order. Park managers are strict when it comes to building even small piles of rocks: like graffiti on rock walls or otherwise defacing natural resources, despite how cleverly they’re designed, putting these formations together is forbidden.) That’s Lakeshore Road above the culvert.Here are Nancy and Gunther on the other side of the culvert pictured above. Walking through its galvanized confines as we hiked underneath Lakeshore Road was an interesting experience. I found, to Nancy’s delight, that it provided quite an echoing experience. There are two culverts in Owl Canyon; they allow seasonal water runoff to continue on its natural course through the canyon on its way to Lake Mead.Erosion from water and wind creates some spectacular rock carvings. Vertical formations like this, like the much larger butte pictured earlier, are created when the erosional forces of water and wind take away rock material surrounding a structure, but the formation itself is protected on its top by a layer of less permeable rock. I’d guess that this formation at the top of the canyon wall is 12 to 15 feet tall.Nancy and Gunther emerge from the canyon and prepare to return to the trailhead; Gunther, in particular, appears pretty happy to be out. That’s a brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) plant in the lower left, displaying its bright yellow blossoms on this early January day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, brittlebush is a member of the sunflower family.On our walk back to the trailhead, we saw this striking shrub we hadn’t noticed while hiking to the canyon. I inset a closeup of the plant’s leaves in the lower right. It’s a pretty plant, isn’t it, with its deep red limbs and attractive dark green and juniper-like leaf structures? Don’t be fooled! This is the scourge of the southwest, an invasive plant called tamarisk (Tamarix ramosissima) that’s native to Europe and Asia. Land and river managers throughout the southwestern United States spend a lot of resources trying to control the spread of tamarisk, the flowers of which each contain thousands of tiny seeds. Younger tamarisk plants compete with native plants for water along riverways; tamarisk doesn’t grow well in shade, so if the native plants are able to outgrow tamarisk (which can grow to heights of 25 feet in full sun and with sufficient water), the natives will usually win out. This particular plant was growing quite a ways from Las Vegas Wash.This is a view of the length of the boat ramp that now serves as a parking lot for a couple of hiking trailheads, including the Owl Canyon Trail. I took this photo as we were driving away from the trailhead. You can barely make out the white paint on a couple of vehicles parked on the right side of the ramp near its end. Las Vegas Wash is just beyond the end of the ramp. When the lake is full, a lot of this ramp would be underwater. Keep scrolling to see what it would take to get this boat ramp functional for launching boats into Lake Mead again.Here’s some perspective of how low Lake Mead is. This is a screenshot from Google Maps, using satellite imagery taken from about 250 miles above the earth, of the area in which Nancy, Gunther, and I hiked. The boat ramp pictured in the photo above this screenshot is the small gray strip in the upper left corner; we parked the Goddard’s six-wheeled towing unit approximately where the red dot is. Owl Canyon is in the red circle; we hiked from the boat ramp, to and through the canyon, and back again. Las Vegas Wash is the creek at the top of the image flowing into Lake Mead in the upper right corner; when the lake was full, it extended west all the way to cover a lot of the boat ramp on the left side of the image. In short, the end of the boat ramp is at least three miles from the current waters of Lake Mead, and the lake would still need to fill much more in order to actually launch a boat from the ramp. When we finished our hike we happened to meet an construction engineer on the boat ramp who was doing some preliminary evaluation to prepare for its eminent demolition and extraction of the concrete, rebar, and other materials. As he told us, “This lake isn’t filling in our lifetimes.”
It’s easy to think that it’s not the end of the world if Lake Mead continues to dry up: the Colorado River flowed freely through this area for millions of years, supporting all kinds of native plant and animal life. But that’s not the world in which we currently live, and the disappearance of Lake Mead would be an absolute catastrophe: without constant flowing water to turn Hoover Dam’s turbines, many metropolitan areas in the southwest, like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles (to say nothing of the many thousands of smaller cities in the region), would suffer calamitous losses of electricity as well as a reliable source of water. Simply put, water impoundments like Lake Mead (and, to lesser but still vital extents, Lake Powell and Blue Mesa Reservoir upstream) make habitation of the southwest possible. Ain’t nobody living in Phoenix or Las Vegas in the 120-degree temperatures of July without air conditioning provided by electricity, to say nothing of being able to turn a faucet and expect water to come out.
It’s sobering to think that every step we took on this hike was once well underwater in Nancy and my lifetimes. Fortunately, smart and committed people are working on ways to continue developing and encouraging water conservation in the American southwest, but committed people will also need to actually take those steps in order to keep water flowing through Lake Mead.
As I related in a previous posting, we spent two weeks of March 2023 in McDowell Mountain Regional Park, a huge protected expanse of land east of the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan region. While that posting approached the avian aspects of the park, this one will focus on the floral features of the McDowell Mountain area. Keep in mind that all of these photos were taken in the last two weeks of March, when much of the rest of the western United States was just beginning to emerge from winter. Since Nancy and I are both from Colorado, about the only flowers we’re used to seeing that early in the year are those of crocus, narcissus, tulips and other bulb-born blossoms. The blooms of these flowering plants of the Sonoran Desert provided plenty of color in a landscape that otherwise seemed to be generally green and brown, as seen in the saguaro landscape above. (By the way, if you’re a beer aficionado, in the background you will recognize the four mountain peaks used on the labels of the Tempe, Arizona-based Four Peaks Brewing Company. I’m suddenly in the mood for a Kilt Lifter.)
Like most of the western United States, the Phoenix area received an above-average amount of precipitation during the 2022-2023 winter. That, along with occasional rain showers while we were at McDowell Mountain in March, resulted in some spectacular wildflower displays.
First up is the very common but colorful California poppy (Eschscholtzia californica), of which we saw plenty while in the park. It’s possible that this is another species called Mexican gold poppy, but I do think that, based on the flower coloration, this is the California species. The petals of these flowers close as evening approaches, and then begin to open again when the sun rises.California poppy plants grow to a height of 8 to 24 inches, and their blossoms can be 1 or 2 inches wide. I inadvertently planted a lot of this species in the xeriscaped part of our yard in Denver – the seeds were included in wildflower packets, and after a couple of years the poppies began to take over the area. Still, these plants produce some pretty eye-catching color. The California poppy is the state flower of … California.Texas toadflax (Nuttallanthus texanus), a member of the figwort family of flowers, grows to a height of about 28 inches. It’s a very spindly plant topped with some spectacular flowers that, because of their size, need some closer examination to appreciate; if you just walked by these flowers, it’d be easy to miss their delicate beauty.The bluish-violet color of this toadflax’s flowers is really pretty, I think, as is the complex structure of the blossom. The flowers grow on a structure called a raceme, a stalk in which the youngest flowers grow on smaller stalks at the top and the lower, older blossoms begin to develop into seeds.Castilleja exserta is one of about 200 species of Indian paintbrush found in western North America down through South America. Native to the southwestern part of the country, the plant grows to a height of 4-18 inches. Like all other Indian paintbrush species, exserta Indian paintbrush (also commonly called purple owl’s clover) is parasitic: it gets nearly all of its nutrition by using a specialized organ called a haustorium to attach itself to another plant species. Indian paintbrushes are some of my favorite plants; I tried to grow them at our Denver house next to some buffalograss for sustenance, but to no avail.Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens) is a common plant seen from west Texas to southern California. They grow to an impressive height of up to 30 feet, and in the spring produce bright red flowers at the top of their many stalks. We were just a tad too early (or maybe too late; I’ve never seen ocotillo in bloom) to see these buds blossom. The flowers, which flower to coincide with hummingbird migrations for their pollination, give the plant its name: ocotillo means “little torch” in Spanish. Ocotillo are really interesting plants: they grow those tiny leaves seen in the above photo after a rainfall, and then drop the leaves when dry conditions return. It’s a cycle that can happen four or five times during the growing season.I think we were also at McDowell Mountain Regional Park too early in the season to see the saguaro cactus (Cereus gigantea) bloom, too. However, we did see some of these mighty cacti beginning to grow new arms, as seen on the left of this photo. Saguaros, which grow to a height of 50 feet, are very long-lived cacti: the oldest are estimated to be 200 years old. They don’t start forming arms like this until the plants are 70 to 100 years old, depending on the amount of precipitation they receive. Saguaro flowers, which grow at the top of the cactus, are white and grow to a width of 3 inches. The blossoms open at night and are pollinated by a variety of insects as well as bats. Saguaro blossoms are the state flower of Arizona.You wouldn’t guess it by looking at Esteve’s pincushion (Chaenactis stevioides), but this pretty plant is a member of the sunflower family. Reaching a height of 4 to 10 inches, it grows across the western United States, from southern Oregon and Idaho, down to New Mexico, and east to Wyoming and Colorado.The park had a lot of buckhorn cholla (Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa) in bloom; these large cacti seemed to be popular perches for birds. Buckhorn cholla cacti, of which there are six varieties, are found in the Sonoran, Mojave, and Colorado deserts of North America.I’d think a bird would find a more comfortable place to perch than on the top of a buckhorn cholla (pr. CHOY-ah), but I suppose they know what they’re doing. We had a different species of cholla along a south-facing exterior wall of our house in Denver; I’ve no idea what species it was (it wasn’t as branching as a buckhorn), but it had pretty flowers in the spring as well.I think of all of the flowers in bloom while we were at the park, desert globemallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) was probably the most prevalent. It’s the orange-colored flower on the left, and the plant is still used by members of the Shoshoni and other Native Americans as a food and medicine source. It’s very common in Arizona; at another camping spot in the extreme northern part of the state later in the year, we’d drive by fields of it in which the blooms probably numbered in the millions. It is a popular cultivar for home xeriscaped gardens. The yellow flower on the right is brittlebrush (Encelia farinosa), which we first encountered at southeastern Arizona’s Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area in January 2022. Its growth habit varies widely; it can be a foot tall or grow to a height of 5 feet.Here’s a closer view of the brittlebush flowers. It derives its name from the delicate nature of its flower stems. The plant’s sticky sap lent itself to a wide variety of uses among Native Americans and early pioneers in the southwestern United States, including as a glue, a sealant, and a waterproofing agent. It, along with the desert globemallow, was everywhere in the park. The plant is commonly found in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.While its flowers are attractive enough, I really liked the foliage of redstem stork’s bill (Erodium cicutarium). This is not a native of the southwestern United States; it was brought to this country in the 1700s from the Mediterranean region of Eurasia and northern Africa. This plant has an interesting seed distribution system; in a process known as explosive dispersal, part of the flower changes its shape into something of a coil and stores up elastic energy. When enough energy has been created, that part of the flower, including the seed, bursts away from the plant. Once on the ground, the part of the flower containing the seed waits until soil conditions become wet enough for it to bury itself into the ground and germinate.Here’s one more cactus, the teddybear cholla (Opuntia bigelovii) that, again, was not in bloom while we were at the park (the yellow-green flowers are a couple of inches wide). I took this photo after a brief late-afternoon rain shower and liked the lighting. Despite its name, this is not a plant you’d like to even get close to: its small joints will readily detach from the main plant at the slightest touch (it’s also known as jumping cholla), and the spines have backward-facing barbs to ensure that they stick. On walks around the park with Gunther, we’d see a lot of these cacti with little balls of spines at their bases. Teddybear cholla grow to heights of 3 feet up to a truly terrifying 9 feet.Let’s move on to something less threatening. Here’s panamint cryptantha (Johnstonella angustifolia), also known as panamint catseye. It’s native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. It grows to a height of 2 to 12 inches, and is an annual wildflower – the plant produces flowers which develop into seeds, and, although the original plant dies, those seeds produce new plants the following growing season. In a very harsh desert landscape filled with plants covered in thorns, spikes, barbs, needles, and other sharp things, it was nice to find a relatively soft-looking flower.To wit: even this Menzie’s fiddleneck (Amsinckia menziesii) has small barbs on it (to say nothing of the thorns of the neighboring fishhook cactus in the lower left). Its seeds are a favored food for goldfinches (who’d have to be pretty hungry to get past the cactus thorns). The flower head of a fiddleneck sometimes curls gracefully into the shape of the head of a violin, giving the plant its name.I’ve enjoyed seeing the creosote bush (Amsinckia menziesii) in our travels around New Mexico and Arizona, and it was neat to see one in bloom. The smell of a creosote bush, especially after a rain, is really wonderful. A creosote bush creates clones of itself as it grows older – typically around the age of 60 to 90 years. Eventually the interior original plant dies, but it is surrounded by a ring of its clones. A ring of creosote in California’s Mojave Desert, called “King Clone,” is estimated to be nearly 12,000 years old – it’s one of the oldest organisms on the planet.I’ll close with this image of a fairy duster (Calliandra eriophylla) that I took perhaps 20 yards from the Goddard’s campsite. Fairy dusters, which grow to a height of between 8 and 20 inches, are fairly ho-hum shrubs for most of the year, but they produce some spectacular flowers in the spring.
There are several more photos I could include, but I think this posting has shown the incredible variety – the color, the blossom structure, the life cycles – of flowering plants in the Sonoran Desert. As was the case with the birds of McDowell Mountain Regional Park, I was really struck by the tremendous depth and breadth of the flower species variation. To be sure, the desert doesn’t look like this year-round, and it had been an especially wet winter and early spring, but under the right conditions a walk around the Sonoran Desert can be incredibly rewarding – as long as you don’t walk into a teddybear cholla.
Much of the identification of these plants was made possible by referencing the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Wildflowers, Western Region (ISBN 0-394-50431-3). Additional information came from Wikipedia, which I lean on pretty heavily for a lot of what I write – if you use Wikipedia much at all, please consider supporting it. I recognize that it’s not the end-all, be-all of sourcing information, but it’s a great starting point as a resource and available to everyone with an Internet connection.
Tales of The Goddard 