Iridium Layer Site

Raton, New Mexico – May 3, 2024

A little more than 66 million years ago, a metallic asteroid the size of Mount Everest slammed into what is today the upper Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and things really haven’t been the same since.

For one, the impact directly or indirectly caused the extinction of three-quarters of all organic life on Earth, including all of the dinosaur species that couldn’t fly. A dust cloud from the impact entered the planet’s atmosphere and blocked the Sun for months, preventing photosynthesis in plants, causing catastrophic climate change, and immediately or eventually killing any terrestrial animal weighing more than 55 pounds, except for some cold-blooded amphibious species such as sea turtles and crocodiles. The impact also caused tsunamis to crash against the coastal areas of the planet, and, because the asteroid crashed into a bed of gypsum, immense quantities of sulfur trioxide were thrust into the atmosphere to later fall as acid rain for days.

The Santa Fe Trail, a major trade, military, and settlement route connecting Kansas City, Missouri, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, cut through the middle of what is now Raton, New Mexico. The area had a post office called Willow Springs from 1877 to 1879, then it was changed to Otero for a couple of years before being renamed Raton in 1880. The city became a center for the railroad, mining, and ranching industries in northeastern New Mexico. This is looking southeast from the hilltop on which the iridium layer is located. All of the mountains on the horizon are extinct volcanoes that arose and erupted many millions of years after the end of the Cretaceous Period.

In short, Earth was a place best avoided for the near- and medium term following the planet’s encounter with an asteroid. In addition to being much colder because of the dust cloud blocking the sun, the lack of plant life due to the cessation of photosynthesis doomed herbivorous dinosaurs like triceratops and titanosaurs, and later the carnivorous genera, like abelisaurids and tyrannosaurids, that preyed upon them.

A lone hiker (it’s Nancy) stands a silent vigil near the K-Pg boundary. The city of Raton has placed this helpful sign to assist in identifying the inch-thick layer of clay containing high concentrations of the element iridium. The layer is sandwiched between sandstone dating back to the Cretaceous Period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and sandstone and coal from the Paleogenic Period, when mammalian species began to flourish.

Things are better today, of course (with the exception that there are no more Tyrannosaurus rexes running around, and even that’s probably for the best). The impact had a huge influence on how life on the planet, including the eventual species of H. sapiens, was able to emerge and evolve.

When I was a kid, an asteroid crashing into the Earth was only one of several hypothesized reasons for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. The existence of a particular layer of sediment, originally discovered in Italy but since found around the world, was a major factor in the popularity of that hypothesis: dinosaur fossils, footprints, and other artifacts could be found below this layer, but not above. That particular layer of sediment, which has since been found in many locations around the globe, is unique in that it contains as much as 160 times more of the element iridium than other layers of the Earth’s crust. Iridium (atomic symbol Ir and atomic number 77) is a metallic element found commonly on asteroids flitting about the cosmos, but it’s not found naturally occurring on Earth except when one of those asteroids flits into the planet.

However, until the actual crater for the possible asteroid impact 66 million years ago was discovered, the theory remained only one of the possibilities for what is now called the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event (again, when I was young the K-Pg event was called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, event; the “K” is used instead of “C” for Cretaceous because the German word for “chalk,” from which the Latinate “Cretaceous” is derived, is “Kreide”). Some scientists believed that the layer, and the mass extinction event that it documented, could have been caused by the explosion of a relatively nearby supernova, or by gradual climate change, or by a reversal of the planet’s geomagnetic poles (you can understand how magnetic north becoming magnetic south, and vice versa, would be undesirable).

In the early 1980s, a crater more than 90 miles in diameter (about the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) and between 6 and 12 miles deep was discovered near the town of Chicxulub (pr. “cheek-shoe-LOOB”) on the Yucatan Peninsula, and chemical and geologic analysis of the impact site showed that scientists finally had their hole in the ground proving that the age of the dinosaurs was ended by an asteroid collision. Researchers believe the Chicxulub asteroid was probably about six miles wide – tiny compared to the Earth, but it was hurtling along at about 12 miles per second so it was ready to do some damage.

Incidentally, I read an interesting book several years ago about past extinction events on Earth, one of which was the Chicxulub impact, and the book’s author wrote that the explosive nature of the asteroid collision was so violent that vaporized bits of organic matter on the planet’s surface could have been ejected into space. The author asked a researcher if it’s possible that there are tiny bits of dinosaurs on the Moon, and the researcher said that yes, it is possible that there are tiny bits of dinosaurs on the Moon.

But I digress. Life on Earth was drastically changed after the asteroid impact, and, with the exception of smaller flying lizards that could more easily find food and shelter (and which would evolve into our feathered friends of today), the dinosaurs were no more – and an age in which mammals could diversify and grow in species number had begun.

Despite the signage, it’s a little difficult for laypersons like ourselves to positively identify the exact layer containing iridium. However, we believe it to be the one-inch-thick layer of light-colored clay material directly above the very dark layer of rocks pictured in the center of this photo (if any experts happening to read this posting dispute this, I’ll happily correct this information). The iridium layer contains, in addition to large quantities of the titular element, shocked quartz and other materials indicative of an asteroid strike. All of the material under that layer is at least 66 million years old; everything above it was deposited after the age of the dinosaurs.

Because iridium exists on the planet only because of asteroid collisions, it’s one of the least-common elements on Earth – it’s four times as rare as gold. Iridium is one of the densest metals on the planet: a cubic inch of iridium weighs just over three-quarters of a pound (12.96 ounces, to be precise). Only one element, osmium, is more dense than iridium and it’s just barely so; osmium (Os) and iridium are both twice as heavy as lead (Pb, which has that symbol because of its Latin name, plumbum). Iridium’s resistance to heat and corrosion lends itself to uses in metallurgy (such as crucibles for less-dense metals) and electronics.

Many years ago, the steel nibs of fountain pens were tipped with alloys containing iridium in order to take advantage of the element’s hardness and resistance to corrosion. Most nibs then, as now, were made from steel. Over time, constant usage of the pen would wear down even the steel of a nib – so manufacturers tipped the nibs with harder metals like iridium to prolong their usage. However, iridium has become so difficult and expensive to source (and, given where the element comes from, we really don’t want more iridium on the planet anytime soon) that fountain pen nib manufacturers now use alloys of ruthenium, osmium, and tungsten (but sometimes, confusingly, call those alloys “iridium”). This is a 10x magnification of one of my fountain pens, a Pilot Custom 823. The nib itself is made of 14k gold for flexibility while writing, but the tipping, or the somewhat rounded extreme end of the pen, is made of harder alloys.

The K-Pg layer was first discovered in Italy but since then many other outcroppings of the iridium layer have been found around the world. One of those occurrences is near the small town of Raton, New Mexico (pop. 6,000), where we camped in the Goddard in the spring of 2024. Raton (Spanish for “mouse”) is about six miles south of the New Mexico-Colorado border in the far northeastern corner of the Land of Enchantment.

Nancy and I visited the site of the iridium layer late one afternoon in early May. I’d secured a permit to visit the site the day before at Raton’s municipal office. It turned out we didn’t really need a permit because it simply supplied the combination to a locked gate on the road and permission to park at the iridium layer site, and we didn’t think that there’d be room for the Goddard’s six-wheeled and 22-feet-long towing unit. We instead parked the towing unit downhill from the iridium layer site and hiked past the gate and then a mile or so to the site itself (the walk the day before from our campsite to the municipal office to acquire the permit, which we didn’t need, and back was 5.5 miles). Both were lovely walks (I saw a small group of mule deer in the front yard of a house in Raton on the way back to our campsite).

It further turned out that we could have driven the towing unit to the site, as there was plenty of room to park and turn around. But, as I mentioned, they were lovely walks.

We didn’t see much in the way of wildlife on our visit to the iridium layer, but we did encounter several of these rock wrens (Salpinctes obsoletus) on our walk back to the Goddard’s six-wheeled towing unit. These little birds weigh only about half an ounce, with a wingspan of 9 inches. Northern New Mexico is at the very northern edge of their year-round residency area; they are migratory into southwestern Canada.

Since this posting is sort of about dinosaurs, I’ll include a couple more photos of the dinosaurs’ descendants that I took at our campground in Raton. This is a chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina), of which we saw many in Raton. There are two major groups of chipping sparrows in North America, eastern and western, and each of those groups have different varieties. As someone who struggles with sparrow species identification, I appreciate the chipping sparrow’s distinctive lil’ red cap.

There were also plenty of common ravens (Corvus corax) in the campground and Raton. These are large birds – measuring up to 25 inches long, weighing 3.2 pounds, and boasting a wingspan of up to 5 feet – and they are remarkably long-lived as well: more than 23 years in the wild. Many people have trouble differentiating ravens from their smaller cousins, American crows, but ravens are on the whole larger, with wedge-shaped tails and much larger beaks in proportion to their heads. Like many other corvids, ravens are noted for their problem-solving abilities.

The few dinosaurs that survived the Chicxulub impact are the ones that were able to take to the skies, and their evolutionary descendants include rock wrens, chipping sparrows, and common ravens, as well as American white pelicans, common ostriches, Anna’s hummingbirds, emperor penguins, and others that comprise the 11,000 species of birds with which we share this planet.

One might wonder about why a one-inch layer of dirt that’s found around the world is important. I think it’s instructive to consider what life on Earth would be like had the planet not been pummeled by an asteroid 66 million years ago. Dinosaurs were the dominant lifeforms on Earth for around 175 million years, from their first appearance during the Triassic Period about 240 million years ago to being (mostly) destroyed by the Chicxulub asteroid. That’s an awfully long time to dominate; in fact, our existence as humankind is closer to the time that Tyrannosaurs were alive than the time between the Stegosaurus genus and Tyrannosaur genus were both alive; the former was even fossilized by the time T. rex had evolved. It’s very possible that gigantic, ground-shaking, and ferocious (and small-brained) lizards could still be the most dominant animals on the planet, and that mammals, although they’d first appeared on Earth well before the Chicxulub asteroid collision, would never have had the opportunity to gain a strong foothold with which to start their evolutionary path.

In short, you can probably thank the Chicxulub asteroid for you being here today. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to hope that a similar impact doesn’t occur anytime soon.

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El Malpais National Monument

Near Grants, New Mexico – April 2024

El Malpais (pr. el-mal-pie-EES) National Monument, located near the town of Grants in northwestern New Mexico, showcases a number of different geological features in its nearly 180 square miles – but it’s best known for its impressive lava flows dating from 60,000 to only 4,000 years ago.

While Native Americans have lived in the El Malpais area for 12,000 years, early 17th-century Spanish explorers coming north from Mexico found the region nearly impassable by their horse-drawn wagons and carts. Those explorers gave the region its name, which means “the bad land” in Spanish and refers to the rocky topography left behind by the extensive lava flows.

El Malpais National Monument was established on Dec. 31, 1987, and about 100,000 people visit it each year.

We camped for a week in Grants and visited several different features of the national monument. The highlight, however, was a great hike that took us to the top of a cinder cone from which much of the monument’s lava had flowed.

The El Calderon Trail is located on the western side of the national monument – it happened to be only a 20-mile drive from Grants. We’re still trying to adjust to being on trails that aren’t in Colorado: there were two other vehicles in the trailhead’s parking lot when we arrived at 10 AM, and in the entire course of the 5-mile loop hike, we saw nearly as many dogs (two) as we did people (three).

This iGoogle Maps satellite image, in which a quarter-inch represents two miles, shows nearly the entirety of El Malpais National Monument. The monument’s visitor center fs indicated at the top, and just to the left is the town of Grants, New Mexico, where we parked the Goddard for a week in April 2024. Grants is on Interstate 40 about halfway between the Arizona/New Mexico state line and the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Everything represented in dark greenish-black in the lower two-thirds of the image is basalt, or lava rock; the greenish hue is provided by plant life amongst the basalt. The town of Grants, too, is surrounded by basalt.

Shortly after the trailhead, the El Calderon trail passes by several caves that are actually lava tubes and are now home to bat populations. Lava tubes are formed when flowing lava exits an existing lava vent covered with a roof of lava rock, leaving behind a cave-like structure.

Here we see a brave hiker (it’s Nancy) at the entrance to Bat Cave in the national monument. This lava tube is a summer home for thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats that emerge at night to hunt for insects. There is still evidence of a guano mining operation in Bat Cave; bat droppings are high in nitrates and therefore valuable as fertilizer. We learned at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky that guano was also once used in the production of gunpowder. To protect the flying mammal population, Bat Cave in El Malpais National Monument is closed to human visitors.

Much of the El Calderon trail looks like this: relatively flat, with expansive views, through a moderately wooded forest with several different species of pine trees and evergreen shrubs.

There weren’t many wildflowers in bloom when we hiked the El Calderon Trail on April 20, but we’d just missed the blossoms of the tree cholla (Cylindropuntia imbricata). Also known as cane cholla, this cactus typically grows to a height of 3 feet, but can reach 15 feet. The flowers are a very bright magenta color, and the yellow fruits, shaped roughly like a pinecone, can last on the plant for a long time. They apparently don’t taste great, but the Native Americans of present-day Arizona and New Mexico did use them as a food source.

This is a TALES OF THE GODDARD LIZARD ALERT. I’d walked by this pair of horned lizards on the lava rocks lining the trail without seeing them but they didn’t escape the notice of Gunther, who Nancy had on a leash behind me. I was able to get several photos of them before we moved on down the trail. Their camouflage really is amazing – if they hadn’t moved as I passed by, Nancy said Gunther probably wouldn’t have seen them either.

This is a close-up of the lizard in the background of the above photo. There are 21 species of horned lizards in the world, 15 of which are native to the United States. Five of them reside in El Malpais National Monument, and, without being familiar with any of them, I’ll just say this is one of those five species (although based on the coloration and locality I’m leaning toward a greater short-horned lizard, or Phrynosoma hernandesi). Horned lizards are often called horned toads, but they’re not toads or even amphibians at all: they are reptiles. It’s somehow reassuring to know that dinosaurs still walk among us, however small they may be. Females of the short-horned lizard species grow to about 7 centimeters (2.75 inches) SVL, while males grow to only 5 centimeters SVL. What’s SVL, you ask? I had to look it up as well: it’s an abbreviation for a herpetology term called snout-vent length (basically the length of the lizard not including the tail).

The entire trail was lined with readily available lava rocks, which made for interesting viewing while hiking because of all of the different textures. Each was different, but the trailbuilders used rocks that were roughly a foot in height and width. One can only imagine the scene 115,000 years ago, when these rocks were being created: what did it look like, sound like, and smell like?

We’ve seen plenty of lava tubes in Hawaii, Idaho, and now New Mexico, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen a distinct lava trench. They are formed in the same way as lava tubes, but the roof of the tube collapses soon after the lava of the tube cools. Water collects in the bottom of these trenches, allowing trees and other foliage to grow larger than their counterparts outside the trench.

This is the side of the El Calderon cinder cone, from which rivers of magma flowed about 60,000 years ago to create immense rivers of lava that found their way 20 miles north to the present-day town of Grants. A cinder cone is formed when gravel-sized bits of lava are shot hundreds of feet into the air from a volcanic vent in the ground. The billions of tiny cinders fall back to earth and eventually form a cone-like structure; El Calderon is 300 feet high. The two different colors of cinders – red and black – indicate different mineral composition and different eruption periods. The trail includes an optional loop around the top of the cinder cone — it was a 300 foot gain in elevation, but the views were well worth the effort.

This is a view looking northeast from the top of the El Calderon cinder cone (the side of the cinder cone pictured above is directly below this position). The red cinders contain high levels of oxidized iron: essentially, rust. On the far left of the photo one can just barely make out the snow-covered top of Mount Taylor (elev. 11,305 feet), about 30 miles away on the other side of the nearer hills. Mount Taylor is an extinct volcano that last erupted about 1.5 million years ago – long before the volcanic activity on El Malpais National Monument occurred. It is a mountain sacred to a number of Native American pueblos, including the Acoma, Zuni, Hopi, Laguna, and Navajo.

This is a view looking down into the interior of El Calderon, fairly close to where the previous photo was taken but in the opposite direction. It’s a peaceful basin filled with pine trees and grasses now, but it was the source of all of those lava cinders shooting upwards into the sky when the volcano was active 60,000 years ago. El Calderon translates to “the cauldron” in Spanish.

Time for lunch – trailside! We heard, but could not see, a couple of different birds singing in some nearby pines during our lunch. Afterwards, I got a couple of pictures of them. The pictures didn’t turn out well at all (they were still far away and the skies were overcast), but it turns out that they were gray flycatchers (Empidonax wrightii), and, judging by the grass in their beaks, they were building a nest.

We saw these white growths on nearly every rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) plant we saw on the hike. Nancy asked what they were and I replied that they were spider egg cases, each just waiting to pop with up to 100 individual spiderlings. She refused to believe me, which was probably the right thing to do, but it meant that I later had to look up what they really are. It turns out my wild guess wasn’t very far from the truth: they’re called galls, and they are home to larvae of a fruit fly. The galls, produced by the plant’s reaction to irritating chemicals introduced by the parasitic insect, act as both a home and a food source for the larvae. They don’t appear to harm the rabbitbrush plant at all.

It’s a little difficult to make out in this picture, but there’s a tree species we weren’t expecting to see in northern New Mesico on the other side of the fallen log, just left of center. It’s an aspen tree, which is made possible by what the scientists call “the edge effect,” or additional moisture that collects along the area where lava fields meet conventional landscapes. The edge effect allows plants that need additional moisture, like aspens, to thrive in otherwise harsh environments.

I thought the smooth side of this hunk of basalt was interesting: it indicates that the lava was moving fairly quickly as it cooled. Lava fields, after they cool and begin to erode, make for fairly good habitat for plants: the basaltic rocks hold a lot of water and trap a good variety of airborne seeds.

The skies above us unfortunately still chose to be overcast when we saw this western bluebird (Sialia mexicana) perched on an oft-used branch, but the bird’s bright colors still impressed us. Western bluebirds are members of the thrush family, and their diet consists of worms and berries found on the ground as well as insects plucked from the air.

The trail on the right side of this photo is the 2,700-mile-long Continental Divide Trail, which meets and shares some distance with the El Calderon Trail. If one were to follow that path, one would wind up at the Canadian border with Montana. We elected to continue on our loop to the El Calderon trailhead instead.

The hike to El Calderon was one of the more rewarding trails Nancy and I have been on in a long time: fantastic views, lots of fascinating geologic features, a good variety of plants, and a bit of wildlife to observe.

There is a lot of geology to appreciate about El Malpais National Monument, and not all of it has to do with lava. On a weekday evening, Gunther and Nancy and I drove to the east side of the monument to see two sandstone features: La Ventana and a sandstone bluffs overlook.

About 160 million years ago, the El Malpais area looked a lot like today’s Sahara Desert: covered with hundreds of feet of sand that, compressed by other layers of sediment, eventually formed sandstone. This arch, formed by the weathering effects of freezing and thawing water trapped in the sediment over millions of years, is 135 feet across and only 25 feet wide at its thinnest point. Spanish explorers called this arch “La Ventana,” or “the window.” It is one of the largest natural stone arches in the state of New Mexico.

This is a sandstone bluff overlook that provides great views of the basaltic lava flows hundreds of feet below. More than 200 volcanic vents have been identified in the national monument, and this sandstone is tens of millions of years older than any of them.

Nancy and I both have more than a passing interest in geology, and especially volcanoes, so El Malpais National Monument was a great place to spend a week. We spent the summer of 2023 surrounded by volcanic features in Idaho, and it was fun to once again be amongst these reminders in New Mexico that our planet continues to reshape itself all the time.

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Craters of the Moon National Monument

Near Arco, Idaho – August 2023

Craters of the Moon National Monument, located midway between Twin Falls and Idaho Falls in the south-central part of Idaho, is one of those National Park Service sites that you kind of have to want to get to. The monument and its associated preserve receive only about 220,000 visitors each year; for comparison’s sake, Rocky Mountain National Park northwest of Denver receives more than 4 million visitors annually. Craters of the Moon is not on any Interstate highways, and it’s about 90 miles from Twin Falls and more than a two-hour drive from Idaho Falls. I imagine many of its visitors are on their way to or from Yellowstone National Park, which gets about 3.3 million visitors each year.

Thousands of years ago, these rocks were part of a slow-moving river of magma. Craters of the Moon National Monument doesn’t have especially tall volcanoes – it has about 20 cinder cones that top out at about 700 feet in height – but it does have immense flows of basalt resulting from lava that escaped through fissures in the earth. As they cooled, the magma flows hardened into these beautiful rock structures.

Still, it’s a unique and beautiful place that clearly shows that the area was the site of tremendous volcanic activity in the planet’s relatively recent past. We parked the Goddard in Arco, Idaho, about an hour’s drive northeast of Craters of the Moon and visited the monument not once but twice in a week. Why? Lava! And cave-like geologic structures!

The year 2024 marks the hundredth year since the establishment of the monument. The monument and preserve protects 753,000 acres (about 1,200 square miles) of south-central Idaho for visitors to experience what it could be like to walk on another world. The scientists have dated some of the lava flows and have determined that the area experienced an extended period of geologic activity – and one that was quite recent, geologically speaking. The oldest lava flows yet recorded are from eruptions 15,000 years ago, and the most recent flows occurred just 2,100 years ago.

Our first impression of the national monument: everything is black, due to the miles and miles of basalt that’s all around. It’s really difficult for plant life to establish itself in relatively new basaltic soil; total vegetation coverage on the entire monument is less than 15 percent, and on cinder cones like this it’s only 5 percent. Here we see an intrepid hiker (it’s Nancy) making her way up the slope of Inferno Cone, a tall cinder cone in the monument. Cinder cones are the most common type of volcanic structure on Earth. The lava emissions at what is now Craters of the Moon were less explosive than many other eruptions around the world, so the slopes of the cinder cones are gentler. It’s a little less than a half-mile to the top of the cone, from which one can see 360 degrees all around Idaho (and on especially clear days even the peaks of the Teton Range, 100 miles away in western Wyoming, can be spotted). The sun, pictured in the upper right of this image, is no joke: its rays can heat the black basalt to temperatures of 150 degrees. Winters can be harsh as well, with plenty of snow and frigid temperatures.

Craters of the Moon contains the largest lava field in what is known as the Great Rift, a 53-mile-long fissure in Idaho running from the southeast to the northwest. The relatively quiet (as quiet as a volcanic eruption can be, anyway) release of gas and magma created these lava flows over a period of many thousands of years. This part of Idaho has several other such lava fields and the soil that has resulted from those older flows results in regions famed for growing fine potatoes. (There were a couple of grocery stores in Idaho in which the smallest baking potatoes weighed a pound.)

In time, the soil in the national monument may break down enough (through the work of erosional forces like wind, water, and plant growth) to allow more plants to survive. Until then, it’s pretty desolate but in a beautiful way, and any potato harvests in this particular part of Idaho will be many years in the future. Incidentally, it’s believed that the caldera underneath Yellowstone National Park, which is responsible for the geysers, paint pots, and other hydrothermal features there (and possibly a mass extinction event if it erupts while humankind is still around), is connected to the hotspot that created Idaho’s lava fields. Over millions of years, the North American Plate has been moving slowly while the hotspot heats up the landform currently over it: 10 or 11 million years ago, that hotspot was underneath what is now Craters of the Moon National Monument.

In order to survive, plants and animals have to be extraordinarily adapted to make it in both extreme heat and cold. This is dwarf buckwheat (Eriogonum ovalifolium), a plant only four inches tall that can boast a root system up to three feet in diameter. That root system works to get as much moisture to the rest of the plant as it can, and this plant is so efficient at doing so that plants can’t survive within about three feet of each other – they wind up being so evenly spaced that they appear to have been hand-planted. Additionally, the plants light-colored leaves reflect, rather than absorb, the sun’s rays. Note the texture of the black basaltic soil.

Craters of the Moon was established and named as a national monument almost 50 years before NASA put astronauts on Earth’s actual moon, so it wasn’t until the very late 1960s and early 1970s that it was discovered that the moon’s surface isn’t anything like southern Idaho. The moon has been shaped by impacts of meteorites rather than volcanic eruptions. But the national monument did serve as an ideal training ground for astronauts so they could practice selecting rock samples in an unfamiliar environment.

While we hiked up Inferno Cone, we saw a few turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) circling in the beautiful blue sky and perching in this dead limber pine tree. I took several pictures of this bunch, but they apparently had more important things to look at than me and they never turned around. These birds can have wingspans of up to six feet in length. Turkey vultures aren’t the most attractive representatives of the avian world, but their diet of nearly exclusively carrion is essential to preserving the natural order of things.

This is known as a spatter cone, formed when jets of lava spout vertically from the earth – for scale, that’s a person on the trail in the shadow of the cone. The monument and preserve contains about 25 cones of the spatter and cinder (such as Inferno Cinder) varieties.

We happily joined a ranger-led hike to some lava tubes. We’d seen lava tubes in Hawaii many years ago, and were more than a little surprised to see them again in Idaho. This was a pretty nifty asphalt trail that wound through the basalt formations and led to the tube structures.

Here is the opening to a lava tube that we didn’t enter, and you can probably see why we didn’t. The jumble of large rocks near the opening are the result of the overlying rock atop the tube collapsing into the void and down to the ground. This lava traveled 18 miles from its source, the spatter cones pictured above.

Here’s the lava tube that we did enter. It was a really impressive cave-like structure, formed when a river of lava continues to flow underneath a layer of magma that has already hardened on top of it. When the supply of lava is cut off, the opening through which the lava flowed remains to form these interesting structures. The empty spaces are home to bats, just like a cave. We didn’t see any bats, but I did capture a photo of a rock pigeon in the lava tube. You know what a rock pigeon looks like, so I won’t post it. It was kind of neat to see a species of bird that’s common on big-city streets in a lava tube in very rural Idaho, though.

While the first day we visited the national monument was clear with blue skies, the second day was mostly overcast and chilly. On a short hike around the lava flows, we saw several of these birds performing some impressive aerobatic maneuvers, presumably catching insects in flight. We couldn’t tell what kind of birds they were until this one landed in a tree. It’s a nighthawk, of which there are several species in North America. I don’t know which particular one this is (I’m guessing it’s a common nighthawk), but we were pretty excited to see it – we’d never seen a nighthawk before. They’re a mostly nocturnal species, so maybe the cloud cover was enough to make them active during the day.

One of the hiking trails we enjoyed led to this impression of trees that were growing thousands of years ago and then were downed in the flowing magma, leaving behind these distinct patterns of bark growth in the basalt.

I didn’t take this photo at the national monument, but rather at the campground in Arco where the Goddard was parked. I’m including it because it was another new-to-us bird, a plain-looking little fellow with the splendid name of western wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus). They are about six inches long, weigh just a half-ounce, and have a wingspan of about 10 inches. Like other birds in the flycatcher family, this species is particularly skilled at snagging insects in flight.

Craters of the Moon National Monument has a lot going for it, and we were fortunate to be able to include it in our summer 2023 itinerary. We saw plenty of other places with lava flows both (relatively) new and old in Idaho – we spent more than two months in the southern and southeastern part of the state – but it was fun to be able to walk across the basalt and wonder what the environment must have looked like when the lava was flowing. Interestingly, the volcanic features at Craters of the Moon are believed to be only dormant – not extinct – and geologists expect the region to become active once again within the next thousand years, and some believe it could be within the coming century.

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Toadstools Trail

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

40 miles east of Kanab, Utah – May 29, 2023

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is big – really big. In fact, although it’s the seventh-largest U.S. national monument by size, it’s the biggest in the country that’s not either entirely in or adjacent to an ocean. At 1.87 million acres (just over 2,900 square miles), the national monument is nearly twice as big as the entire state of Rhode Island, and just a tad bigger than the state of Delaware.

This area in southern Utah is vast, and it is remote: it was the last part of the contiguous United States to be mapped by the federal government. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was authorized by President Bill Clinton in 1996. This is also one of the more contentious federal properties; President Donald Trump effectively halved its acreage in 2017, and then President Joe Biden restored it to its current size in 2021. It is the first national monument to be administered solely by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

(A brief sidenote: the U.S. government’s holding of lands, especially at the levels of national monuments and especially those in the western United States, is criticized by some groups and lauded by others. Much of these lands frankly isn’t good for anything except looking beautiful and supporting native plants and animals – which, in the eyes of some, is more than enough reason to provide federal protection. Other groups are interested not so much in the lands themselves, but what’s under the lands’ surfaces: minerals, petroleum, and other extractive materials. Everyone from kayakers to native Americans to miners to anglers to ranchers to tourists wanting a scenic drive has an opinion on what should and shouldn’t happen on these lands. U.S. presidents are able to establish and change landholdings under national monument status as they see fit; acts of Congress are needed to establish or change national parks. I’m someone who enjoys nature quite a lot, but I also realize that I use minerals and petroleum extracted from the earth nearly every minute of every day – in the laptop I’m typing on, in the fifth-wheel trailer in which we live, and in the iPhone and digital camera with which the following photos were taken. You most likely are equally dependent on those extractive resources. As with most issues in life, it takes a balance. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is especially contentious because county and state governments also want to maintain at least some control over what can and can’t happen within its borders.)

(That sidenote was less brief than I’d expected.)

Anywho, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument takes up a sizable chunk of southeastern Utah. It protects three major areas: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Canyons of the Escalante. The Grand Staircase is so named because of its stepped appearance if viewed from the side: from west to east, the landscape drops in elevation in enormous eroded and even layers. The steps drop, west to east, in cliffs measured in hundreds of feet. The area represents 400 million years of geologic development.

The views at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are simply spectacular. The monument is bordered by Bryce Canyon National Park on its western edge and by Glen Canyon National Recreation Atea on its eastern side.

One fun thing to do in these federally protected lands is to go on a hike, and that’s what Nancy and I did in late May of 2023. The Toadstool Trail leads to some wonderful rock formations and other features of this otherworldly environment. In its easy out-and-back 1.5 miles, one can see rocks eroded from water, rain, and other elements to create some pretty stunning scenery. We happened to visit the area when a number of flowering desert plants were in bloom, which was great to see.

We visited the national monument on a beautiful day in late spring, when there was little chance of rain, but there was plenty of evidence that the area receives considerable amounts of moisture at times. This ravine was cut by a seasonal watercourse; the hiking trail is at the far right of the photo. Note the coloration of the different layers of rocks in the cliffside.

This pretty flower is a sego lily (Calochortus nuttallii), which happens to be the state flower of Utah. We saw quite a few of these blossoms, which can measure up to three inches across, on the hike. “Sego” is believed to derive from the Shoshone name of the plant.

There’s a lot going on in that cliff, not the least of which is the wavy nature of the rock layers on the left. I took this photo from a U-bend in the trail (it continues on the left and right of the photo) and you can see some hikers near the center of the photo.

This is a TALES OF THE GODDARD LIZARD ALERT. I’m not an expert on reptile identification (I’m not really an expert on anything, come to think of it), but I believe this to be a common side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana). They grow to a length of about 2.5 inches not including the tail, which is often longer than the body. Judging from the Wikipedia page on these little rascals, a lot of the scientists have spent a lot of time observing this species. This is a lizard that can safely lose its tail to escape a predator, but that comes at a terrible cost: loss of social status within a group of other common side-blotched lizards. We saw several of these lizards and all still had their tails, so we were among the elite. This isn’t the first lizard species to live in the area; researchers have found fossils of several different dinosaurs within the borders of the monument.

This is the largest rock formation from which the Toadstools Trail gets its name, and it’s plenty spectacular. If I had to guess, I’d say the column is about 25 feet tall. Formations like this occur when softer rock under harder, denser rock is eroded away. These are basically small buttes, with more material underneath the surface caprock taken away by water, wind, and other erosional forces, to form a toadstool formation.

I thought this rock wall was interesting because it shows not just the colors of the different rock layers, but the different density of the layers as well: note the edge-on layers of rocks upon which less-dense layers, which are disintegrating faster, were deposited over millions of years.

The bright blossoms of this plains pricklypear (Opuntia polyacantha) were hard to miss in an otherwise tan-colored environment. The flowers of this species of cactus can be yellow, red, or magenta, as on this specimen. These plants provide a source of food for quite a few animals, like prairie dogs and pronghorns, and many people enjoy eating the fruit (if animals haven’t gotten to them first) once the blossoms are spent.

Although the larger toadstools are very impressive, the rock formation – a column supporting a wider, flat cap of harder stone – is fairly common in the area. They make for some interesting viewing opportunities.

This is Coulter’s lupine (Lupinus sparsiflorus), also known as Mohave lupine or desert lupine. The plants grow to a maximum height of about 16 inches. We’ve seen this pretty flower elsewhere in the deserts of the western United States; it, along with the other plants that happen to be flowering at the time, provides a nice pop of color.

This blurry photo is unfortunately the best of three I took before this rock wren (Salpinctes obsoletus) took off to raise havoc somewhere else. This species, fairly common in the western part of the country, is adapted to cling to rock faces while hunting for insects and spiders.

Shortly after we’d started this hike, another hiker suggested that we continue walking past the main toadstool formations for some really nice views, more toadstools, and balanced rocks. We took his advice, and we’re glad we did. I’m going to guess that it’s six or eight miles to the horizon. Here we see a lone hiker (it’s Nancy) looking west; Kanab, Utah, is about 40 miles thataway.

In this very arid environment, anything that moves and (especially) is not some shade of brown quickly catches your eye. This caterpillar is the larval stage of a really nifty moth called the white-lined sphinx, or hummingbird moth (Hyles lineata). The adult version of this species can be easily mistaken for a hummingbird as it hovers over blossoming flowers. The species is very common from central America up into Canada, including most of the United States. The spike at the back end of the caterpillar isn’t a stinger but it does give this larval form another name: hornworm. They aren’t harmful to humans but given a big enough population, these voracious eaters can destroy cultivated crops and flowers. Conversely, the adult moth form is beneficial for plants because of its ability to pollinate while feeding.

That hiker who suggested that we continue our walk past the main formations was absolutely right, and we were able to see some really pretty toadstools and long vistas

The yellow blossom on the left is red dome blanketflower (Gaillardia pinnatifida), while the white blossom belongs to a flowering plant called birdcage evening primrose (Oenothera deltoides). Because they don’t require a lot of care, blanketflower species are very popular in home flower gardens – I planted some of them in our xeriscaped lawn in Denver.

The cliffs, toadstools, balanced rocks, and other rock formations in the national monument were created by erosion and plenty of time. I’m including this photo to show how even tiny trickles of water coming down a rock face can create really interesting designs.

Native American cultures arrived in what is now the national monument around 1,500 years ago. There are hundreds of petroglyphs that document those peoples’ existence in the area, and the rock in the foreground looks to have two of them. This was at the mouth of a very short canyon eroded into a cliff wall.

Here’s a closeup of one of the petroglyphs on the rock pictured above. I have no reason to think it’s not genuine, but I sure can’t think of any horned quadrupeds that also have long tails. Maybe it’s a depiction of something else entirely.

On the way back to the trailbead, another hiker with a digital camera and long lens was as excited as me to see this bird about 50 yards away from us. We couldn’t identify the species at that distance, so I was certainly looking forward to getting back to the Goddard and looking at the picture on a larger screen. “What kind of exotic birds could possibly live in this remarkable desert environment?” thought I, taking picture after picture of a bird I couldn’t make out through the camera lens. Turns out, it’s a house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) which is common all over the country so it’s not nearly as exciting as I first thought. However, I’ve gone some days without seeing any birds at all and those days aren’t any fun so I’ve learned to appreciate all the birds I see, no matter how common they are.

This photo was not taken on the Toadstools Trail, but I wanted to include it in this posting about Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It shows a spectacular bluff above a former townsite called Paria, which was a Mormon settlement from 1870 to 1929. The town was abandoned because it kept getting inundated by floodwaters. It must have been a tremendously hard way of life, separated from other communities by dozens of miles, but at least the view was pretty good.

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Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

Near Las Vegas, Nevada – December 7, 2023

About 190 million years ago, much of the present-day southwestern United States was covered in an immense field of sand dunes – one of the largest that has ever existed on the planet. Many of the dunes happened to carry iron pigment, which turned red when it was oxidized by the sun.

Over the course of millions of years, and with the help of chemical compounds like calcium carbonate and iron oxide, the dunes were slowly cemented into a rock called Aztec sandstone.

These sandstone formations are the primary feature of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, located only about 15 miles west of the casinos, hotels, nightclubs and other delightful debauchery of Las Vegas, Nevada. The area includes nearly 200,000 acres (about 300 square miles) of the Mohave Desert, and it’s visited by 3 million people each year – a little less than what Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming receives.

It’s an impressive number of visitors, to be sure. I think, however, that most of Red Rock Canyon’s visitors are from the Las Vegas area. Its canyons and sandstone cliffs make it remarkably unlike most of the rest of the flat desert surrounding the city, and it’s extremely popular with hikers, cyclists, and rock climbers. Consider that Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport (until 2021 McCarran International Airport) saw almost 58 million passengers arrive and depart in 2023, and it’s easy to see that most of those people aren’t coming to The Entertainment Capital of the World to entertain themselves by visiting a national conservation area.

Being avid hikers with interests in geology and biology, Nancy and I (and Gunther) went to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in early December 2023. We were happy to be joined by a Canadian couple we met at the campground in Las Vegas at which we were staying; it turns out that Canadians enjoy hiking as well. They also joined us for a visit to the Hoover Dam, a hike in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and a hike in Valley of Fire State Park north of Las Vegas (not all on the same day).

A one-way scenic drive, a loop 13 miles in length, at Red Rock Canyon provides many pullouts and parking lots with access to hiking trailheads (beginning a total of 22 trails ranging in length from under one mile to more than 10 miles), overlooks, and other points of interest.

It’s easy to see how Red Rock Canyon got its name. The sand originally forming the dunes contained an abundance of minerals, one of which was iron that was oxidized by the elements over millions of years. The area began its federal protection in 1967, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) designated 10,000 acres as the Red Rock Recreation Lands. Further legislation over the years and significant additions of acreage eventually led to the National Conservation Area designation in 1990.

I was struck by the clear delineation of colors in the rock. These two different colors of rock are both types of sandstone, but water moving through the sand at the bottom millions of years ago took away the red minerals and left behind calcium carbonate. The sand later developed, over even more millions of years, into sandstone.

Erosional forces like water and wind result in some really cool-looking rock formations. Note, also, that the light-colored and red layers of rocks are the reverse of the photo above (and I didn’t post it upside-down).

These huge sandstone blocks are not naturally formed: they’re remnants of one of the earliest industries in the Las Vegas area. The Excelsior Stone Quarry began operations in 1905, extracting blocks of sandstone for use as building materials. The blocks, some weighing up to 10 tons, were pulled with a 17-ton steam-traction engine to the just-built railroad in Las Vegas and loaded onto railroad cars bound for Los Angeles and San Francisco, where they served as decorative building material. While the sandstone was judged to be of exceptionally fine quality, quarries closer to California’s coastal cities were later developed and the Excelsior Stone Quarry and other operations in the area shut down for good in 1912. The plant growing in front of the large block is a species of yerba santa, which is Spanish for “sacred herb.” The name comes from the plant’s medicinal properties to treat respiratory and digestive ailments – even today, yerba santa extracts can be found in western U.S. herbal medicine stores.

Part of the day included a hike on the Calico Tanks Trail. The long views and beautiful multicolored rock formations along the trail reminded Nancy and me of several places in Colorado, including Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs and the Red Rocks Amphitheater near Morrison. Two hikers can be seen in the lower-left corner of this image. The BLM has classified the Calico Tanks Trail as “moderate”; I’d say, based on the elevation gain and necessity to scramble up and over rocks, it’s on the far end of “moderate.” It was a beautiful hike, though.

These curves in the sandstone were created while the materials were still in the form of loose sand. Wind blowing across the dunes created these lifted layers before the grains of sand were cemented into the sandstone of today.

This specimen of Spanish dagger (Yucca schidigera, also known as Mohave yucca) reminded us that we were in the desert. It, like many plants found in the Mohave and other deserts, looks pretty savage.

Speaking of savage, Gunther takes a break on the Calico Tanks Trail to enjoy the scenery. He got along really well with the Canadians; he gets along really well with pretty much everyone, no matter their country of origin.

This is the feature for which Calico Tanks Trail gets its name: a seasonal pond, or tank, created by water seeping or flowing into a depression in the sandstone (there was a much smaller water feature earlier in the trail, thus the plurality of the trail’s name). The Spanish word for this formation is “tinaja,” which means “clay pot.” The sun on this early December day was pretty low in the sky, making for some considerable shadows from the rock formations. Those of you who have been to Las Vegas will probably think this tank is the third-largest standing body of water in the area after Lake Mead and the fountains in front of the Bellagio resort on the Las Vegas Strip; I would not disagree with that assessment. Formations like this make possible a huge diversity of plant and animal life that otherwise couldn’t survive in the desert.

If you squint, the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas can just barely be made out near the horizon in this image, taken at the end of the Calico Tanks Trail. This vantage point took some rock scrambling to get to; along with my phone, with which I took this and most of the rest of the photos in this posting, I was also carrying my digital camera with a large and heavy zoom lens in case we saw any wildlife. A fellow hiker noticed the camera and said I was brave for bringing it along; I corrected him and said I was dumb.

So that I didn’t bring my heavy camera lens on the Calico Tanks Trail for naught, here’s a picture of a rock climber I took with it. Rock climbing is a pastime in which I have absolutely no interest in participating.

Yeah, this looks like just heaps of fun. The BLM’s website states that rock climbing at the national conservation area is among the best in the world. Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is one of more than 850 areas managed by the BLM’s National Landscape Conservation System, which totals 27 million acres of areas designated as National Conservation Areas, National Monuments, Wilderness Areas, Wilderness Study Areas, Wild and Scenic Rivers, and National Historic and Scenic Trails.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I won’t pass up an opportunity to post an image of lichen. I have no idea what species this is, but I think the shade of green is best described as “obscene.” Together with wind and moisture, plants and lichens do their part to erode the rocks into all kinds of fantastic formations.

This is a view from High Point Overlook (elev. 4,771 feet) looking east toward the city of Las Vegas, which is 15 miles on the other side of the rock formation. High Point Overlook is just a little shy of the midway point of Red Rock Canyon’s scenic drive. The vegetation in the foreground gives an idea of what the flat parts of the area are like; it appears kind of sparse, but it’s much more heavily vegetated than other areas we’ve seen around Las Vegas. There are about 600 species of plants found in the conservation area, a number boosted considerably by the presence of year-round water: the sandstone allows water to percolate, creating springs, pools of standing water like the Calico Tanks, and even small creeks and waterfalls .

This is Turtlehead Peak (elev. 6.323 feet), also photographed from High Point Overlook. There’s a trail to the top, but it’s 5 miles round-trip with a 2,000-foot elevation gain, and Gunther didn’t want to try it so we didn’t. That’s a heavily laden Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) on the left, with Mormon tea (Ephedra nevadensis) growing at its base.

I wasn’t planning to see any natural bodies of water in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, let alone one that was flowing. This is Lost Creek, along which we saw a huge diversity of plant life flourishing in early December. I will remember this very short hike off the scenic loop for a couple of reasons: this stream, and the fact that Nancy bonked her head on a low-hanging ponderosa pine branch that was overhanging the trail; she didn’t see it because of her hat brim. If she hadn’t been in the lead of our hiking party, any of the other three of us would probably have bonked our heads (even though he was ahead of Nancy, Gunther didn’t bonk his head because he’s an expert hiker. And he was able to just walk under the branch, without making note of the obstruction to Nancy.) We’ve discovered that the maintenance of trails in the federal system can vary greatly; BLM trails are perhaps the most … rustic. It’s really not a problem, and I’m certainly not complaining. It’s just interesting to see.

Here’s an example of the diversity of plant life in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area: a specimen of ashy silktassel (Garrya flavescens), growing along Lost Creek. I’ve never knowingly seen it before. It can grow up to about 10 feet high.

Another short trail from the scenic loop leads to a grouping of petroglyphs and pictographs, created by native Americans thousands of years ago. The minerals in rock exposed to the intense desert sun over the millennia develop a dark patina called desert varnish. The native Americans removed the patina with stone tools to expose the lighter colors of the original rock beneath, creating designs known as petroglyphs. Pictographs, in contrast, are designs created with paints made with clays, charcoal, and other minerals, and then applied to the rocks.

Here’s a closer view of the petroglyphs in the photo above this one. The meanings or significance of these designs have been lost to time; the only communicative records of the people who created these designs that still exist are the petroglyphs themselves. Nancy and I have seen quite a few petroglyphs in New Mexico and Arizona, but it was a bit surreal to see these ancient designs just 15 miles from the (barely) controlled 24-hour party of the Las Vegas Strip.

Here’s an example of a pictograph, or an image painted on the rock, located just a few yards away from the petroglyphs. It’s a little hard to see in this photo, but petroglyphs and pictographs are themselves sometimes hard to see in the wild. There’s a closer view of the pictograph below.

The pictograph looks like a figure 8 with a vertical line inscribed through it (it’s just to the right of dead center in the photograph above). Again, we have no idea what its significance is, but it must have been important to someone a very long time ago. The BLM and other federal agencies take great care to protect these cultural artifacts; like in other areas around the country, the precise locations of many of the pictographs and petroglyphs in Red Rock Canyon are not made available to the public. Six major groups of native Americans have lived in what is now Red Rock Canyon, beginning with the Tule Springs Paleo-Indian culture 11,000 to 8,000 years ago.

A visit to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area had been highly recommended by one of our Lyft drivers who happened to be a native of Las Vegas, and she was right to do so. I mean, we would have gone regardless, but our visit definitely blew past what I thought it would be like. I sure wasn’t expecting to see those incredible views, enjoy fascinatingly colorful rock formations, and go on a hike next to a running stream, let alone appreciate imagery left by native Americans thousands upon thousands of years ago, but Red Rock Canyon had all of that and more. If you do find yourself in the Entertainment Capital of the World and want to experience something completely unlike what Las Vegas is known for, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is a wonderful place to spend a day.

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Owl Canyon Hiking Trail

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.

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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.

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Blossoms of McDowell Mountain Regional Park

Near Fountain Hills, Arizona – March 2023

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.

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Utility Poles of Ririe Reservoir

Near Ririe, Idaho – Late Summer 2023

The Goddard spent a few weeks in far eastern Idaho – about 30 miles from the Wyoming border – during the waning days of summer 2023. Ririe Reservoir, built in 1970 by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers (CoE), impounds Willow Creek as it flows toward its entry into the Snake River near Idaho Falls. The reservoir has a surface area of 6.1 square kilometers (1,500 acres), about the size of Colorado’s Chatfield Reservoir at normal pool.

We camped at Ririe Reservoir long enough to see some of the cottonwood leaves change to their autumnal colors. This pavement is what I came to call “Raptor Road” because of the frequent sightings of hawks and falcons atop the utility poles (there were, unfortunately, no raptors atop the poles when I took this photo on the morning of September 8). That’s a potato field on the horizon.

Juniper Campground serves the reservoir, and, as is usually the case with CoE-built facilities, it’s outstanding. We spent most of our time at the reservoir camped in a site that had a great view of the reservoir through the Goddard’s back and side windows. We were there for Labor Day weekend and, although the Saturday and Sunday of the weekend proved to be pretty chilly and wet, we think the families who filled up the campground still had a great time.

The campground’s stands of native juniper trees, along with planted aspen, cottonwood, and chokecherries, support an outstanding wildlife habitat. The shrubs and trees provide food and shelter for birds, squirrels, and rabbits. I managed to take a few (hundred) photos of birds in the weeks that we were at Ririe Reservoir, and a lot of the pictures featured birds of prey perched atop utility poles (thus the title of this posting).

I was really happy to get some photos of this American kestrel (Falco sparverius) – it’s a species I’ve been wanting to photograph for many years. Their plumage, especially on their heads, is just so pretty. Kestrels are the smallest raptor in North America, weighing only about 5.5 ounces and measuring up to a foot in length, with a two-foot wingspan. Size- and weight-wise, they’re roughly the size of an American robin although their wingspan is much longer. They are found all over the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as much of South America. Like other raptors, they can see in ultraviolet light – which allows them to see a urine trail from a rodent. Kestrels also eat a lot of airborne insects, and will commonly patrol a well-lit football or baseball field in search of bugs attracted by the lights. They are fierce little birds, to be sure, but because of their size they’re also prey for other, larger raptors.

We saw plenty of these magnificent red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), both on power line poles and in the air, which makes a lot of sense because they are the most common hawk in North America. They’re found all over the United States and most of Canada. Red-tailed hawks grow to a length of 22 inches, with a weight of about 3 pounds and a wingspan measuring more than 4 feet. They have a very distinctive call, so commanding that Hollywood productions use the call whenever any bird of prey, whether it’s a bald eagle or an actual red-tailed hawk, is shown on screen (soundfile below). Red-tailed hawks are remarkably long-lived: one banded individual lived for at least 30 years in the wild.

WARNING! The next photo shows a bird eating a fish; if you get squicked out by the sight of mildly bloody things, you may want to consider scrolling past the picture with some haste.

I saw this osprey (Pandion haliaetus) atop a power pole with its sushi breakfast mid-morning while I was driving to the town of Ririe on some errand that I’m sure was important. I was happy I’d thought to bring along my digital camera, because although we’d seen plenty of these birds during our stay I hadn’t gotten a picture. Ospreys weight about three pounds, with an impressive wingspan of 5 1/2 feet. Ririe Reservoir contains rainbow and cutthroat trout, kokanee salmon, smallmouth bass, and yellow perch. It’s difficult to tell what this unfortunate fellow was.

Ospreys are supremely adapted to support their diet of 99% fish (I don’t know what the 1% is; maybe like all of us, they break down about once a year and get a Big Mac): uniquely among raptors, two of their rear toes are reversible to allow them to carry fish with two toes in front and two toes in back. Their feet also have barbed lobes to aid in the grasping of fish, and they fly with their catch facing head-on to decrease wind resistance. Over the course of several studies, researchers found that ospreys are successful in catching a fish about 25% of the time. They are found all over the world, with the exception of Antarctica. Osprey were seriously endangered until DDT was banned, and their numbers have since strongly rebounded. These birds typically have a lifespan of about 20 years.

Of course, there were birds perched on things other than power poles at Ririe Reservoir (and apologies for anyone expecting more utility pole content; the title of this posting is probably misleading). Here’s a chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina) enjoying a quiet morning while perched on a cottonwood limb. The easiest way to tell a chipping sparrow apart from the other several billion brown-and-white sparrow species is the presence of a dark horizontal line through their eye. Male chipping sparrows have a handsome ruddy-brown cap atop their heads. This species is found throughout the United States, although they’re found in the center of the country only during their migration.

This pretty bird sitting atop a juniper tree is a female American goldfinch (Spinus tristis). In the waning days of summer, the plumage of these birds is starting to molt into its winter colors. Goldfinches are unusual among most birds in that they molt twice each year: once in late winter and again in late summer.

When birdwatching, I usually have my eyes trained at the tops of trees. Nancy spotted these male American goldfinches from a window in the Goddard, and I stuck my camera out the front door and snapped a couple of photos. We’d just had a brief rainshower in the campground, and these guys were looking for seeds on the ground. Goldfinches are purely vegetarian birds; they eat predominantly grass and flower seeds, and insects only inadvertently. There’s a species of bird called the brown-headed cowbird that lays its eggs in other species’ nests and lets the new parents raise their young (and the cowbird hatchings often crowd or starve out the real hatchlings because cowbirds are much bigger). In the case of goldfinches, cowbird hatchlings usually die a few days after hatching because they can’t survive on the all-seed diet that the goldfinch parents bring to the nest. Note that, like the female goldfinch above, these two fellows also appear to be in the process of molting for the winter.

More birds on the ground: while on a morning walk with Gunther down Raptor Road, I saw this mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) on the roadside and bundled up against the chill of the early day. I feared it was sick or injured, but it flew off shortly after I took this picture. You may have heard a whistling sound when a dove flies off; that’s not coming from their beak, but from the beating of their wings. Doves spend a lot of time on the ground gathering seeds, and can eat 20 percent of the body weight (the birds can weigh up to 6 ounces) in seeds every day. This is the most frequently hunted gamebird in North America, but the current population is estimated to number 3.5 million birds (more than one mourning dove for every person in the country). I really like the pale blue ring around mourning doves’ eyes.

Mourning dove, elevated (and a shout-out to all the barbed-wire aficionados).

Lots o’ ladies in this particular blog posting. This is a female Brewer’s blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) hunting for breakfast in the grass near a campsite. These birds (the males are definitely black, with a startlingly bright yellow eye) are fairly sociable and help reduce insect populations near human habitations. Blackbirds also eat a lot of seeds. They can gather in flocks numbering up to 100; we didn’t see any gatherings that big, but we did see lots of these birds.

We also saw black-billed magpies and an eastern kingbird during our time at Ririe Reservoir. The new species that we saw at the reservoir brought our total species count for the year, through early September, to 87 – the number with which we ended the calendar year 2022. We also saw a lot of utility poles, but I haven’t been keeping track of those. Will we reach 100 species of birds seen in 2023, with more than 3 months left to go? No one can say. However, we’ll be spending quite a few weeks in parts of the country in which we haven’t yet stayed, so it’s very possible.

I should probably include a picture of Ririe Reservoir in this posting, so here’s one with a friendly dog (it’s Gunther, on one of his security patrols around Juniper Campground; everything checked out on this walk). We’ve stayed at more than 60 public and private campgrounds in the nearly two years since we began full-time RVing, and Ririe Reservoir’s Juniper Campground is definitely in our top 5 favorites. Between the opportunities for wildlife watching, enjoying the quiet environment (the dark skies at night allowed for some incredible stargazing), and easy access to a number of attractions in the area, this campground really impressed us.

Alright, one more utility pole photo, at sunset, with a center-pivot irrigation system on a potato field, some beautiful Idaho mountains, and an osprey.
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Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

Near Brigham City, Utah – July 14, 2023

The Bear River, at 350 miles long, is the country’s longest river that doesn’t eventually reach an ocean – but it is the largest river that flows into the Great Salt Lake of northern Utah. It starts in northeastern Utah, flows into southwestern Wyoming and southeastern Idaho, then makes its way back into Utah and into the Great Salt Lake.

I took this photo looking east from an observation platform along the Bear River, a few miles before it enters the Great Salt Lake. The Wasatch Mountain range, forming the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, is on the horizon; Box Elder Peak (elev. 11,101 feet) and Willard Peak (9,763 feet) are two of the prominent mountains in this part of the Wasatch range. As in many areas of the west, the 2022-2023 snow season was quite robust in the Bear River drainage and provided plenty of water flowing into the lake in mid-July. More on that later, though.

This family of gadwalls (Mareca strepera), a species of duck that, thanks in no small part to the establishement of wildlife refuges, has been growing in numbers since the 1980s, is making its way down the Bear River. Female gadwalls closely resemble female mallard ducks, but their heads and bills are shaped differently. This mom is tending to at least 11 ducklings; gadwalls can lay up to a dozen eggs in one clutch. In the fall months, 500,000 ducks and geese can be found at the refuge during their migration southward. Imagine all of that quackin’ and honkin’!

Here’s a closer look at another, and perhaps more reasonably sized, gadwall family. The gadwalls weren’t the only bird species looking after young ones at the Bear River refuge: there were baby waterfowl and shorebirds aplenty.

To wit: this western grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis) and two fledglings (grebelings?). Like many waterfowl, young grebes will often hop on a parent’s back to take a break from paddling. A volunteer at the refuge’s visitor center had suggested that we keep an eye out for the freeloading young grebes, and we were happy to see this family. The plumage of western grebes and that of their closely related cousins, Clark’s grebes, is very dense and their hides were used to make waterproof garments in the 19th century. Thankfully, the popularity of the style dropped and populations of both species, which had declined, soon recovered.

More baby waterfowl, this time an American coot (Fulica americana). I had only ever seen black coots before and assumed that the lighter colored ones (like the one at the top of this photo) were females. In fact, both male and female adult coots are black, and so the larger coot here is either mother or father to the cootling but has not yet matured out of its juvenile color pattern. Coots were everywhere in the refuge: I’m going to guess that we saw about 70 kajillion coots that day.

The delta at which the Bear River flows into the Great Salt Lake is where the 74,000-acre Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge was established in 1928. The refuge provides critical breeding and nesting habitat to more than 250 species of birds and other wildlife. Nancy, Gunther and I visited the refuge in mid-July, enjoying a short hike, a 12-mile auto tour, and the company of thousands upon thousands of birds.

We’d seen white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) only once before, at St. Vrain State Park in northern Colorado, and that was a flock in flight and so far up in the sky that I thought they were Canada geese until I took a closer look at the photo. There were plenty of these beautiful birds on the ground at Bear River National Wildlife Refuge. They use their distinctive curved bills to dig in the wet dirt around waterways in search of earthworms and other invertebrates. I look forward to getting better pictures of white-faced ibiseses(es) sometime: their purple, green, and bronze plumage is really pretty.

The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is located where two of the country’s major migratory flyways, the Pacific and the Central, overlap. Because of its connection to the ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake, the refuge is a critical stopover for migratory birds of all sizes.

Administered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Wildlife Refuge system includes more than 550 refuges in all 50 states and territories. In all, more than 150 million acres (almost 235,000 square miles, or more than twice the size of Colorado) are protected to support more than 700 bird species and 220 mammal species, along with hundreds of amphibian, reptile, and fish species.

Due to the loss of habitat from population growth, as well as a botulism outbreak, Utah citizens and conservation organizations asked Congress to protect this area, and the national refuge was created in 1928.

This black-necked stilt (Himantopus mexicanus) was yammering away while on the hunt for something good eat on the shoreline. The refuge is home to 65,000 black-necked stilts in the fall months. This species is closely related to American avocets, and, although it’s rare, the two can create hybridized offspring called “avo-stilts.”

Ready for a break from birds? How ’bout a bug? This is a twelve-spotted skimmer (Libellula pulchella), a type of dragonfly. It was resting on a reed in a marsh next to the refuge’s visitor center. This is a very common dragonfly and is found in all 48 of the contiguous states. If you only count 10 spots, that’s okay – they’re also called ten-spotted skimmers. They’re one of the bigger dragonfly species, at up two two inches long and with an even longer wingspan. Insects like this are, of course, a major component of a wildlife ecosystem. Dragonflies eat smaller insects, and they themselves are eaten by birds and reptiles.

To wit (again): this house sparrow (Passer domesticus) with a late breakfast on the visitor center’s roof (it looks like it has an unfortunate grasshopper rather than an unfortunate dragonfly in its beak, but you get the idea). The most common birds in the United States – house sparrows, rock pigeons, and European starlings – are all introduced species. None are native to this country, but they did remarkably well for themselves once they got into the wild.

Here’s a native sparrow species, the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia). This species is found from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the country’s east coast. The coloration of their feathers varies depending on the conditions in the local population’s habitat.

The variation in bird species we saw was pretty remarkable. Here are two western grebes pondering an American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), one of the largest birds in North America. We didn’t see many pelicans during our visit, and those we did see were pretty far away. This photo was taken in the delta area of where the Bear River enters the Great Salt Lake.

Here’s another big white bird: the snowy egret (Egretta thula). During the breeding season, snowy egrets develop very thin feathers on their necks. These feathers were once highly valued by the fashion industry: in the 1880s, they had a per-ounce value twice that of gold. Naturally, the numbers of snowy egrets dropped precipitously, but conservation efforts, including the establishment of national wildlife refuges, helped restore the population. Check out those yellow feet! This egret was kickin’ it with a small herd of cattle, probably looking for insects and other invertebrates disturbed by the bovines.

Back to bugs, briefly. There are about 3,000 known species of dragonflies in the world, and we saw three of them at the wildlife refuge. This one is a blue dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis), and like other dragonflies, is capable of eating hundreds of smaller insects every day.

One more dragonfly; this is a variegated meadowhawk (Sympetrum corruptum). This species, native to North America, has been found migrating south to Honduras and as far as eastern Asia.

Of the 256 photos I took at the refuge (I’m not kidding), this one is my favorite and it might be my favorite that I’ve taken this year. It’s an American avocet (Recurvirostra americana), and I took this picture after crawling slowly and steathily through a half-mile of stinking wet marshland in an attempt to unobtrusively approach this bird. I’m just kidding iwth you right now: I took this photo from the passenger seat of the Goddard’s six-wheeled towing unit while the avocet was walking down the side of the road. Avocets use their gently curved bill to sweep through shallow water in search of invertebrates. The plumage on their head and neck darkens to this beautiful russet during the summer, and then retreats to white and gray during the winter. They grow to about 18 inches tall. What an elegant bird.

Here’s another photo I took from the passenger seat of our pickup. Gunther has enjoyed several auto tours with us this year, and we were happy to have him along at the wildlife refuge. He’s taken a special interest in seeing horses from the back seat.

About the water issue I alluded to at the beginning of this post: while the Bear River seemed to be flowing at or near the capacity of its banks thanks to a great snow season in the Rocky Mountains, the Great Salt Lake is undergoing an historic multi-decade drought that has shrunk the lake to just 37 percent of its former volume. It’s something that’s happening all over the western United States: higher temperatures coupled with decreased annual precipitation levels, exacerbated by growing populations of people, are creating smaller river flows and diminishing bodies of water. What’s happening at the Great Salt Lake specifically is a crisis that, in my mind, isn’t getting nearly enough attention: in addition to the critical wildlife habitat that would be lost, a dry Great Salt Lake bed would create a huge volume of toxic dust directly adjacent to Salt Lake City. It’s a metropolitan area of 1.3 million people, and one that is growing quickly.

The consequences of losing the Great Salt Lake are difficult to imagine, and I don’t even want to consider what life around Salt Lake City would be like. Conservation efforts, meant to reduce the amount of water taken (mostly for agricultural purposes) from the Great Salt Lake’s three tributaries prior to entering the lake, are underway. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the west’s biggest land- and water-rights holders, has taken the unprecedented step of donating a sizable amount of its water to the lake, and is encouraging its adherents to conserve as much water as they can, but it may be a case of “too little, too late.” The 20,000 acre-feet of water donated by the Mormons, while a significant amount on its own, is enough to replace only about 2 percent of the lake’s lost volume.

We saw 19 different bird species in about four hours while at the refuge. All of those species, and all of the other birds and other animals at the refuge, are dependent on healthy waterways to breed and raise their young – in other words, to continue as a species. I hope that happens, for all of them.

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Mammoth Cave National Park

Near Cave City, Kentucky – July 2022

From scenic Tennessee, the Goddard hurtled northward in the summer of 2022 – destination: Michigan, to visit Nancy’s sisters and their families. On the way, we stopped to visit a couple of national parks in Kentucky and Indiana. We’d visited Mammoth Cave, located in central-west Kentucky, some years ago (Nancy’s way into caves – like, way), but it was time for a return visit. We made not one, but two trips underground to visit different parts of the cave; on another day, Gunther also joined us for a fun hike above the surface of the earth.

Mammoth Cave’s story begins, as do so many of the tales recounted in this blog, 350 million years ago when this part of present-day Kentucky (and most of the rest of the current United States) was covered by a vast inland sea. Corals and shell-bearing organisms produced calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which precipitated out of the seawater to fall on the seabed below. There were a lot of corals and shellfish: the CaCO3 their bodies created gradually accumulated to develop a 450-feet-deep layer of sedimentary limestone at the bottom of the sea.

In the ensuing hundreds of millions of years, the sea retreated and the limestone was covered by more layers of shale and sandstone. Mammoth Cave is the world’s biggest example of a solution cave, meaning that it was created when rainwater percolated downward and picked up naturally occurring carbon dioxide in the air and soil to became very weakly acidic. Ten to 15 million years ago, the percolation dissolved enough of the limestone to allow greater volumes of water to flow through the crevices. The force of the Green River took it from there, cutting through the highly erosional limestone using both water pressure as well as a mild acidity present in the river. The passages of the cave closest to the surface are the youngest in the system: only about 2 million years old. While the protective layer of harder shale and sandstone is keeping the brakes on vertical erosion from rainwater, the Green River is still creating more Mammoth Cave under the earth today.

Our guide, National Park Service Ranger Matthew, a retired schoolteacher, welcomes the Star Chamber Tour group to the Historic Entrance of Mammoth Cave. Matthew is a retired schoolteacher. The tour, which started at 6 PM, allowed us to visit the cave as those who entered the cave a hundred years ago did: with oil lanterns. The Star Chamber tour is two miles long and lasted 2 1/2 hours; it was nearly full dark when we emerged from the cave. Ranger Quentin is behind the shrub in the center of the photograph; we talked with him a bit during the tour and he shared that he’d just been informed that he’d been named a full-time NPS ranger. As anyone who has spent time in national parks can imagine, it’s a very competitive position; Quentin is a native of the Cave City area, so it had to be especially rewarding.

Native Americans lived in the area around Mammoth Cave for thousands of years, exploring the cave and using it for mineral extraction. They entered the cave through what is now known as the Historic Entrance, and explored at least 14 miles of the system using only the flame from burning torches for light. Evidence shows that Native Americans stopped using the cave about 2,000 years ago, and the caverns were unknown for more than 200 years.

This is the Historic Entrance to the cave, accessed by a long stairway (the stairs seen at the right of the image above). There are about 30 entrances to the cave system, some of which are just small holes barely large enough to squeeze through.

Local history holds that the first European-American entered the cave in the late 1790s. A young boy named John Houchins was hunting black bear (no longer found in the area) and inadvertently came across the huge hole in the ground that is now the Historic Entrance.

During the War of 1812, the cave’s … significant … deposits of guano (there are 13 known bat species in the park, but not all use the cave) served our nation as a source of saltpeter, a component of gunpowder. Some of the wooden assets used in the guano mining operations are still to be observed in the cave, thanks to its cool and humid environment (54 degrees and 87 percent humidity, all day, every day, all the year round).

The site became a local tourist attraction but, because of the area’s remoteness, didn’t see much out-of-state visitors for many decades until the automobile was developed and popularized. The property was privately owned by different interests through the years, all of which conducted tours of the underground passages, until concern about preserving the caverns’ natural resources resulted in Mammoth Cave National Park being established on July 1, 1941. It is the country’s 26th national park. In its first year as a national park, Mammoth Cave saw about 58,000 visitors; we were two of about 663,000 people to visit the park in 2022.

True to its name, Mammoth Cave is pretty big: in fact, it’s the longest cave system in the world and fully twice as long as the next-longest system. Mammoth Cave is currently mapped to include more than 400 miles of caverns (the entire state of Colorado is 380 miles wide), and the scientists believe that as many as 600 miles of caverns remain to be discovered and mapped. The system has been likened to a bowl of spaghetti, with passages intersecting and moving up and down multiple levels .

Understandably so, flashlights and flash photography were forbidden on the cave tours so the photos I was able to take are terrible because the only light available came from lanterns (on the Star Chamber Tour) or electric lights along the cave passages (on the River Styx Tour). However, some of the photos give a sense of scale to the caverns. Much of the present-day caverns are completely dry – the river water that carved them disappeared quickly into deeper caverns many years ago – so there’s no dripping water to create stalagmites and stalactites, along with other formations familiar to spelunkers. To be honest, although there are some beautiful formations to enjoy, for me most of Mammoth’s impressiveness – and there is plenty of that – comes from its sheer size. Mammoth Cave is big, and it’s dark. I remember a ranger’s tale from the first time we visited the national park: in the mid-1930s, before the park was managed by the NPS, the mummified body of a Native American (who’d lived before Columbus reached the New World and was killed when he was struck by a large falling rock) was discovered on a ledge in one of the caverns. By that time, hundreds of guided tours had passed by the body and all of the people – numbering in the thousands, at least – in all of the tours were unaware that they were passing by the mummy, which was only a few feet above their heads. It was just too big, and too dark, in Mammoth Cave to know about the mummy until someone happened to come across it.

The pandemic limited the number of tours available; some of the tours that Nancy and I went on during our first visit weren’t available at the time of our visit in July (mostly because of a shortage of National Park Service rangers trained to lead the tours). However, we enjoyed the Star Chamber Lanternlight Tour one evening, as well as the daytime River Styx Tour on another day.

The cave’s corridors vary greatly in size: some passages require visitors to walk sideways in order to pass through, and other caverns are wide enough to accommodate a Boeing 747 jet (I didn’t see any aircraft on either tour, but it was pretty dark).

We saw this formation, called the Giant’s Coffin, on both of our tours (which shared a bit of the same trail). Located 175 feet below the surface, the Giant’s Coffin is a limestone nugget measuring nearly 50 feet long and 20 feet tall, and weighing a thousand tons. The rock separated from the limestone wall behind it sometime in the distant past; imagine the sound it made when it fell. Our NPS ranger guide is in the shadows at the left of the photo; if I remember right, she’s standing perhaps 50 feet in front of the Giant’s Coffin.

At one point on the Star Chamber Tour, Ranger Matthew asked us to place our oil lanterns in a row on the cave floor. He and Ranger Quentin then extinguished all of the lamps and used a flashlight to guide their way behind a rock wall, leaving us in total darkness (he’d mentioned they’d do this beforehand; they didn’t just sneak off and leave us). If you’ve never been in a completely darkened cave, you’ve never known true darkness: the absence of all light. Even being outside on a moonless night, well removed from city lights, isn’t the same because there’s still starlight to provide some illumination, however feeble. It’s a common occurrence on cave tours, this extinguishing of all artificial light, but it never fails to strike some primeval chord – to not be able to see your hand in an inch in front of your face, let alone across the room. It also gives one a better appreciation for those early explorers: modern spelunkers carry all sorts of redundant sources of light – there are only so many torches or lanterns one can carry.

This picture is from the River Styx tour, which was illuminated by electric lighting for most of the 2 1/2-mile trail. The tour includes a visit to the River Styx, an underground tributary of the Green River, but flooding in the cave in 2010 destroyed the electrical system along that part of the tour. We needed battery-powered lanterns to continue. (Incidentally, as of this writing in August 2023, the River Styx tour isn’t being offered – I wonder if the electrical system is being repaired.) Notice the scallop-shaped carvings in the rock ceiling above: those indicate the direction and velocity of the flow of water eroding the rock. Larger scalloped features (a meter or more wide) mean that the water was moving only a few centimeters per second, and smaller scallops indicate that the water was flowing in meters per second.

This is a pool known as the Dead Sea, created by the Green River. It’s about 15 feet below the point at which this picture was taken. Artificial lighting next to the river shows some details of the water erosion. The occasional blind cave fish or blind crayfish can be observed in these waters; alas, they were not to be observed on this occasion.

And here is the River Styx, which looks a lot like the previous photo of the Dead Sea. Bur remember, friends, that the River Styx is but a tributary of the Dead Sea’s Green River.

Here was another highlight of the River Styx Tour: seeing the incredible Mammoth Dome. Known in spelunking terms as a “vertical shaft,” Mammoth Dome was created when water followed the law of gravity to flow straight down vertical crevices in the limestone. The erosional activity results in shafts that, at Mammoth Cave, measure 30 feet or more. In Mammoth Dome’s case, that resulted in a vertical shaft measuring 190 feet in height. An impressive metal staircase provided a lot of viewpoints to see the dome (there’s still a lot of climbing to do; see the top of the staircase at the top of the photo).

River Styx Spring Trail

While there are a number of different tours available for anyone wanting to explore the bowels of the earth at Mammoth Cave National Park, it also features more than 80 miles of above-ground trails. Gunther joined Nancy and me for a hike on the River Styx Spring trail, which provided for some great views of the Kentucky countryside.

Because we spent most of our lives in Colorado, neither Nancy nor I are familiar with vistas like this: hardwood forests as far as the eye can see. Mammoth Cave National Park currently encompasses 53,000 acres, or about 80 square miles; while it’s justifiably most famous for its subterranean caverns, there are plenty of opportunities for above-ground adventures.

We encountered this whitetail fawn near the trailhead of the River Styx Spring trail. Its mom was less than 10 feet away. It must be pretty used to seeing humans; I don’t think I’ve knowingly ever been this close to a young fawn before. The speckled pattern on a very young deer’s sides act as a kind of camouflage, helping it to blend in with the sun-dappled undergrowth in forests. I would think that fawns would also be predominantly grass-green instead of brown, but I suppose evolution knows what it’s doing.

The River Styx Spring Trail passes by a historic cemetery that is the final resting place of Stephen Bishop, one of the first non-Native-American explorers of the cave system. Bishop’s story is very interesting: in 1839, the Mammoth Cave estate, along with several Black slaves including Bishop, were sold to Dr. John Croghan for the amount of $10,000 (about $275,000 today). Croghan began to explore making improvements to the property’s tourism assets, like the hotel, and Bishop began to explore the underground caverns. A gifted spelunker and popular guide, Bishop also named many features within the cave – including the River Styx. In 1844, he published a detailed map of the cave system; the map would remain the primary guide to the cave for 40 years. The map contained about 10 miles of passages within Mammoth Cave, half of which Bishop discovered himself. Croghan envisioned using part of the interior of the cave as a tuberculosis treatment facility – some of the stone housing built for tuberculosis patients in 1841 is still standing along present-day tours of the cave – thinking that the cave’s environment would provide helpful results, but the treatment failed. In fact, all 10 of the tuberculosis patients either died in the cave or later after they exited the cavern. Further, the widespread disease would claim the lives of both Croghan and Bishop: Croghan died in 1849, and had stipulated in his will that Bishop would be declared a free man seven years after Croghan’s death. Bishop did enjoy a few months of freedom beginning in 1856, but tuberculosis claimed his life in the summer of 1857. He was buried on the Mammoth Cave grounds but his grave remained marked only by a cedar tree until 1881, when a second-hand tombstone (it was originally intended for a Civil War veteran’s grave but the family never claimed it – explaining the appearance of a sword and flag on the headstone) was inscribed and placed at Bishop’s gravesite. The date of his death is incorrect on the headstone.

Look at this rock Gunther found on the hike! Look at it! In addition to seemingly endless hardwood forest vistas, neither Nancy nor me nor Gunther were used to the high temperatures combined with the high humidity of central Kentucky in July. This part of central Kentucky gets about 50 inches of rain each year.

Here is the terminus of the River Styx Spring hike: a view of the water feature we’d seen only underground. Presumably any fish or crayfish in this part of the river have the gift of sight.

A couple of birds

I’ll close with a couple of bird photos from our campground in Cave City, which is a little more than 10 miles from the Mammoth Cave National Park visitor center. This is, of course, an American robin (Turdus migratorius) that lit upon one of our campground’s picnic tables. They’re common birds but always fun to watch. They’re found throughout the United States but breed in Canada.

Here was a new bird to me: an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea). They’re found in the eastern United States and the southern part of the country. The scientists discovered that indigo buntings, which, like many other species migrate at night, and navigate using the stars. The experiment involved placing some of the birds in a planetarium. The birds adjusted their orientation in the room as the projected stars above changed position. Their remarkable blue color is due to microscopic structures in their feathers that reflect and refract blue light – very similarly to why the sky above the bunting looks blue.

There are a number of NPS sites that prominently feature caves including a couple, perhaps improbably, in South Dakota, which we visited a number of years ago (did I mention that Nancy likes caves?) However, none are bigger than Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and, thanks to the Green River, it’s getting bigger every day.

Thank goodness we were done with caves for the year.*

*We weren’t.

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