SEKI and Death Valley

After leaving palm springs, we've started heading north.  Hopefully this will mean better (colder) weather and more climbing.  Along the way we decided to stop by Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Parks to do some backpacking.  

The mayflies were swarming the first night.  Huge clouds of flying bugs.  Annoying, but also neat as the mayflies' adult winged form only lasts a day or two when they all hatch together and swarm in large groups.  Then they die.

We spent a night in the car, near a stream.  I like camping near water.  The bugs were a bit annoying, but the sounds were nice and small mountain streams are always fun to explore.  This one was filled with small trout (brown or brook I think) and ran between wild flowers and reeds over small waterfalls until draining into a meadow.  Dark-Eyed Juncos ( Junco Hyemalis of the darker Oregon variety )   kept us company while we cooked and packed for the backpacking trip we had planned the next day.

Early in the morning we headed towards Roads End Permit Station to get our papers.  Our planned hike took us into the wilderness outside the park, but as we were starting the day inside the park lines we needed to go through the national park permit process.  The drive to the station was beautiful, the process was simple, and the girl working the station was nice.  No trouble at all.

Our hike was nine miles or so, with a bit under a mile of elevation gain.  We took the Lewis Creek trail to Frypan meadow.  Athena took a nap and I stripped to dry my clothes in the sun; an improperly packed beer can had soaked through everything.  My tent and sleeping bag were reasonably dry, but it felt as though I had marinated myself for the bears.

Athena dislikes water crossings.  Perhaps it is due to her poor footwork.

On the hike we spotted a Blue Grouse ( Dendragapus Obscurus ) which took awkward flight and stared at me from a tree as I peered at it.  Female grouse are not the most distinctly colored birds.

The first of many panoramas.

 The trail we took is seldom used and a soft sand for long stretches.  Deer, Coyote, and Mountain Lion apparently use the trail when hikers are absent, as their prints were everywhere.  I've never seen such clear lion prints.  I followed them down the trail for 7 or 8 distinct steps at one point.

A 'Snow Flower' (  Sarcodes Sanguinea ).  This plant is a parasite, and cannot photosynthesize for food.  It feeds on the Mycorrhiza fungi that lives in a symbiotic relationship with tree roots.  As a fungi parasite, it's called a  myco-heterotroph.

The Snow Flower feeds off of the sugars that the Mycorrhiza fungus receives from the tree roots.  In a healthy relationship, the  Mycorrhiza fungus provides the tree roots with nutrients and protection from disease.  There are few parasitic plants, and only a few of these feed on fungi.  A really cool plant.

Panorama #2... much like panorama #1.

 From Frypan meadow, we headed west a bit on a nearly invisible trail towards Grizzly Lakes.  Nearly invisible is a bit of an understatement, and for the most part I was watching my compass and looking for a rise of land shown on the topo.  Every once in a while we would follow what I could convince myself was a trail for a while, until it disappeared again.  Eventually we ran into the Grizzly Lakes trail, which we followed for a bit before setting up camp outside the park somewhere near a stream.  Athena setup the tent, I started a fire and won a game of Rummy.

Another stream!  This one by our campsite.  Either our old water filter works or it's nice clean water.  Either seems equally likely to me.

Athena checks a pool's depth on the hike out.  The water runs over granite here, and has carved pools over time.  Chilly but the rocks are nice for a rest.

A bumble bee with its pollen baskets loaded.  Bumble bees' stingers lack the barb of the honey bee's stinger, allowing them to sting more than once.

Panorama #3, remarkably similar to the first two.

A pussy paws flower ( some sort of Costanthe ). I think this is a One-Seeded Pussy Paw.  I can't find any interesting facts on this flower... but it is sort of pretty. The valley girl of flowers I suppose.

We got back uneventfully and went to visit the largest tree on earth, 'General Sherman'.  This must be a hugely popular tree, as everything about the area and the short hike was seemingly aimed at the unfit, unintelligent fool intent on injuring themselves.  Signs warn you to sit if you are tired, drink water if thirsty.  Feeling a bit abused by the half mile paved walk down to the tree? Why not take a shuttle back to your car!  The hike is fenced in and paved.  Along the way there are signs letting you know you are "Almost to the Top!" or half way to the bottom.  I've never seen such an idiot-proofed  half mile before.

The middle tree is General Sherman.  By volume, it is the largest tree.  By height, age, and circumference, it is not.

General Sherman's footprint, with a single Dan for scale.

 That night we camped in the forests outside the park, where it's a bit less crowded and most importantly free.  Our campsite was shared by a pair of White-Headed Woodpeckers ( Picoides Albolarvatus ) tending their nest in a dead tree.  It was fun watching them poke in and out of their home.  Athena was wondering why we didn't hear them pecking as you would expect from woodpeckers.  Apparently this species is one of the few that rarely if ever actually pecks at dead and rotting wood.

We headed for Death Valley the next day, sleeping on the side of the road just outside the park.  It was in the mid 80s for the whole night.

IT'S EXTREME!

Only a bit of the Valley is dunes.  Most is rock-strewn flats, salt plains, and sparsely vegetated scrub/grass land.

A family of desert iguana.  These ones were much more amiable than the last few.  There was a small baby off to the left that i didn't notice till later.  Google-ing for the family structure of the desert iguana does not turn up many results.

The lowest point in the US is near this spring, called 'Badwater'.  There are at least three hats in this picture kindly left by previous visitors.  It's about 280 feet below sea level.

Badwater is hot, and really a fairly unpleasant place.

The park has a really nice visitors center, and you can buy gas at about $6 a gallon.  The lowest point in the US, and some neat sand dunes occupied our day until we headed north again towards the Bishop area.  We plan on spending a week or so in Bishop, where there is a huge amount of bouldering, sport climbing, and some trad as well.

My father before he practiced his photo smile, and his father looking like a true cowboy.  Happy fathers day!

Joshua Tree and Palm Springs

On our way down to palm springs we stopped just outside the Kelso dunes in the Mojave desert,  in the Mojave National Preserve. Although there are no camping signs most places, about 200 meters down the road from the trail head there is a pullout on the left which doesn't have signs... so we slept there.  The moon has just passed its first quarter, and lit up the dunes and the desert so that everything was colored in silvers and greys.  It was a lovely night in the middle of nowhere.

Athena's ukulele balances amazingly well.

In the morning we headed down towards palm springs, just to the east of L.A.  We ended up on Route 66 on the way, which is a really weird road.  There are displays everywhere, just random piles of semi-ordered junk on the side of the road.  After a spray-painted cactus ( some sort of Cylindropuntia, although usually they aren't purple, blue, pink and orange ) and some Shi ( Chinese guardian lions ) we found a dead tree covered with old pairs of shoes.  Many of them had things written on them with sharpies.  Luckily I had an old pair of shoes... so i left them.  No silly message on mine, just a bit of good old fashioned littering in the guise of an old Route 66 tradition.  I did a bit of googling and apparently "Shoe Trees" are a thing that some people get really excited about.  What an odd world.

A dead tree covered in shoes.

We wanted to drive through Joshua Tree on the way to palm springs. ( I collect National Parks maps, and don't have that one yet. )  The park straddles the Colorado Desert and the Mojave Desert, making it ecologically cool in addition to the awesome climbing.  Unfortunately 110 degrees is a bit hot for climbing so there was none of that.   On the drive through from south to north you see the land change from mostly short cactus and scrub ( cholla cactus being most common ) to the odd forests of the Joshua Tree, from which the park gets its name.  The J-Trees are not in fact a tree, but an overgrown member of the yucca family ( hence the Latin name Yucca Brevifolia ).  They even get the yucca like flower spikes on top, which I guess I should have expected as they are in fact just large yuccas.

Token picture of me next to a giant Yucca masquerading as a tree.

Apparently it was some Mormon settlers that named the trees, in reference to the biblical story of Joshua.  We also saw a neat Desert Iguana (Dipsosaurus Dorsalis), and I almost even hit one with my car as it ran across the road.  The desert iguana is a really light colored lizard, fairly large, and mostly a herbivore.

I stopped to do some bird watching (armed with my new book) at barker dam in Joshua Tree National Park.  It is usually a fairly large body of water in the middle of the desert which attracts a number of birds, bighorn sheep, and other wildlife.  It was sort of just a muddy puddle when we went.  Apparently it's been a really dry year.  Nonetheless there where a bunch of  white-throated swifts ( Aeronautes Saxatalis ), some sort of flycatcher ( maybe an ash-throated, but I have a hard time with these ) and some little brown birds about.  It was nice sitting under a rock in the shade trying to identify everything.  Soon a group of young adults/college students showed up.  The guys were shirtless and the girls where mostly naked.  I think they had wanted to swim in the water... although there was not nearly enough this time of year.  We left while they stood on the 'shore' looking forlornly at the muddy pool that was supposed to be a pond.

We found this cowboy hat in the road, with a tire track across the brim.  It works wonderfully for bird watching.

We made it to palm springs about an hour before my dads flight got in.  The time was well spent in the shower.

On monday we walked up Andreas Canyon in the Indian Canyons area.  This area is the ancestral home to the Agua Caliente Cahuilla indians, and today is mostly a reservation.  The land that was 'given' to the indians is in a checkerboard pattern, so they don't actually have a large contiguous area.  They just own alternating squares.  There's a picture below, where the brown squares are what was 'given' to them.  It's a really weird setup.  I would have been one pissed indian when they showed me this map.

Wut.

In any case, the Indian Canyons area lies in one of the squares and is home to a number of palm oasis.  These canyons look like odd green streaks in the desert from far away, and up close look like the sort of lush palm frond and babbling brook oasis you assume is made up by people who have only read about them.

Shortly after this photo my phone was doused by the babbling brook.  Sorry for the fuzzy/milky pictures that follow.

When not tended on city streets, some types of palm have a huge husk of dead fronds around their trunks. To the right of this picture are two palm trees, each with a trunk about 1 foot in diameter.  The dead frond husks make nearly a solid wall in places.  I tried to part them and see if there is an open space next to the trunk... unfortunately I would not fit.

The contrast between the desert on each side and the flowing water and greenery in the center was really neat.  There was a bunch of life in the canyons as well, including tree frogs, a long coachwhip snake, and some familiar lizards from Utah.

A very colorful Granite Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus Orcutti) photographed with a wet iPhone. 

The underside of a larger, grumpier Granite Spiny Lizard.  The males have really bright blue bellies and chins, which intensify during breading season.

A California tree frog I think.  Just hanging out on Athena's Finger.

The tree frogs blend in really well to both the rocks and trees.  This one wouldn't move.

A 'Red Coachwhip' or 'Red Racer'  ( Masticophis Flagellum Piceus ).  One of the longest snakes we've caught at  more than 4 feet but really skinny.  Coachwhips are really fast snakes that eat lizards, birds, and rodents.  They have really good eyesight for a snake.

Some Hiltonius species of millipede.  Thicker than a pencil, and quite long.  There was a group of 4 or 5.  Harmless but a bit weird.  These types of arthropods were some of the first creatures to colonize land as life moved out of the seas. 

There have also been a large number of hummingbirds around. I think that most of them are Anna's, Costa's or Black Chinned Hummingbirds.  Around the hotel we found four separate humming bird nests. This is... simply amazing.  You almost never find humming bird nests.  They are tiny and rare and frequently well hidden.

This nest is maybe 1-2 inches across, and is held together with spider webs.  I have no idea how a hummingbird harvests enough spider web to make a nest, but apparently they manage.  The nests sit between 1-2 meters off of the ground and holds a clutch of 1-2 eggs.

We spent a large amount of time trying to identify one bird today, and finally settled on a juvenile Costa's Hummingbird ( Calypte Costae ).   It spent the whole day sitting on a branch near one of the nests, and every once in a while its mother ( humming birds are for the most part all raised by single mothers ) would come and feed it.  This mouth to mouth feeding went surprisingly well given the unique physiology of the hummingbird.

Tomorrow we are off to the Sierras.  We will be making our way towards Bishop California, then on to San Francisco.  Hopefully the weather will be a bit colder.  There's a full moon coming up, and we are looking forward to camping under it in the mountains.

We washed my rope in the hotel tub.  It was a bit dirty.