Calaveras Big Trees

Good times with the Boy Scouts. This was the campsite that we occupied for five nights. We had some awesome adventures during the day. This is a panorama image that might deserve a click.



- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

All creatures great and small

Very small.

- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Back to Joshua Tree

I was last in JT just after Thanksgiving.  This time the weather was so much nicer with 40 degree nights and 70 degree days.

These are some HDR and panorama photos from my iPhone.

Dollar value of grades

A+,A 12
A- 6
B+ 3
B 2
B- 1
C+ 0
C -4

Lower: nothing at all

Red Rock canyon at sunset

We took a jeep ride to look at the sunset. There was no guarantee that we'd get a nice show due to overcast skies and potential for showers. This is Juli and our driver, Mario. Our jeep is at far left.



Same shot.


We were sad to think we wouldn't have the most beautiful light, and it started to rain a bit, but then the light broke through.



The light creeping up the cliffs with a rainbow. Ahhh!




The other half of the rainbow.



Splendid!







- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Ruins of Tuzigoot

This is an ancient pueblo of the Sinagua people, who lived here between AD 1000 and AD 1400.


A panorama courtesy of the Autostitch app.







OCR on an informational sign:

For thousands of years, the Verde Valley has been a
human melting pot. Hunters and gatherers came first, searching for wild game and grasses. Traders followed, digging salt and minerals, and then settlers farming the fertile bottomlands.
A tribe of southern Sinagua built their masonry homes on this ridge about AD 1000 and established a thriving agricultural community. Inexplicably, they left in the early
1400s, more than a hundred years before the first Europeans rode into the valley.
A circular 1/4-mile trail winds up and through the remains of the Tuzigoot pueblo.


In a typical late-pueblo room, storage cists were frequently set in a corner of the room and clay vessels for storage were submerged in the floors. When Sinagua children died, they were buried in lined crypts beneath the floors of the dwellings. It was hoped their spirits would be incorporated into succeeding generations.



- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Montezuma Well

So called because early Europeans thought that the cliff dwellers in the area were at the north end of the Aztec empire. The name has stuck, though we now know better.

It's a large sinkhole fed by a constant flow underground flow of water.

There's cliff dwellings on the far side




Maybe you can see the cliff dwellings a bit better



This is as good a picture as I have of the cliff dwellings





This water source was used for irrigation by the original people of the area.

OCR on an informational sign:

Since water in Montezuma Well is charged with carbon dioxide (CO2), gill-breathing fish can not
survive: instead, an aquatic community of several unique species—each dependent on the other - has evolved.
By day, small floating plants—aIgae—manufacture food from light energy and the rich supply of carbon dioxide. Tiny, shrimplike animals—amphipods— feed by combing algae cells through appendages below their mouths.

Leeches, living by day in the bottom of the well, rise at night and, searching with the sensory hairs of their bodies, gulp large quantities of the small amphipods. Night-swimming water scorpions also make evening meals of the shrimplike creatures. More familiar turtles and muskrats live around the
well, and at dawn and dusk you might see squirrels, foxes, skunks, raccoons and snakes coming to feed. ln winter, look for black-headed Canadian
geese, green-winged teals and mallards.


- Posted at great expense from my iPhone