October 27 -- Spiny Lizards And Good Friends

It was a day of recuperation from the big hike up to Silver Peak the day before.  I was surprised my body didn't feel too "ache-y" -- but I took 2 Motrin just the same. I was going to have my friends Peg, Lori and Mark over for dinner, so I had to pick up the requisite Malbec (for me and Peg; Lori always has Chardonnay, and Mark is a long-time microbrew beer connoisseur ). The Portal Store may have a limited selection of items, but it does have Malbec, so I stopped by to get a bottle. After that I went to the post office to get an Amazon package and say hello to "postmistress" Joan. I asked her how the Irish Spring bars were working; I've given her 2 to put in the post office to keep the mice out. She said she'd seen neither mice nor droppings since she put the bars out. I went  back to Faranuf and since a friend on Facebook asked how the desert willow I'd planted over a month ago was doing, I took a photo to show it was doing quite well --

It may still LOOK scrawny, but there are new branches near the bottom, and with the oncoming cold season it doesn't have many leaves. Oh, and that's Silver Peak in the background, the highest point of which we hiked up the day before...Speaking of which, I didn't mention in the previous day's post about the lizards we saw while up on the top of Silver Peak. We weren't totally sure what species they were -- and there are QUITE a few here in the Chiricahuas -- but I later found out from a expert in the area that they were Yarrow's Spiny Lizards, a specialty of the sky islands of SE Arizona. They live at elevations between 4,300 to over 10,000 feet, and we saw them at 7300 feet --

There were two, with this one much larger than the other -- 

This one had slightly different coloring than the other, too. Male and female? It was...curious about us, too. My friend Dodie "walked" up to it with 2 fingers, and actually touched its front leg -- and it didn't flinch -- 

Here's a closeup of the larger Yarrow's -- 

Beautiful, isn't it? And you can see why it's called a Spiny Lizard. The intricacy of its "design" is amazing. Just in Chiricahua National Monument, north of Portal, there are over 46 species of reptiles, so there must be at least that number, and probably more, in the whole of the Chiricahuas. I hope to photograph many of them while I live here...

Back to the 27th... I thought it would be neat to photograph the top of Silver Peak, where we'd seen these lizards, from Faranuf. I'd say there's at least 10 air miles distance between the two. So I took out the 500 f/4 lens with the 1.4x TC attached (700mm total) and took a photo; the actual spot where we were is hidden out of view on the north side -- 

Lori and Mark came over around 5:45pm, and while Mark prepared their dinner (their stove had stopped working, so I said they could use mine until the repair people came here on Thursday -- they had to wait for nearly a month for them to come out here; one of the "inconveniences" of living at The Beyond) Lori and I had wine out on the back deck and watched the sunset, which was pretty darn colorful over False Portal Peak --

Peg came over later. She's the person who really started the ball rolling that ended up in my moving here. About 3 years ago, when I was still living in San Pedro, she e-mailed me, asking if she could use a photo I took in the Chiricahuas of a Red-faced Warbler for her travel brochure. I said "Of course!" and a long-distane friendship started. When I came to Portal last year and seriously looked at houses for the first time, she had a "meet and greet" potluck at her house, at which I was introduced to a lot of residents here. And once I bought Faranuf, we became neighbors -- I now live across the street from her. She runs her own nature travel tour agency, and I've supplied her with more photos for her brochures. So she's a very special person to me. So she came over to Faranuf, I made stir-fried for her and me, and the 4 of us had great conversation and food, and afterwards we saw a DVD that Lori and Mark had put together about one of their Africa trips, with Lori providing the running narration. As we left, the full moon was lighting up the landscape. I know I may sound like a broken record, but it's great living here...