I like "minimalism" i.e., I can live comfortably on just the basics; for many years I would camp in my truck and camper shell, sleeping in the back, but now MY back prefers a few creature comforts, especially now that I have sciatic pain due to long drives in the sitting position without getting out to stretch. I've since changed my ways...Here are a few more photos from March 1, the day after the storm, taken at the Valley of Fire. Here is Balancing Rock and the redrock massif along the north side of Valley of Fire, looking east ---
And this is the view from one of the pullouts along the main road running east-west through the VOF, with the darker-toned Muddy Mountains in the distance --
The white cross is a memorial to a fellow who died here riding a buckboard along what was then the main (dirt) road through the Valley of Fire. He'd stopped, apparently looking for water, tied his horse to the back of the buckboard, laid down and died, presumably of thirst. Such was life here in 1915, the year of his death...
Yesterday Sunday the 2nd my birding buddy Norm Parrish and I set out in my Tundra for a day of birding. We started out at the Overton Wildlife Management Area down the street from the RV park here, where my truck slewed around in the glopy goo of the wet dirt roads -- but the rain DID stop the dust from flying about for at least the next few days. We searched the area for the male juvenile Vermilion Flycatcher I'd last seen there over a week ago, but it appeared as if he has moved on, possibly (as Norm speculated) due to being pushed-out by all the aggressive Yellow-rumped Warblers that wanted the area for themselves. The VFC is still a young kid, and probably hadn't learned how to fight back to claim his territory, but in the long run -- who knows? I'm just glad I got good shots of him when he was around. After an hour of "caked tires"we decided to take to the asphalt roads, so we headed down the Northshore Road that runs along Lake Mead and drove to Vegas Bay, where we hoped to use our spotting scopes to check out the reservoir. But Lake Mead has receded quite a bit in these past years, so all there was at Vegas Bay was a river that wound its way to the lake a few miles away. And we saw an interesting phenomenon -- dirt cliffs crumbling, then falling into the water like a glacier "calving". The cliffs here must be made of very "crumbly" soil, so we stayed well back from the edge. There weren't many birds there -- a few male Redheads, Mallards, Verdin in the brush, and a Say's Phoebe -- so we headed back east on the Northshore Road and went to Calville Bay. The marina with its houseboats was still there, so we walked among the boats looking for birds, but still only saw a few Mallards and a lone Pie-billed Grebe, then on coming back to the parking lot Norm spied a flock of White-throated Swifts swirling and diving over the water, catching insects. It would turn out that this was our best "sighting" of the day, but it was worth it for me as I was able to add them to my Life List. After another quiet stop at Rogers Spring -- where Norm had previously seen Costa's Hummingbird, Cactus Wren and Sage Thrasher, among others -- we ended up at Bowman Reservoir north of Logandale. The quiet of the area was broken by the sounds of ATVs and dirt bikes roaring around -- this was a Sunday in Nevada, after all -- so after seeing 2 Western Grebes and a few Ring-billed Gulls, we parted and promised to meet at the Overton wildlife area for a bird count on Saturday. After hosing off the undercarriage of the Tundra at the local car wash before the caked dirt turned into concrete, I spent the rest of the evening figuring out how to transfer my BirdJam files on my iPod Nano to Norm's iPod Touch as he wanted his own iPod full of bird calls; I'm still trying to figure it out this morning...
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