October 25 -- Another Backyard Morning View, And Another Unpaved Bike Ride

Prior to moving to Portal and Faranuf,  I lived in a port city of 80,000 -- San Pedro, otherwise known as the Port of Los Angeles. It was a place of container terminals, a dying town center -- the major department stores had moved out of town -- and a gang and crime presence that was slowly moving up the hill (personal incomes grew higher the further up the hill you lived). It was what you could call a "gritty" port town. Certainly the last thing you could realistically call it is rural. Perhaps back in the early part of the 20th century before it was "annexed" by Los Angeles to become its main port for commerce. Sure, there were areas, particularly on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which were being restored to their natural beauty, and had a lot of charm that approximated what it may have looked like a hundred years ago -- but the city, or suburban sprawl, was always around the corner. With Catalina Island 24 miles across the channel, it could be very pretty. But here, on the east side of the Chiricahuas, you look out the kitchen window in the wee hours of the night and see no lights of any kind -- houses, streetlights (those never existed, and neither did many streets) or towns, large or small. I don't like to say "nothing" is there -- because there is very much something. Land spreading far and wide (sorry, from "Green Acres") in its natural, or as near to natural as can be with rural ranching, state. And there is a wide variety of landscapes, as the Chiricahuas are the meeting place of 4 different habitats -- the Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts to the east and west, and the southern tip of the Rockies and Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains to the north and south. It's one of the main reasons why the Chiricahuas are so special and probably the best example of the classic "Sky Island". So you see, there's a lot of Something here...

The sky was cloudless for the most part, but there were pockets of low clouds hovering over the mountain peaks; here's the scene of Portal Peak with the sun hitting the lower rock formations --

And I can see this view from my side porch...Just before I went on my bike ride I looked out the back sliding glass door and saw one of the Coues deer heading tentatively towards the water feature, It was one of the males, and his velvet was still hanging off one of his antlers

I hopped on my hybrid bike "Diamondback" and headed north on Foothills Road. I had nice, smooth pavement for the first mile -- then bumpy, washboard-y dirt for the rest. And the road had deteriorated since I last rode it about 2 weeks ago. It was jarring, even with the front shock absorbers, and the washes which crossed over the low spots in the road were thick with dirt, which if you were timid stopped you in your tracks and cause you and your bike to topple over. I must admit it happened at least once to me -- and the first thing I did when I got back up was look around to see if anyone had seen me. Luckily I ended the ride with no "road rash", but it was a close call. I made it out as far as White Tail Canyon, about 8 miles one-way from Faranuf, and I passed a windmill down a rutted dirt "road" and decided to take a short detour to it. I ended up at a locked gate with a "Private Property" sign, but I still got the photo I'd come to take -- 

It's open land all the way to that range in the distance, perhaps a dirt road or two. For some, particularly those from the big city, it's too much open land. For me, it's part of paradise. I continued my bike ride as far as White Tail Canyon; a "primitive" road goes 5 miles to and through it, then dead-ends. People live there, including my friend Wynne Brown and Rick Taylor, a celebrated figure in the birding world and expert on the Elegant Trogon. The road splits 3 ways here, one going to White Tail, another continuing north to San Simon and Interstate 10, and the other to the small "community" of Paradise, which if you can believe it is smaller than Portal -- perhaps 20 residents at most, including my friends Winston and Jackie Lewis at the George Walker House. Here's the start of the road to White Tail Canyon --

I headed back as I was due to have lunch at the Portal Cafe with Lori and Mark, who had just returned from a birding trip to Guyana and Trinidad. Once I met them at the Cafe, they regaled me with the story of how they saw a Harpy Eagle, a large raptor that, while somewhat common in that area, is very difficult to actually see. Later, we have dinner over at Faranuf and once again enjoy good food, good conversation -- and good wine and beer. 

What did I see a year ago today? Why, the Aberdeen donkeys in the Owens Valley, of course --