From the south rim

Yucca

Just outside of Page Arizona at about 4600 feet elevation near the Utah border these were blooming. I believe they are a type of Banana Yucca (Yucca baccata).

Tulips with teeth

Tulip Pricklypear (cactus), Opuntia phaeacantha Engelm

These were found near Page, Arizona. If my identification is correct, I think they are very well named.

Feeding your 800 pound gorilla.

What do you do to feed your 800 pound gorilla if it’s energy he wants? The present opinion seems to be “anything you can possibly imagine doing, no matter what the cost”.

If your gorilla is in L.A., you go get it from southeastern California and Arizona by trampling all over the Big Morongo Wildlife Preserve north of Palm Springs, Pioneertown near Yucca Valley, Pipes Canyon Wilderness Preserve and a corner of the San Bernardino National Forest as the L.A. Mayor wants to do as reported in this story in the LA Times.

“Wait”, you say, “you can’t do that”! But it seems that Federal Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman thinks you can.

As pointed out in this story, also in the L.A. Times, “Federal energy regulators Thursday singled out most of Southern California as an area in need of more high-voltage power lines and set in motion a process to make it happen — even if state officials balk.”

“Critics warned that the move could potentially gut local and state authorities’ control of the siting of the transmission lines, among the most controversial issues that state and local agencies address.”

“The action, authorized under a law signed by President Bush in 2005, puts power-short regions of the country “on a path to modernize our constrained and congested electric power infrastructure,” Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said in a statement.” “Under the Energy Department proposal, federal energy regulatory commissioners would have the right to overrule state and local regulators if the latter refuse to issue permits for transmission corridors on designated private lands, an Energy Department spokeswoman said.”

When intelligent beings in outer space (and I’m hoping there are some there because there apparently aren’t any here) look toward the Earth at night, and see what a fantastic picture on this NASA website shows, they must wonder why in the world we want to destroy all of the natural resources we have just to light up the night sky.

They probably also wonder why we don’t put our 800 pound gorilla on a very strict diet.

Secrets of the Ancient Pine

Far above a canyon, high upon a ridge in the highlands of Arizona, stand the solitary bones of an ancient pine, respectfully buried there on a day hundreds of years past by Mother Nature Herself in a lonely grave gently dug in a blue expanse of sky and tenderly wrapped in a thin shroud woven from a soft breeze.

Her name, “Bristlecone”, was penned for her by a modern man four thousand years after she was born in a small depression filled with dust on the ridge-top and her epitaph can still be seen, engraved in lichens on her memorial stone of granite now lying at her feet.

For thousands of years she watched the struggles and the sorrow and the progress and the joy of men. She saw the Hohokam in the distance far to the south as they formed their canals in the stone and the sand of the desert, bringing forth lush green as a welcome contrast to the brown of the valley and she alone knows the mystery of their fate.

She observed the arrival and spread of the Anasazi across the plateaus of Arizona and on east from there, admired the intricate patterns of black and white on their pots and vessels and marveled at their dwellings made of stones. And she watched them disappear as the Hohokam, but will not tell her tale of that secret time.

The dwellings of the Hopi, high in the cliffs above the canyons were under her gaze as she watched the joy of children at play in those precarious perches of safety and shelter from harm.

And there were tears that fell at her feet when she saw the red blood of white men and the red blood of red men intermingle and soak slowly into the dust of her canyon below.

I asked her for the secrets of those days long ago and there was never a reply, but on a day yet to come, when my epitaph is on a granite stone I will ride to Bristlecone on the desert wind and share her tales of man and men and shed with her my own tears of sorrow and of joy.

My old Apache brother

It was cloudy and cold that day in November as I slowly climbed the rocky and cactus strewn slope leading to the narrow crest of a ridge, still baked from the past summer’s sun, high in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. The rough boulder-filled canyon to the east spread out far below and then began its climb toward the next ridge which ran parallel to mine, a mile in the distance. All the cares and concerns of routine life in the city were already becoming far, far away.

The normally fierce Arizona sun had no power now, having given it up to the spirits of winter, and was hiding in shame behind a solid wall of white clouds which covered the sky. The occasional Saguaro, tall and lonely, cast no shadow today, but stood in stark solitude, silhouetted against the solid white expanse overhead.

Not far to the west could be seen a large scattering of dark clouds sweeping across the Sonoron desert, bringing rain to my ridge from the Pacific, two hundred miles away. It would be a good time to seek cover from the impending storm.

Atop my ridge was a crest of rim rock. It had a dark and forbidding look as it towered over the slope, but I knew somewhere up there I could find shelter as the storm passed overhead. My boots made crunching noises on the decomposed granite beneath my feet as I climbed. The sound didn’t matter. The desert mule deer which were my quarry would already have taken their storm positions among the rocks in the heads of the small ravines which also lead up to the ridge. They could wait.

A few hundred yards ahead and still above me was the peak of the ridge. The towering walls of rock at the peak were my destination. From there if I nestled against the rock I would enjoy a view of two canyons and the ridge crest trailing off to the north while I waited out the fury of the storm.

When I reached the peak I found to my pleasant surprise a cave of rather ample dimensions which the wind over many millenniums had carved into the base of the rock, situated such that it was invisible from the canyons below. I ducked down, went inside and placed my rifle on a shelf of rock at the back of the cave with my pack beside it. The rain was just beginning to fall, but today my poncho could remain in the pack.

On the floor of the cave, precisely in the center, was a small pile of charcoal, the remains of fires which had burned in the far distant past, and on the walls and ceiling were faded traces of smoke from those ancient fires.

At my feet lay an arrow head, a rather coarse hunting point which had been fashioned from the native rock. I immediately knew it was Apache. I picked it up and as I held it in my hand I suddenly felt at one with the spirit of its maker who had also sat there so many years before, a hunter just as I was, looking out at the beauty of the desert through the opening of the cave, waiting out the storm.

My old Apache brother.