Alamo Canyon

Once again our plans for an early start were foiled by the weather.  We were warned by the ranger that it was going to be really windy and during the night a big storm blew up.  Grateful we weren't in one of those cartop tents! As it was we forgot about our tablecloth and lost one of the strawberry weights holding it down.  It had rolled deep into a pricklebush. We also found a pair of forgotten socks later on.

When the rain stopped later in the morning we headed off for a short hike in Alamo canyon. 

All that foggy weather makes the cactus grow tall

It was reputedly good for birds but between the stormy weather and the lateness of the day we didn't see much.  But we did see a canyon towhee (not long enough to get a photo). Bird of the Day!

 

Organ Pipe Cactus grow pretty big here too!

The vegetation is a little different in the coolness of the canyon and the higher elevation.  Here's a new plant we saw, the jojoba.

Plant of the day!

The trail leads to the remains of the old Alamo Canyon ranch. There's the tiny old ranch house of fired Adobe brick.

We walked up to the corral and ate our lunch on the cattle trough.

From there we continued up the wash.  

There we found Juniper and holly oak.

Up here we found orange  warblers and Anna's hummingbirds.

We kept going till the rocks we had to hop were house size, then we turned around.  

We got back to the visitor centre in time for Ranger Kim's patio talk on ravens.  We learnt some interesting things about the species.  She says a pair of ravens often attend the talk, but not today. But it's also a great spot to see a Costa's hummingbird.  

Green Desert

 

Posing with the park's namesake cactus

We visited Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument way back in 1994 on our first whirlwind 2-week trip to Arizona.  I remember being enchanted with the desert and the cacti but I didn't remember it being quite so lush and green and dense with vegetation.

That's because it wasn't.  The Sonoran desert, unlike the Mojave, Chihuahua and Great Basin deserts has not one but two rainy seasons, the winter and the summer monsoons.  That's why it has all the cool stuff like saguaro which can't survive in the drier areas.  The Monument itself is the only place in the US that is warm enough to support the organ pipe cactus because they don't get much frost here.  There's lots of organ pipe cactus in Mexico.

And in the last years the climate here has become wetter.  They get massive rains now in the summer and more rain in the winter as well.  So it's much greener and all the cacti are bigger.

Ajo, Arizona

Ajo town plaza

We woke in the night to the sound of heavy rain and the rain continued  until noon. So our plans for today's hike were changed to a trip into Ajo to Tacos Tarasco for lunch and the public library for wifi.  (There's wifi at the visitor centre but it's terribly slow.)

Ajo is a mining town that now seem to be mainly populated by retirees.  (The mine has closed.)  It has a beautiful plaza and lots of interesting Southwestern style public buildings

Visitor Center

and houses.

This looks like a former apartment turned into gallery (?), studio (but no windows?).

Those are ceramic totemic sculptures out front.

This is the Federalist church:

And this is the Catholic church.

Best of all, Ajo has a number of establishments named after its mine: the New Cornelia.

Also:

Alas the Cornelia Hotel is derelict.

But it's for sale!  Anyone want a big project to sink their money into and resurrect my namesake?

And here's Cornelia herself at the New Cornelia Mine.

Victoria Mine

 Our first day with no driving.  We hiked out to the abandoned Victoria mine right from our campground.  It was a 3 hour hike round-trip. We got a late start.  It was the wrong time for birds but we did manage to see our first verdin.  Bird of the Day!  Plus gila woodpeckers, cactus wrens and phainopeplas.

The mine was interesting enough for a destination

Ruins of mine store with the parks namesake cactus in foreground

and had beautiful views of the surrounding mountains.

Connie was here!

On the way back we found hiking in the sun a bit too hot even though it was probably only about 25 C at the hottest. We're still acclimatizing! We spent the rest of the afternoon recuperating in the shade.

It's the last day of the President's Day weekend so all the younger people cleared out in the morning and only the snowbirds remain. We've met people from Maine, Campbell River, California, etc. Only problem is we can't tell them apart. We all look alike! 

No sunset tonight but we have a hedgehog cactus in our campsite in the evening glow.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

 

We arrived at Organ Pipe at 9 am and snagged the first spot available for 1 week.  Only later we found out it was President's Day long weekend so we were lucky to get in.  Also Family Day in BC, a holiday I will never cease to bitter about.  All my working life I used to say we need a holiday in February to help us get through the long winter.  It finally got declared after my retirement and now I never remember that it even exists because it's just like any other day! 

We're so glad to finally stop driving we just got set up and put our lawn chairs out and relaxed for the rest of the day.  We were assigned an accessible site so we've got a liitle extra space for a tent pad and we're not so close to our neighbors.  And it comes with our own little resident cactus wren nest.

Later in the afternoon we walked down to the visitor centre to get a bird checklist and use the wifi (very slow) to update this blog.  It's a twenty minute walk each way through the desert so we got a little exercise.

We're happy to reconnect with all the usual desert birds: canyon wren, gila woodpecker, raven, curve-billed thrasher, ...  Now that we have the Merlin bird app, maybe we'll be able to distinguish it  by call from the other thrashers we have so much trouble identifying.  The checklist says they also have Crissal's and Bendire's thrashers.

But the bird of the day is the crested caracara, the national bird of Mexico, which can only be seen just north of the border.  We saw two feeding on a roadkill on the drive into the park.

In the evening we were delighted to attend a ranger's talk at the outdoor amphitheater.   These were a staple of my childhood and parks all over North America still have them, left empty and unused by fiscal restraints.  Only the national parks still keep it up. The last time we attended an evening talk was in Grand Canyon in 2015. 

Anyway the talk was about how the the ecosystem of the park has changed over the millennia.  I learnt a few things.  Like, they carbon date fossilized packrat nests to determine what the vegetation was during specific eras.  There's no fossils in deserts because no water but the packrats' urine does the job!

San Luis Reservoir to Ajo, Az

 

Our longest day of driving yet.  We turned east at Bakersfield and climbed up into the Tehachapi Pass, a really beautiful area of pines and live oaks. 

On the other side we descended to the Mojave desert - windmills and Joshua trees. 

At Barstow the road suddenly got packed; we'd joined up with the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon.  Another few hours of driving and we crossed the Colorado River. We were in Arizona. 

In the past we'd stayed in the overflow parking lot at Lake Havasu State Park, but when we arrived at dusk, on a Friday night, even the overflow was full.  So we drove out of town and ventured up a gravel road in the gathering darkness unsure of what we'd find.  What we found was a ton of rv's parked all over the place and we found a level spot to overnight in a little to close to the road.

In the morning we woke up to this:

We headed into town to attend to business: stocking up on groceries, filling up with water, repairing a tire, and then we were off to Organ Pipe National monument right on the Mexican border.  First we had to pass through Quartzite, boondocking capital of Arizona.  There's not much to recommend it, in my opinion, except for the free camping.  The desert here is pretty flat, dry and barren. 

They did have rain though, the brittle brush was blooming along the roadside.  We stopped at a rest stop where the hillsides were yellow with tiny flowers.

We'd already learned that the campsite at Organ Pipe was full for the weekend.  We had a free camping area nearby already picked out and found a site before the sun set.  Again too close to the road but we will be leaving in the morning.  

Compare this lush desert scene to Quartzite above:

We went for a walk as the sun was setting.

Bird of the Day:  A phainopepla was calling in the palo verde trees, and we saw an unidentified hummingbird, but this site was surprisingly devoid of birds.

Yreka to San Luis Reservoir

 

A day of steady driving.  We drove past Mt Shasta covered in snow.  The giant reservoir Lake Shasta was pitifully low.  Then down into the Central Valley where the almond groves were just beginning to bloom.  We heard on the radio that 80% off the world's almonds are grown here and that its big big business for the US bee industry.  There's also olive and orange groves and rice fields.  Further south the I5 veers up into the foothills where there's cattle and Sheep ranching. 

We arrived at San Luis Reservoir south of Modesto, CA, just at dusk, and set up in the dark.  When we awoke in the morning we found ourselves in a very pleasant campground underneath live-oak trees right by the lake. 

The reservoir was full due to recent flooding.  There was a boil water advisory, unfortunately, due to recent flooding.  I read on an info sign that the reservoir is home to hundreds of thousands of overwintering waterfowl but we were too late. They are already heading north. Still I saw scaups and ruddy ducks.