Queen butterfly (Danaus gillipus). Closely related to the Monarch.
This is part 3 of a 3 part series. See part 1: Trees and part 2: Wildflowers. I took all these photos in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico.
Spear Globemallow (Sphaeralcea hastulata)
This is part 2 of a 3 part series. See part 1: Trees. I took all these photos in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico.
Inverted photograph from a pond at the Nature Conservancy plot down the road
It’s a really buzzy time because of the US elections, so rather than putting out some writing that’ll just get lost in the noise, I’m offering a 3-part series of photos. I had originally planned just one post, but have been taking so many pictures, I broke it into sections: Trees, Wildflowers and Insects.
I’m currently staying at a friend’s rural property in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico. If anyplace can be said to be the home-base in my nomadic existence, this is it. It’s in a remote, sparsely populated location. The pavement ends a mile further down, and the road dead-ends entirely a couple miles later at a campground in the Gila National Forest. From there you can be hiking in the Gila Wilderness in just a few minutes. Also down the road is an old farm owned by the Nature Conservancy where they’re doing passive restoration, where I take walks regularly. It’s also chill enough around here that you can just take off across the pastures to get to the river and nobody pays any mind.
So I’m blessed with a lot of space to explore, full of plants and other creatures, and I’ve been carrying my camera with me so I can share what I find. I hope you enjoy this 3-part visual offering of the more-than-human world.
View west from the Grand Mesa
In mid-August, I met up with Nikki Hill at a trailhead on the Grand Mesa. She was there to scope out sites for the field course she’s teaching next week, on Human-Landscape Relationships, Ecology, & Ethnobotany. Summer wildflowers were blooming and berries were coming on. Within earshot of our camp, a fork of Kannah Creek was babbling over the rocks on its journey down into the valley below. Birds and chipmunks twittered and squeaked. No traffic noises except the occasional passing car on the nearby gravel road. No light pollution but a few twinkling lights on ranches in the valley. Fresh air, scattered clouds, and lovely overnight temps. A truly idyllic spot.
But the star of the show was the view. In the far distance were the peaks of the La Sals range, over 100 miles away as the crow flies, in Utah. Below was the Grand Valley, which is part desert, part irrigated agriculture. On the other side of the Valley, and extending to the horizon, were the tumbled ridges and deeply cleft canyons of the Uncompahgre Plateau. The vista is startling in its expansiveness, like little else I’ve seen before. The sense of space is so vast, it almost feels like being at the ocean.
The rough terrain of the Uncompahgre Plateau was especially evident in the morning light:
View of Uncompahgre Plateau from the Grand Mesa
Milkmaids (Cardamine californica), a lover of disturbed places. I’ve seen it only along the roadside and nowhere else
I’m currently housesitting at a friend’s cabin in a remote part of northern California with Nikki Hill. The Klamath River has been brown and silty all winter due to the dam removal projects up stream (yay, dam removal!!). Where the Salmon River joins it blue and clear, the contrast is startling. See below:
Salmon River on left, flowing into the Klamath, right, whose flow is from bottom to top in this photo.
Flowers and new shoots have been popping (and butterflies with them), so here’s some of the photos I’ve been taking.
I exited social media early in 2023, and while my quality of life in general improved, I did miss a small number of people who I interacted with there. One of them is Joanna Pocock, a British author who I interviewed on my podcast twice (here and here), and who posted photos to her Instagram that I truly appreciated. She has a great eye for composition and her work is really worth looking at closely. Occasionally I posted my own photos especially for her. Some were call-outs to her subject matter, which often included scenes of urbanity and decay, and others were simply my attempts at creative arrangement I thought she would dig.
Had I still been on Instagram this year, I would have tagged Joanna on most of these. Some were taken specifically for her (many of the black and whites), and others jumped out at me as I reviewed this year’s roll. Someday I hope to take a walk around London with Joanna, taking pictures together, but in the meantime, I have these to share. They are arranged in order by date, from earliest to latest. Enjoy!
Painted Lady butterfly, bg: California Poppies
The other day (May 24, 2019), I saw a Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) near the town of Dinsmore, California. That’s in the northeast corner of Humboldt County, near the Trinity County line, just off the 36, on the edge of Six Rivers National Forest. The terrain is hilly, fairly steep and treed with Firs and Oaks of various species. Though this spot was only a little over 50 miles from the 101 to the west, it takes close to an hour and a half to drive there, due to tight curves and steep climbs. It’s out in the boonies for sure.
The butterfly had seen better days. One of their lower wings was over half gone and the others a bit raggedy-edged. Earlier this year, in southern California—specifically in Anza-Borrego State Park—I had seen thousands of them every day for weeks. There had been a bigger-than-usual migration (see here, here and here). For awhile there, I couldn’t drive anywhere without my windshield getting streaked with yellow and my grill filling up with dead bodies. Try as I might, it just wasn’t possible to avoid hitting them, there were so many. I felt a little less bad about it one day when I came out of a store and saw a couple of small birds on my bumper, gorging on the corpses.
Other times, sitting in the desert, a cloud of them would pass through, literally hundreds a minute, alighting on the many, many flowers and passing on. (A “superbloom” was in effect too.) For as many as there were, it was tricky to get good photos. They were shy of close human presence and never landed in one place for long. What I had to do was a pick a good spot and sit still with my camera turned on and pointed, waiting for one to flutter within focusing distance.
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Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)
I woke the other morning to the staccato sound of a Woodpecker pecking. He (I am guessing, based on appearance) was tap-tap-tapping on a dead branch on a nearby Oak. The rhythmic noise was not disturbing, even first thing upon waking, because I had been observing and appreciating this bird and his habits for the last few days on this particular tree. But the vibration also brought me sadness, as I knew the tree was not much longer for the world, and was in fact scheduled to be cut down that very day. Why? Such is agriculture. Read on…
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Hell’s Canyon rimland, July 2016
Since giving up farming a couple years ago, my interest in sustainable diets has only changed focus, not waned. Turning away from the domestic, I have been exploring wildcrafted food and medicine, including plants traditionally used by Native Americans. So this spring, when my former farming partner, Clara, invited me to visit northeast Oregon with her for the early summer harvest season of wild foods there, I was thrilled.
We spent six weeks in and around Hell’s Canyon on the Oregon/Idaho border, an area that’s abundant for foragers and has been for millennia. Fruit trees, berry bushes, wild roots and medicinal herbs can be found in profusion, mostly on public land. Most of this flora is native but some was introduced through European colonization. All of it is threatened to one degree or another by misuse of the land, both contemporary and historic, and by Climate Change. Indeed, every place we explored offered us a glimpse of the past and a taste of the future.
Acres of “Desert Gold” (Geraea canescens)
Over the weekend of March 12-13th, I visited Death Valley National Park in California for the spring bloom, which was considered to be especially impressive this year. I tagged along with a 2-day plant walk set up by the California Native Plant Society. The event was well-organized by a gentleman who knows the area well and scouted out prime locations ahead of time. I enjoyed the presence of botanists because I got positive IDs on everything we saw. They had their books and would key-out anything they couldn’t name off the top of their head, and they corrected each other on newer names.
One male-female couple on the trip had not been to Death Valley in three decades and the woman joked that they only visit every 30 years, and that she looked forward to coming again in another 30, when she’ll be 96. I was not part of the conversation so didn’t mention that its doubtful that all the flowers and plants we were seeing would still be there in 30 years, at the rate that the climate is changing. Even scientifically-minded people are not giving much thought to Climate Change.
