Field Trip

After a couple of grueling days of classroom lectures and demonstrations, today was a day in the field.  We were taken on a ranger-led hike to a popular attraction, balanced rock.  But unlike a hike up the canyon to the attraction with the family, we had a ranger along that new the name, the Latin name, of every plant we passed.  And we passed a lot of plants.  What would have taken most people just a few minutes to traverse took us well over an hour as we were treated to the identification and description of every plant we passed.



Cyndee and another classmate walking with our ranger of the day.

But it was not an all-botany trip.  The small, shallow canyon we were walking in had walls lined with curious rocks, looking as if they had been loosely stacked in preparation for a future project.

Lighting was difficult to manage as we were walking up this east-facing canyon just as the sun was about to rise over the ridge, but these rock jumbles still stick out.

We will soon learn that these rock formations are just about everywhere in the park.  There is a story about this that I will included in a later post.

While photographing the curious rock jumbles I spotted some movement in the distance.  I could tell it was a bird, a raptor but it was too far away for me to identify exactly what it was.  But in just a few seconds that was going to change.  As you will see from the series of photos below it would appear that the bird had spotted me too.  But instead of being shy and moving away from me and our little troop trudging through the canyon he (or maybe she) launched off its perch and headed straight for me.  And I can definitively say straight for me.  Just look at the pictures, this hawk is lining up with me as it crosses the canyon and goes straight over me all the while turning its head and looking straight into the camera.

It was a long way off and even with a 300mm lens the bird was barely visible.

But with good optics and a high resolution camera it makes it possible to do lots of cropping and enlarging.

I saw the hawk look at me and then turn to launch into flight in my direction.  That is when I started holding the button down on the camera.

Its blurry and several more after this one are too but still not bad for the distance, hand held and tracking a bird in flight.

Just a couple of wing beats and then glide on the wind.

Still a long way off but he is already looking directly at me.

No doubt now, this is a red-tail hawk.

He is getting pretty close now and in this shot is looking straight down the lens.

This one is my favorite.  At nearly directly overhead he stops flapping, cocks his head to one side and looks right into the camera.

By the time this shot was taken he had passed overhead and I was now bending over backwards trying to stay tracked in on him.

About two wing beats after this shot the hawk disappeared over the ridge of the canyon we were in.

I guess it is easy to tell, I like my bird encounters, especially the raptors.  But there was more to the hike.  We were not even half way to our goal of the balanced rock yet.

Most of the walk was a gentle slope up a shallow canyon but the last quarter mile requires a little climbing and attention to the trail as it gets hard to read going across the rock that forms a saddle.

That is Cyndee to the right of the group, lining up a shot back down the canyon we just climbed through.
The others include the ranger leading our group and fellow volunteers, some work visitor centers like us, some are campground hosts.

After climbing over some car-size boulders our goal comes into sight.  This is balanced rock.  Access to the rock is completely open.  You can walk right up to it, heck you can walk on it.


Looking southeast to the Sierra Del Carmen Mountains.

To get light in the right direction I moved around to the opposite side.

Getting around on the back side really highlighted the precariousness of this truck-size rock.

This was a pretty good way to spend a morning.  Our ranger got us back to headquarters by lunch time and once nourished it was time to return to the classroom.