2024 Adventures

Updated: Dec 31, 2024

January

Not much happening here this month. Just cold and snow.

It was a nasty cold morning as I went out to shovel my sidewalks and driveway, about -5 deg F (-20 deg C). I was wearing my warmest gloves, but my fingers were burning/stinging by the time that I was finished, so out of curiosity I decided to take an Infra-Red (IR) photo of my fingers to see what temperature they were. Certainly they warmed up a little bit by the time I found my IR camera and took the photo, but nonetheless, they were still quite cold! The temperature varied from 92 Deg F at my wrist, to 61 deg F on my index fingertip, and I was quite surprised that 61 deg would be so painful.

At sunset there was a faint rainbow high in the sky due to frozen ice crystals in the atmosphere which were refracting the sunlight:

 

February

I have a camera pointed toward my driveway, and enjoy seeing what comes and goes during the night. Mostly raccoons, a variety of cats, several rabbits, some foxes that appear every few months (possibly hunting for those rabbits), and over the years there have also been a couple of bears.

Here's a short little video of a couple of foxes out hunting for an early-morning snack:

Fresh snow and a clear blue sky. What a marvelous combination!

But not so marvelous to me when there is no blue sky.

What a bizarre cloud formation at sunset!

Aliens arriving in some sort of sky chariot? (no self-respecting alien would be caught in a flying saucer... they are so passé) Or maybe it's just a big pink rabbit.

 

March

Yippee! Cruising across Colorado on a road trip, approaching the Continental Divide, headed westward:

Northeast of Moab, Utah, the rock formations in the foreground are called Fisher Towers, with the La Sal Mountains in the background:

Lovely red-rock formations along the Colorado River, northeast of Moab, Utah:

Heading into the astonishingly spectacular red-rock beauty of Monument Valley, near the Arizona/Utah border. This is a stunningly beautiful place to visit, but Monument Valley must be a very challenging place to live.

I happened to pass by the London Bridge, which is now located on the Colorado River at Lake Havasu City.

A cool, shady hillside oasis with a small stream, in Joshua Tree National Park:

Joshua Trees. Very funny looking! They are an extraordinarily tall variety of yucca, with some reaching a height of around 20 feet.

A plentiful crop of wildflowers in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park area of Southern California. Brilliant colors. Not a lot of variety, but there are certainly a lot of flowers!

The taller yellow flowers tend to dominate the scene at a distance, but there are other flowers hiding amongst them:

Some brilliant artistry on display along San Diego harbor:

A very chilly ocean breeze had people covering up at San Diego's Mission Beach in mid-March:

Bountiful heaps of wildflowers blooming along the highway near Gila Bend, Arizona:

Cruising down the road south of Ajo, Arizona. Several ajo-shaped peaks around here:

I took hundreds of photos of flowers and landscapes on this March road-trip, but it's just not practical to try to show more than a few samples for this yearly-summary web page.

Magnificent cactus bloom in Organ Pipe National Monument, only a few miles north of the US/Mexico border. My overly-active imagination sees a many-fingered gloved hand reaching up out of the center:

A small stream in Sabino Canyon, Tucson, Arizona:

Some of the wildflowers blooming in Sabino Canyon in March 2024:

Oh my... these are nasty! That curve easily hooks into the skin, and they don't want to let go! You might be able to guess why this is called Cat's Claw Acacia:

Lots of lovely orange poppies along the edges of arroyos:

Penstemons happily blooming in the middle of a very dry arroyo:

A close-up of the penstemons:

 

April

Some wildflowers are beginning to pop up here in Colorado:

Two owl chicks hiding in an old cottonwood tree:

Good moisture for the flowers, but not so nice for hiking.

Lovely blue sky day for hiking in late April, near Boulder, Colorado:

The two owl chicks are much larger this week:

The chicks have parental supervision today. Or maybe I'm the one being supervised. Very intense eyes!

A great day for hiking in the phallic foothills south of Boulder, Colorado:

 

May

This amusing little creature, about half an inch long, was staring at me through my kitchen window, so I decided it was a photo opportunity. How can it grab ahold of a glass window?

I don't think I ever noticed this particular flower before... some kind of BlueBell, but opened up much wider than other bluebells:

As an experiment, I tried to photograph the lightning inside of a growing thundercloud. It sort of worked, but  I never got a great shot:

The month of May ended poorly for me.

I fell backwards from a friend's kitchen, through an access hole, down into the crawl space beneath her house. I was pretty beat-up from the fall, with a very large swelling on the back of my head, a concussion, a very painful neck, lots of nasty pains in my ribs, a painful compression fracture of the lower spine, and huge bruises on both hips. Thankfully, none of the injuries were life-threatening. The bill from the Boulder hospital ER was over $25,000. Yikes. Fortunately, my insurance only required me to pay a few hundred.

 

June

My roof was damaged in hail storm, and I hired a local company called West Pro to put on a new roof. The workers were not very tidy, but the roof seems to be ok, and they cleaned up most of their mess before leaving.

And as a part of getting the new roof, they also installed new gutters and downspouts. Bizarrely, the installer chose to put a downspout extension across my sidewalk. Brilliant!

And after the roofing work was finished, I noticed that the bathroom fan didn't work anymore. Heavy sigh. The roofers managed to drop all this rubbish down the fan vent pipe and it jammed the fan outlet closed:

All the ducks in  row. Mama sure had a lot of babies! A dozen!

I'm always amazed to see so many different varieties of cactus in the Colorado mountains. Here's a large yellow prickly-pear flower, about 3 inch (75 mm) diameter:

Mariposa Lily, about 2 inch (50 mm) diameter, with one drop of dew:

Deptford Pink wildflower, about half an inch (1 cm) diameter:

July

An interesting wildflower called a Blazing Star, a little over 3 inch (75 mm) diameter:

Ugh. Just as many of the aches, pains and wounds from that nasty backwards tumble into a crawl space under a friend's house at the end of May were healing and I was beginning to feel a bit better, a spider bit me on the back of my right leg. In the first day, the bite was just a little red spot.

But by the second day, it was bigger red spot, and by the third day, the bite site was full of pus, I had a rash, and my leg and ankle were swelling rapidly.

I went to an urgent care center, where they gave me an antibiotic injection and a prescription for some additional antibiotic pills. For a couple of days, the infection was diminishing and I thought that everything was on the mend.

But, alas, it turned out that I was allergic to the sulfa antibiotic and soon had a rash over my entire body and a high fever. Ugh.

Fortunately, it only took a couple of weeks to heal from that whole spider bite/allergic reaction fiasco, and get up into the mountains for a hike. This is a favorite meadow of wildflowers along Long Lake:

The area around Long Lake has a phenomenal array of Indian Paintbrush colors, from almost white to pink to brilliant red, and every possible shade in between:

Oh my, two forest fires burning today. The closest of the fires is a little over 15 miles northwest of my house, and the other one is about 35 miles north-northwest:

 

August

 A pretty day for a hike up to Ouzel Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park. The lovely creek near the start of the trail:

At Ouzel Falls:

A hawk sitting on my backyard fence, with his head on backwards:

On a hike at Hall Ranch, just outside Lyons, Colorado:

Hiking in the Brainard Lake Recreation Area, this is Diamond Lake, at an elevation of a little over 10,000 ft:

A ways farther up that same trail:

 

September

By mid September the shorter days and the very cold nights in the mountains have begun the fall-color show up above 7000 or 8000 feet elevation:. This is the view along the Peak-to-Peak Highway, north of Nederland, Colorado:

I was surprised to see these lovely white trumpet flowers still blooming while the trees are turning yellow. The plant is actually called Scarlet Gilia, and can have flowers ranging from white to pink to red, sometimes even multiple colors on the same plant:

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Along a trail at the Caribou Ranch:

Also at Caribou Ranch:

I noticed this interesting crab spider on a flower in a friend's kitchen. I wish there would have been more light on the back of the spider, because the red coloring on the back and arms was quite vivid:

 

October

Fall is so bittersweet. The fall colors are so magnificent (yay!), but they show that winter is on the way (ugh!).

 

Wow, what a treat. The Aurora Borealis is visible tonight here in the middle of Colorado, and is so bright that I didn't even need to go out of town to see it!

 

On a pleasant fall afternoon hike, I met this splendid Burdock flower along the Shadow Canyon trail, south of Boulder. The green spines look like the might be thorns, but they were soft and almost fuzzy feeling:

 

And as if the Aurora wasn't enough of a heavenly treat this month, a comet with long list of names (Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) was visible very shortly after sunset. I took this photo of the comet from my backyard with my Pixel phone camera:

More lovely colors along the Mesa Trail, south of Boulder:

 

 

 

November

It was a pleasant surprise to find these tiny Hoary Alyssum flowers happily blooming during the first week of November:

 

So far, the snow has stayed up in the mountains, as viewed from my backyard:

 

There were four coyotes walking up the Mesa Trail south of Boulder, as I was walking down the same trail. Two of the coyotes immediately heading off-trail when they saw me coming down "their" trail, but these two felt like standing their ground in the trail.

And while I was standing on "their" trail those first two circled around and got back on the trail behind me! Hmmm. At that point, with two coyotes in the trail in front of me, and two coyotes on the trail behind me, I was feeling a bit uneasy. Fortunately they eventually decided to move on, and hunt for something else for dinner.

 

A lovely sunset this evening!

 

Winter may be arriving. I was quite content with the above-average temperatures so far this fall.

 

My arm, after getting my Covid vaccination... apparently she hit a blood vessel:

 

Like fire in the sky tonight:

 

December

I drove down to Tucson for a few days of warmth and sunshine. Here's the start of a hike in Sabino Canyon:

 

So I asked him: "Which way should I go from here?" And the Saguaro replied by pointing in every possible direction:

 

I hiked over to Rattlesnake Canyon:

 

Then I went back over into Sabino Canyon where I strolled along the creek bed. Even though the steam is dry, the cottonwood trees are happily announcing the change of seasons in Arizona:

 

This silly Roadrunner ran to catch up with me on the trail, stopped beside me for a moment, and then cruised on up the road:

 

Quite a collection of arms on this saguaro:

 

Just meandering along a trail in the western part of Saguaro National Park:

 

After a fine week of hiking around Tucson, I headed homeward through Monument Valley:

 

Unfortunately, as I approached Moab, there was a nasty snow squall approaching. I pulled off the road at a gas station and waited about 45 minutes for the snow to quit.

 

Then I headed on up into Arches National Monument. The light was not typical desert sunshine, because there were still many snow clouds passing through, and it was very interesting to see the red rock formations with a dusting of snow:

 

 

Ugh... by the time I got back home, I had Covid! I had managed to hide from the plague for about 4 years, but eventually it found me:

 

Closed out the year with some brilliant sunsets:

 

That's all for 2024... Looking forward to lots more beauty in 2025!