Promised Desert Traipsing!

As promised yesterday, we did go traipsing about the desert, this time to the Harquahala Valley desert near Buckeye and Tonopah. We were joined by friends, Woodie and Margaret Mackie. Woodie had once found the elusive Ajo Lily in this are and we had as our goal finding these rare beauties. To be honest, I would not have put it past Woodie to make up a story about his finding these rare plants in the past, he's that kind of guy! But, it made a wonderful excuse for going to this area so I thought we would find what we would find and enjoy the day.

Here are some of the beauties we found in the Saddle Mountain area:



Brittle Bush - saw lots of these today!

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Cholla blossoms - These were not shot as a macro! The cholla are famous for being buzz kills for the entire day as they "jump" onto skin and clothing and are very difficult to remove from either!



These white flowers are still a mystery. I need to drag out my field manual for wildflowers and identify them. Woodie was guessing there were in the phlox family, I don't know. Anyway, we didn't see a lot of these, they were mainly limited in area.

Note, I looked up these flowers in my wildflowers of the southwest field guide and think they most closely resemble a member of the phlox family...close enough for me to assume that is what they are! Woodie guessed that when we saw them, I now agree with him.



These Mexican poppies were glorious today. They were quite abundant where we were.



Here we caught Woodie, on the ground, trying for the perfect backlit poppies. I tried this technique myself, but found it too hard to get back up!