Canning Peaches

Our peach trees weren't impressive this year, but fortunately a lady down the road had an overabundance of peaches and was willing to share. Desert Boy and I went down to gather some (it wasn't easy because Desert Boy kept trying to climb up the ladder after me). Back home I separated peaches into ripe, not ripe, and bruised.

I put the bottles and lids through the dishwasher to prepare.

I turned on every burner on the stove and got out my big pots. Then I dug in and started processing peaches--canning them, making jam, and even making a peach pie. It was long and hot work. 

But seeing the results makes me happy. We'll have plenty of peaches and peach jam all winter long!

Desert Destination: Four-wheel Driving

Every Monday we visit a desert destination.

Yesterday morning we cleaned, so we were ready for something different in the afternoon and decided to do a little sightseeing in some nearby hills. (Hills around here are just smaller mountains, generally only  a few thousand feet higher than the valley floor rather than over a mile higher than the valley floor.) We got into the truck and headed out.

The truck was a narrow fit through one section, but for the most part the road we chose was in good shape.

You can see the fields in the background, so we aren't too far from the ranch. We were feeling a little adventurous, but not too adventurous. After all, it was a hot afternoon and we didn't have much gumption.

Desert Boy loved all the jostling as we went over the rough road. I wasn't quite so fond of it, so I jumped out to take some photos. Having a camera close at hand is a good excuse for a lot of things, like getting out of bumpy vehicles and taking extra breaks when hiking. 

I told my husband I wanted to look at the vegetation, but as you can see in the photo, most of the vegetation is really brown now, after a rather dry summer. I was hoping if I looked around long enough I might find something interesting.

I did manage to find this cute cactus growing out of a little hole in the rock. It won't be able to get too much bigger.

A few white flowers were growing off this green mat of leaves on a rocky area. I still haven't figured out what they were, but the bright green leaves and long stems were distinctive. (Note: 9/29/08: This is Petrophytum caespitosum, in the Rosaceae family.)

I even found some pretty yellow flowers to help brighten up the landscape. 

These hills are really dry, with no streams or springs. This is some of the typical desert landscape, tall cliffs, scattered pinyon and juniper trees, and lots of sagebrush, Mormon tea, and shadscale. After driving awhile we stopped and took a nap. Desert Boy was the one who inspired us, he had already fallen asleep. 

After our nap and flower break it was time to get back in and see where else the road led to. We felt like rugged explorers. Except that we were in an air-conditioned truck with cushioned seats and plenty to eat and drink. And we had just taken a nap. It's tough being an explorer these days.

Signs of Fall

Yep, it's hard to believe, but summer is fast coming to an end. I'm seeing so many signs of that around me. The rabbitbrush is blooming, putting out its beautiful yellow flowers. The are so pretty, but I find that I'm slightly allergic to them, so they stay outside. They're a happy looking flower, though, brightening the landscape when so many other flowers have lost their inflorescences and turned brown.

The rose hips on the rose bushes are bright and red. Supposedly you can make a tea from them, but I haven't tried that so far. I used to like roses until I came out here and had to bash my way through them to get to the creeks. They grow so thick that it's an adventure in getting scratched. I suppose that they beat poison ivy.

I'm hearing more and more geese as they stop by for some food and a rest as they travel south. They nearly always travel in flocks and their loud cries make me smile. The sandhill cranes seem to be flying around more now too, and my husband has called them pterodactyls so many times that now I seem to have adopted that name for them. Yikes. Many of the other birds have quieted down because they aren't looking for mates, so hearing these squawkers is refreshing. Little Desert Boy has developed an eye for spotting birds.

The yellow school bus is out and about early every morning and in the mid-afternoon, picking up and delivering the school kids. They are so excited to be back in school so they can see their friends, many of whom live far away. Aunt Tana drives one of the two buses for the community, spending several hours each day on the road to  get to the faraway ranches and three schools.

Here's one of the not-so-pleasant reminders of the end of summer: ragweed. It makes me sneeze like crazy. It's taken over the perimeter of my garden and the edges of the fields, so both my husband and I are in it daily and want to scratch our eyes out.

One of the best things about the end of summer is the cooler temperatures, especially at night, making it the perfect time to go camping. I'm still trying to convince my husband to go on a camping trip this fall. When we go camping, the most important thing is the food. We never skimp on the food. We eat more around a campfire in a day than we do in several days at home. Then we're so full we can't go hiking and just have to lay around and do nothing. That's my husband's ideal trip--eat and do nothing. He needs the rest after his busy schedule.

I'm noticing other signs of fall too, like the calves being weaned and brought into the feedyard, the brown tinge to the landscape, and a little frost on plants at higher elevations early in the morning. Fall is such a beautiful season in the desert and I'm really looking forward to it.

How to Find Water in the Desert

Your car broke down and now you're wandering through the desert (even though you should have stayed with your car, but we'll ignore that for now). You've run out of water and wonder what you can possibly do to find some to quench your overpowering thirst. You take out your laptop with your satellite connection and find this blog, which has the answer. Thank goodness, you will survive!

It's just a matter of becoming acquainted with the right plant. In this case it's a shrub called black greasewood (Sarcobatus vermiculatus). Greasewood has a long tap root and reaches down to the water table. Sometimes this tap root can grow more than 20 feet deep, but often it's less than 10 feet deep, especially when you see quite a few greasewood plants as in the photo above.

Greasewood grows in many areas of the Western North America and is easy to spot with its bright green color. It usually is found in the cold deserts and on slightly saline soil. 

In this photo we can see the small staminate flowers on the greasewood plant, looking like little cones. The pistillate flowers are generally found in leaf axils below the staminate flowers, and wind pollinates the plant. Winged seeds can blow almost one-half mile away.

Not all is nice with greasewood, though. It has sharp thorns that can puncture a tire, so if you're driving near it, watch out. These thorns help protect the plant from overgrazing.

One of the neat things about greasewood is that the leaves are deciduous, so they fall off in the winter or when it is too dry. The plant then becomes rather dreary looking in the nearly monochrome desert vegetation community. If you happen to get lost in winter you'll have to look a little more to find this shrub. When you do, start digging. You probably think I'm just saying this for fun and it's all theoretical, but it really works. My husband has dug in several greasewood stands to develop springs for cattle, and nearly always he's found water. 

So I don't recommend going out and getting lost in the desert and running out of water, but just in case you do, you'll know what to do. Just make sure you have a shovel in your survival kit so you don't ruin your nails. Or even better, use a backhoe like my husband.

The Golden Glow of Sunflowers

It's obvious that summer is coming to an end because the sunflowers are blooming. The yellow of the sunflowers will soon be seen in the yellow of the school buses and the golden leaves that will fall off the trees. The sunflowers, along with rabbitbrush, curlycup gumweed, and several other yellow-blossoming plants, make me feel a tiny bit sad because they indicate that the days are getting shorter.

On the other hand, sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers because they always seem to be happy flowers. No matter how their day is going, they look perky and ready for whatever is coming their way.

Their bright color and habit of following the sun across the sky while in the bud stage (called heliotropism) makes me smile. This flower is practically dancing the way it can move.

I had the opportunity to observe these sunflowers at a birthday party at a small reservoir near our house. I'll be talking more about the party in a later post. The sunflowers are growing above the high water line, so you can see that the lake has shrunk quite a bit. That's common every year due to evaporation and use of the water for irrigation.

Okay, I couldn't help it, I took a lot of photos of these sunflowers! The late afternoon sun illuminated them from behind, and the bright blue desert sky provided a good backdrop.

Here's a little pollinator on the sunflower (look on the right side of the brown part, and click on the photo if you want to see a bigger image). These late-blooming flowers allow many species to survive later in the year.

Sunflowers are part of the Aster family, the largest family of flowering plants in the world, with over 20,000 species. North America has 2,500 species, including some common flowers like daisies, coneflowers, and Black-eyed Susans. Marigolds, chrysanthemums, and dandelions are also Asters. Want to eat one? Try lettuce or artichokes, also members of this huge family.

One of the neat things about sunflowers is that each flower is actually a composite of many flowers (the family name used to be Compositae). The brown disk in the middle is made up of many individual flowers, and each of the yellow ray flowers that come off the disk is also a flower.

Okay, you've seen enough of my obsession with sunflowers. So what do you think of when you see a sunflower?

Finding an Apricot

This past spring, the huge apricot on the side of our house was filled with beautiful apricot blossoms. We were hopeful that we would get a crop, because last year we had a late freeze and didn't get any apricots. But alas, we also had a late freeze this year, and so we resigned ourselves to another apricot-less year.

However, one day I was walking in the yard and a bit of orange caught my eye. I looked closer and found it wasn't one of Henry's chew toys, it was an apricot! I did a little dance of joy and picked it up, devouring it quickly. Apricots are one of my favorite fruits.

I looked up at the tree and saw that although there weren't apricots in the lower branches, the higher branches had a few of the brightly colored fruit. Early settlers to this area planted apricot and other fruit trees to feed themselves and the miners that were searching the desert for riches. This particular tree is about 50 years old.

I'm not the only one who likes the apricots, the birds are continually up in the tree. This apricot has a peck mark from a bird. Due to the long fall, many of the apricots are bruised, so I have to eat them quickly. It's such a hardship.

I have other competition for the apricots--Henry and Desert Boy. Both seem to like apricots a lot, and for awhile I was worried about Henry's lack of appetite for his dog food. Then I discovered that I was finding pits under the apricot tree and not apricots--because he was eating them. 

This time Desert Boy gets the apricot and hurries off to enjoy it. We planted a variety of other fruit trees a couple years ago, but the late freeze got everything except the apples. We should be enjoying them in a couple months. I can hardly wait.

Desert Destination: Wheeler and Jeff Davis Peaks

Towering over the Great Basin Desert is Wheeler Peak at 13,063 feet, the peak slightly right of center in the above photo. The trailhead begins at about 10,000 feet, with a well-marked trail weaving through groves of aspen, sub-alpine meadows, patches of Engelmann spruce and limber pine, erratic groupings of stunted trees called krummholtz, and finally large amounts of big boulders called talus. The 3,000 foot hike up the mountain is not easy, but someone in relatively good shape can make it in half a day. I've climbed Wheeler Peak several times, but I've never climbed its sister peak, Jeff Davis, on the left side of the above photo. Jeff Davis has no trail to it, is about 12,770 feet high, and it's been on my to do list for a few years. So today's destination involves these two peaks in one massive hike.

So the plan was to climb Wheeler Peak, and then go across the ridge to Jeff Davis. Sounds simple, right? We started up Wheeler at a nice steady pace. The spectacular views of the valleys on either side, other mountain ranges, and flowers like this Parry's primrose (Primula parryi) kept our minds off the steadily decreasing oxygen.

About half way up the trail becomes a little harder to find as it enters a talus field. The trail ascends the steep ridge right up to the top of the peak. Some rain moved in, and because we had gotten a late start, we were passed by people who had already summited and now were on their way back down with big smiles on their faces.

It was amazing how many tiny wildflowers were nestled among the rocks. This is an alpine paintbrush (Castilleja nana). Close to most of the flowers were an array of pollinators, including flies, bees, and butterflies. We also saw some birds like rosy-finches and rock wrens.

After about three hours we made it to the top and were rewarded with this view looking south. The South Snake Range has many peaks over 11,000 feet. The snow covered area in the foreground is part of a glacial cirque, with a rock glacier at the bottom of it. A rock glacier is basically a piece of ice that has a layer of crumbled rock over it that acts as an insulating blanket, protecting the ice from warm temperatures and solar radiation.

A really spectacular view of a rock glacier came after we had a snack and started over on the ridge to Jeff Davis. This rock glacier is quite long and near the end of it a grove of bristlecone pines can be found. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you may be able to see a couple pools of turquoise water about halfway down the rock glacier. I've never seen them before, and am very curious about why they are there and how they formed.

Here's a photo of the cliff side face of Wheeler Peak. The rock is very loose Prospect Mountain Quartzite, a metamorphic rock. Incredibly, some people have climbed this face, despite the huge amount of crumbly rock. There's a good reason that a rock glacier exists below--plenty of rock is added by the mountain each year.

Here's a view of one of my hiking partners working her way up Jeff Davis, with Wheeler Peak in the background. The ridge between the two was longer than I had expected, and I started getting a bad headache. That's a classic sign of elevation sickness (or as one person put it, altitude poisoning). I had never really had elevation sickness before, and I wasn't liking it. The best thing to do is go down, but one side was a cliff face; behind us was Wheeler Peak, even higher; and to the other side was a steep talus slope that led to a long hike out. So we kept heading ahead to Jeff Davis Peak.

I wasn't enjoying the view that much because I felt icky, but I managed to snap a couple photos, and I'm glad I did, because the scenery was spectacular and I can enjoy it now. Clouds and a sporadic light rain kept the temperatures wonderful, and we lucked out and didn't have much wind. When we got to the top of Jeff Davis I laid down and took a quick nap and that made me feel a little better and ready to start down.

This was the way down, over 2,000 foot descent on talus. That green patch at the bottom is trees, but the trees are so far away you can't even make out individual ones. I got dizzy looking at the whole slope, so I just focused on where to put my feet. And foot by foot, we made our way down.

As the oxygen thickened I felt better and even took time to stop and admire this blue columbine (Aquilegia scopulorum), with some daisies (Erigeron species) in the background. At one point on the talus we could hear water moving underneath, but we couldn't see any. 

After about 10 hours of hiking we finally made it back to the vehicle. We all decided that we never again wanted to descend Jeff Davis down the steep talus slope, it was too steep and unsteady. But overall it was a beautiful hike, and a good warmup to another 10 hour hike a couple days later that included four mountain peaks. I'll save that story for another day!