A Little Pet

 The kids were delighted to go see their friends' pet yesterday. What was it? Oh, just your regular, friendly 'ol pet. Or maybe not. It wasn't a dog. Or a cat. Or a fish. Or a guinea pig. Or a turtle. Or an iguana. Nope, they had a...

 ...pet rat. And the kids could not wait to hold it.

 I tried not to show my expressions as they experienced the wonder of holding a rat, feeling its whiskers brush their fingers, watching its ears twitch...

 ...or letting it climb up on their heads. Both kids had to do this. I just kept my mouth shut and pressed the shutter button.

This might not have been my idea of a good time, but they definitely thought it was.

And with that, have a good day!

Desert Destination: Tule Hardpan and Fossil Mountain

After our recent rock climbing adventure on the Ibex Crags, we took out the bikes and headed out on the Tule Hardpan, also known as the Ibex Hardpan. If you've never ridden a bike on a hardpan (playa), it is the bomb. You can go anywhere you want, it's perfectly flat, and it just feels great. The last time we biked on this hardpan, Desert Boy was just a toddler and we had an alien experience (click the link to see more!).

Desert Girl gave the playa a try on her little bike with training wheels, but soon decided she'd rather ride with mom. I guess I should add that when I say perfectly flat, I don't mean perfectly smooth. The playa has plenty of mud cracks, and it's best not to have super inflated tires or you will have a bumpy ride.

 So while my husband took a rest, the rest of us rode around the "island", a projection rising from the middle of the playa. Someone had planted three flag poles on the top, which seemed rather out of place to me. I'm not sure if it's some group or remnants from when they filmed part of the movie John Carter out here (which I have yet to see). As I noted in another post, playas have all sorts of uses.

 Someone had dug out a low spot on the playa, which gathered water for animal use. Desert Girl just barely resisted getting wet.

 After our little bike ride (which I could have continued much, much longer--did I mention how much I like riding on playas?), we packed up the bikes and headed around the south end of Ibex Crags and the Barn Hills to Blind Valley. Our destination?


The mighty Fossil Mountain, in the south Confusion Range. Nearly the entire mountain is made of fossils! Here's a link to a very brief geology of the mountain. Many of the fossils are from the Lower Ordovician Pogonip Group and include brachiopods, cephalopods, trilobites, and echinoderms. Dr. Lehi Hintze (who wrote the marvelous Geology of Millard County) and his coworkers used the area to establish fossil zones for rocks of this age that are a reference to paleontologists all over the world. He noted that because this area was at the edge of a sea, the wave action caused many of the fossils to be in pieces.

 We drove to the end of a four-wheel drive road and then headed up the wash towards the mountain. It didn't take us long to start spotting fossils.

 Here's a cephalopod.

 I'm not sure what this is, but it looked pretty. I wish I knew more about paleontology, because I mainly just look for pretty things but don't understand much about what they mean. Nevertheless, I appreciate that very different things used to live here, and that the landscape has changed so much over the millennia (although I'm looking for a word that means even bigger time changes--geologic time is so hard for my mind to grasp!).

We happily spent about an hour looking around.

Someday we'll have to hike all the way up the mountain. Summitpost says that it takes about two hours;  I think it would take me longer because I'd be stopping frequently to look for fossils!

Sleepy

This is how I felt a lot this week!

Desert Girl's wearing her tutu--she insists on a dress almost every day and dances around the house. it is  so cute.

Desert Girl is at the stage where afternoon naps don't always happen, so sometimes she just plays until she passes out--wherever she is, and then sleeps the rest of the day and the night. It's an awkward stage.  And it can make for some memorable temper tantrums.

We are enjoying some wonderful warm weather, and the garden is starting to look good. I'll post an update soon. But for right now, I'm going to take a cue from Desert Girl!

New Food: Green Smoothies

First, we have some winners! The winners of a free digital magazine subscription from Zinio are: Sara H., Susie R., Gayle R., Jeff N., Andrew S, Shae, Moi A., Lila A., and Andrea. Congratulations! You'll be receiving an email soon.

Now, on to some green stuff.

If you would have asked me a year ago to make green smoothies and feed them to my family, I would have laughed and thought, Ew, that's just too much of a nature nut thing. 

But just a few days ago, I was ready to give them a try. 

What changed? 

Well, since we've been eating more real foods and a lot fewer processed foods since the beginning of the year, I've felt great. I've had lots of energy, have hardly gotten sick, and have had fun experimenting with food. 

I've come across some very inspiring websites and blogs. One is Unconventional Kitchen, which has a 30-day Love Your Greens Challenge starting May 1. It's free and promises to double your energy, get your glow, and rock your skinny jeans. 

I'm ready to rock my skinny jeans, for sure. Even though I've been eating healthier, those winter pounds haven't come off, and I'm not thrilled with them.

So I signed up, and the welcome email had a recipe for a pineapple-grape-banana-spinach-yogurt-lime and water smoothie. I had all those ingredients, so I pulled out the old blender and put them all in. I wasn't so sure about the spinach part, but went ahead and followed the recipe, blending all the ingredients. Lo and behold, we ended up with a big container with an Incredible Hulk hue to it. It was a little bit scary. It was a little bit exciting. I grabbed the camera. Maybe this would turn out worthy of a blog post.

I gingerly poured the smoothies into several cups. Then I had Desert Boy try it first. I was too much of a wimp, too scared to find out what drinking spinach would be like. He took a little taste and smiled. I let out a sigh of relief. Maybe this was doable. Then Desert Girl gave it a try. She liked it too. Then it was my turn. I worked up my nerve and took a sip. It was better than I expected. When my husband came home, he also tried it and liked it. We poured some of the smoothy mixture into popsicle molds and downed the rest. Maybe this would be worth repeating.

I was out of grapes, but had strawberries, so two days later, I repeated the recipe with smaller amounts of everything.

Desert Girl was an eager helper as we blended up the ingredients. It took a long time to get those frozen strawberries blended! We still have to learn the art of blending.

Being a chicken again, I let Desert Girl do the first taste testing.

She drained it! We all enjoyed some and had enough left over for me to finish off the next morning at breakfast.

So far our green smoothy experiment is going well. I'm looking forward to the 30-day challenge and expanding my eating horizons. If you'd like to do it with me, I'd welcome the company!

For those of you experienced with green smoothies, what's your favorite recipe?

Desert Destination: Titus Canyon, Death Valley National Park

Happy Earth Day! Here's a post where you get to see plenty of earth: Titus Canyon, one of the most popular backcountry drives in Death Valley National Park. I had visited the canyon about 16 years ago and wanted to see it again.

After a lovely night in Beatty and a quick stop in Rhyolite, we headed down the pavement towards Death Valley National Park. We took the road marked as the Titus Canyon turnoff, prepared for a 27-mile adventure. The road is one-way except for the last three miles.

The beginning was a typical gravel road with creosote bushes and other desert plants on both sides. It didn't take long to get to some spectacular scenery. I stopped and took photos several times, trying to capture the variety of colors in the mountains.

At one of the stops, we could see the road leading up to Red Pass, with the red road cut giving an indication of the origin of the name. We would be on that road soon, and I was very glad we were driving the truck and not the van. The road is designated as high clearance, and I would agree with that. 

The road was in good condition and seemed plenty wide enough. Granted, I've driven some scary 4x4 roads, so it takes a lot to intimidate me. I did put the truck into 4x4 so it wouldn't bounce so much on the uphill.  I thought we'd see a lot more flowers, but we saw relatively few.

Here's looking back from near the top of red pass at the road we had just traveled. Wow, what great mountains! I would like to hike more of that terrain someday.

I've biked much of this Titus Canyon road before, which was wonderful. If you want an even more in-depth view, you could enter the Titus Canyon Marathon. It used to be held in February but due to a number of years when storms washed out the road and they had to reroute the marathon, they've changed it to December of this year, limited to 300 participants. Hmmm...

Descending from Red Pass, we soon entered Titus Canyon proper. I had fun guessing where exactly the road would go.

Before long we reached Leadville, a small ghost town. (Like the dirt bikes? Several people used them to go down the road, and they sure could travel a lot faster than the vehicles!)

Desert Girl did a little happy dance on an old foundation. I wondered how they had gotten all that cement to such a remote location.

A few buildings persisted, and we had fun peeking in them.

We could walk through one old shed.

Oh yes, this is a good adventure!

What a view out the window!

I don't think I would be cut out to be a miner in such a remote location.


We went over to a mine adit and walked up to the bat gate.

Inside was a culvert, and beyond that old timbers supporting the mine shaft. The miners had clearly spent a considerable amount of time and effort to make such a large shaft. It went beyond where my camera flash reached.


We continued on, with fantastic rock strata dipping in the same direction we were traveling.

As we continued to descend, the surroundings became much more canyon-y, and the rock layers continued to impress. Most of these are Cambrian age limestones.

As we rounded one corner, we saw some bricks. We couldn't tell what they were doing there, so we got out and walked over.

When we got closer, we still didn't know why the bricks were there.

A bit further on we saw some petroglyphs. A spring is nearby. We didn't stop, as the kids weren't terribly interested and we wanted to pass one vehicle that had stopped there. We saw about ten other vehicles on the road that day, and all the other drivers were quite polite and pleasant.

The canyon continued, wider than I had remembered. I couldn't wait to get to the good part--the narrow section!

Finally we were there. See how the rock has changed and now consists of huge breccia cemented into the bottom of the wall? I didn't notice while I was driving--I was more concerned about hikers in the canyon. To my surprise, we didn't see any--all the hikers in the rather full parking lot had gone over to nearby Fall Canyon.

It took us over two hours to get to this narrow section of the canyon, and Desert Girl had fallen asleep and Desert Boy was ready for lunch. So we didn't spend quite as much time appreciating it as I had planned. Oh well, it was still enjoyable.

The canyon ends rather abruptly, with a parking lot just outside it and then a washboardy road leading down to the highway. When we looked back from the highway, we couldn't even pick out which canyon we had come down--there are just so many canyons in Death Valley!

I'd definitely recommend this trip to anyone who likes the backcountry and a little driving adventure. Plenty of hike options lead off from the road, including Titanothere Canyon (before Red Pass), peaks from the top of Red Pass, upper Titus Canyon, and anything else that strikes your fancy. When the kids are older I hope we can return and spend a whole day in the canyon, checking it out more thoroughly.

Question of the day: What is your favorite canyon?

p.s. It's the last day to enter the Zinio Magazine Giveaway!