Between Bluebonnets and Butterflies at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

I'm migrating west before starting my route north.  This lets me visit lots of friends and relatives, and to camp out.  Then I'll finally drive straight up and stop at one or more motels just before I reach my summer home.

Today I moved from Galveston, Texas to Dripping Springs, Texas, stopping at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center where I found spring in rushing toward summer.

As always, there is an air of excitement there, made more apparent today by both tours of senior citizens and and visits of school children, from toddlers to middle school.

There were a few bluebonnets still in bloom, but most of them had already set seed, which was rapidly maturing. Many other spring flowers were in bloom and summer blooms were starting to paint the landscape.

A senior tour. The man in the yellow shirt was the leader and seemed very knowledgeable 

Another volunteer talks to a school group at the beginning of their tour. 

The pond just before the entrance to the courtyard

This little water snake seemed to be stalking....

.....this frog

Athena the owl has had a nest with her mate at the entrance to the courtyard for the past seven years.
 I could only see one owlet today

What geometry

Bees and syrphid flies were busy

Lots of DYCs were blooming

View of the water tower

Bee collecting cactus pollen

This courtyard holds many themed beds showing habitats across Texas 

Caterpillars at the butterfly house

I was excited to see Clematis pitcheri just starting to bloom

Late blooming bluebonnets

Prickly pear cacti were getting glorious

Portrait of a prickly pear cactus bud

Prickly pear in bloom

I'm going to spend a long weekend with my daughter and go camping with her. Stay tuned.

I hope you are getting to enjoy spring where you live.

An Amazing Day at Enchanted Rock

As you drive Ranch Road 965 , you find yourself in the rolling hills of the Texas Hill Country, viewing a mix of fields and trees.  Suddenly your eye is caught by two huge pink granite formations.  Then you come around another corner or two and find the sign for Enchanted Rock State Natural Area.

I was longing to revisit this magical place again.  I've only been here twice before, once on a weekend camping trip with the Sierra Club, and once for a day hike by myself.  I slept in and didn't get here until about 9:00 but the day was exceptionally cool, although sunny,  and I expected to have a great hike.

I decided to do the Summit Hike first since it has no shade and I wanted to see the vernal pools that make up a special tiny ecosystem ,and wanted to see the view of the surrounding world from 425 feet up. 

Instead of walking straight to the top, then back down, I chose to wander around the dome and get off the path most people were following. I started finding the vernal pools, little ephemeral ponds that form microhabitats and host fairy shrimp, which hatch and grow, then the females lay eggs that survive the dry seasons between rains.  The plants are also interesting and form beautiful textures.  Some of the pools were dry and only supported plants, while others were mostly open water with only a few plants at the edge.

Contrast in the vegetation with a tiny light green plant growing along the edge and a darker green plant growing in the middle

Some pools contained taller plants

Trees even grew in some pool but these were dead

View down to Moss Lake

Instead of coming all the way back to the start of the Summit Trail and starting on another trail, I just cut across the batholith.  I enjoyed the views of the rock and, as I descended, found lots of eroded rock. While this area looks static at first glance, in geological time it is very active, with weathering causing layers to crack and peel off in blocks.

My next small adventure started on a rock face that looked kind of like the next picture - I didn't have time to take pictures while I was trying not to slide completely off.  The slope got too steep for me to comfortably walk, so I tried sitting down and immediately began sliding.  I was close to a rock seam that was full of shrubs so I grabbed them and worked my way down.





Then I saw that I was running out of rock and the underbrush was too thick to traverse,  so I started looking for an alternate path. My best chance appeared to be in a little fissure that made a small tunnel. I took it down to the almost dry creek bed and then cut the trail, although, at that spot, it wasn't really evident and was still pretty hard to navigate.

Looking back up at my escape tunnel

Yeah! I'm back on the trail -  if those old guys can do it, surely I'll make it

Soon I noticed a purple post and thought it marked the Turkey Pass trail but instead, it climbed sharply up to one of the climbing areas. There I found a group of high school students learning to climb and, I'm sure, in the process, develop self confidence. This was a dead end trail so I had to go back down and try again.

I was now on the north side of the batholith and mostly walking in shady woods. I saw several birds going about their lives while enjoying the steep climb up. Of course, I also had to climb back down, which sometimes was a little harder. At times, the trail again seemed to disappear and I was getting into steeper and steeper sections. I finally turned away from the batholith and caught the loop trail back  to the east side of the park.

A Bewick's wren singing his heart out

Sometimes the trail looked like this

And other times looked like this

Turning away from the rock led me to open meadows dotted with trees and full of wildflowers, with their pollinators. I spent a lot of time chasing butterflies as I could often see several species at once.

One of the painted ladies

The fallen rock becomes colonized into this

I found Moss Lake which was prettier at ground level than it was from the Summit

I think this is an American Painted Lady enjoying a wild onion bloom

I had another wonderful experience when I was almost back.  I looked down the trail and saw an animal turning off from the main trail to a side trail and disappearing. I had the impression it was raccoon.  I hurried to catch up with it and saw a beautiful black and white tail waving in the narrow trail through the wildflowers. I followed it as it went into one of the camp sites and  nosed around. I was watching it for several minutes but it never seemed to care that I was there. I'm sure it is adapted to being close to people and probably panhandles.

Ringed-tailed cat, a raccoon relative

I checked out the campground that is close to the parking lot and got one more view of Enchanted Rock in the afternoon sun with hikers still on it.  Then I went to Fredericksburg for a well deserved early supper at a German restaurant before heading back to my daughter's house.

I am currently in a motel room a few minutes out of Salt Lake City, Utah.  I was supposed to stay one more night at the Horsethief Campground, a BLM campsite near Island in the Sky.  But yesterday we had several showers and today was predicted to be colder and wetter. I woke up to frost, after the prediction was for forty-eight degrees, so decided to head up further north and stay in a motel.  This morning, I took two beautiful hikes, then stopped at the Moab library and edited my pictures, before heading out.  I left a sunny town, then drove through a few hours of rain and a little snow, and even followed a snowplow a short ways before arriving here. But tomorrow is supposed to be better so I'll check out Salt Lake before I head north.  But before you can see these adventures,  you'll have to see one more Texas adventure - my last paddle there for a long while. 

Search for the Lost Road at Big Bend Ranch State Park

We spent Wednesday, February 20 trying to find and hike on a road which shows on an old topography map of the area. Louis hadn't taken a waypoint off the map so we just guesstimated on where to start out.  We looked for features in the landscape and figured out where it must go.  Finally, after about a mile of walking, we began to see signs of it. But some of the most fun on the hike was just cutting across the country, which was easy to walk through, then climbing up a couple of hills to see the view from higher ground.

Looking for chert - we found some that was worked in this area

I love seeing how nature arranges garden elements.  The arrangement comes from the weathering of mountains into boulders and rocks, wind blowing in sands and dust, and seeds arriving, some of which find a niche in which they can grow.  Wildlife eats and processes seeds, then plants them beside boulders or under shrubs. Cows and other animals carry seeds from one place to another and some of those places give the seeds a chance to make new plants and new plant combinations.  Each year the area looks a little different as some plants die, and others begin life. And some places are so naturally beautiful, I want to try to recreate the scene, or some of its elements, in a garden. .

An view early in our cross-country hike

A rock garden on top of the first rocky hill I climbed

From this first hill, I was finally able to see a piece of the lost road and we started up it.  Lewis knew our destination was a dammed up pond. We also found places where the gulleys had been blocked to cattle and goats with stone fences. The tops of the hills were rocky enough that goats and cows couldn't cross, so they were used to make huge pastures.

View from hillside

There was one beautiful view after another

Rainbow cactus

Sotol with bloom stalk

 At the end of the road, we climbed the dam,  to find a dry bed.  Some  flowers  and grasses were growing at the edge of the dry pond.  Some some spots were wetter, and held the prints of the longhorn cows, who, by the dryness of the cow patties, had been there several months before.(The park has a small, historic herd of longhorns.) Other places were so dry that the soil had cracked 

Cracked earth

Flowers growing on the edge of the pond

We ate lunch on the far side of dry pond, where there were rock chairs. After lunch, the beautiful, rocky hill behind us beckoned and several of us climbed up it to see the different plants growing on it and to get long views across the landscape.

Our lunch spot

A surprising fern growing on among the boulders on the hill

Louis almost to the to of the hill behind our lunch spot

A look down on the pond

The second agraita - this growing on the rocky hill

Susan taking a rest

On the way back, Lewis again tried to follow the old road to the intersection of the road we  on which we had driven in.  But that end of it had completely disappeared into the landscape.This outing taught me that it is possible to study topographic maps and then travel using landmarks. (As a child, I used to to this all the time, but without maps - I just generally knew where electric lines, roads and streams ran and reoriented myself when I got to them. )  It makes a more fun way to travel, provided you can work your way through the brush.
And John and I decided to again cut across the land to the site of the car.  He had set a waypoint, so, even though we couldn't see the car, we knew where it was  And when we were on higher ground, we saw Natalie leaving. She had hiked on the road until she got tired and then driven back to camp. She had a lingering cough and fatigue from a light case of the flue and spent a lot of time sleeping.

The most amazing thing I found on this hike was this flower - perhaps the smallest I've seen in bloom, other than duckweed.  It was about 100 yards back from the car and was the only plant of its kind I could find in the area. It most looked like a Primula but that is SO not the habitat for them. It was growing in dry, gravely/sandy soil.

A single tiny flower growing in dry gravelly ground

I took the following picture to give an indication of its size. The entire plant was less than a quarter. Sorry for the poor focus.  I got a little closer than my lens would focus.

My next post SHOULD be about the exciting and wonderful tour we took down into Fresno Canyon in  a 4-wheel drive van. But I managed to leave two charged batteries at camp so got no pictures. But, if you visit the park, be sure to take one or more of the tours back into history - both the history of the people who have lived in this canyon, and the history of the earth. At least I did get to go - I wasn't supposed to because the tour only holds six people, but Natalie had had a relapse the day before and was afraid she might be infectious and was really too tired go anyway. So I got her spot. But on Friday, we  took what was my favorite hike to overlook the Fresco Canyon and the Flatirons in the Solitario. My header picture is from our view into the canyon.