Bonehead's Traveling People

Me, Dan, and our friend Kathy went for a quad ride on Friday 3/18. What a nice ride it was. It was very warm out most of the time. We had a place in mind to where we were going. Back to a place where Dan had found a really neat crystal. Heres a pic of it in case you didn't see it in another blog post. This is something you would find at one of the vendors in Quartzsite. I guess you just don't find nice pieces like this laying around all the time. This is the view from where we went to "crystal hunt". The view of Quartzsite is real hazy and dusty. Not the nicest view this time. Not quite sure why its been so hazy out lately.

You can see Kathy out looking for treasures. I snapped the next couple of pictures because you can see the quartz veins in the side of the hills. I think they are really cool looking. Dan and I have seen a place where someone took a huge vein of quartz right out of the side of the hill. It was a wide vein and after it was taken out, we could see an long empty trench on the side of the hill where it had been. Facinating to know there is a machine that can do that. We really didn't find any real treasures this time out. Just some pretty quartz and some crystal "wanna be" stuff. As always I had to put a few flowers on here. They are starting to bloom. I am gonna guess at the names of these flowers. This time while writing I have my "Wildflowers of Arizona" book in front of me. I'm just comparing my pictures with what I see in the book and hope I'm writing the right thing here. This is a pink-flowered hedgehog. Not sure what this is. Eventually I'll figure it out. Beavertail Prickly Pear Now, we have been lucky enough to have seen 3 of these guys in the 5 years we've been coming to Quartzsite, Arizona. The first two were very shy, hid in their shells, then as we ventures away from them, they moved on. This guy was not shy at all. I took some pictures of him as he was just going about doing his "tortoise day". We never bothered him and I guess he didn't think we were a threat. He just "did his thing" and we watched. Here is a website to read about him or her. http://www.southwestwildlife.org/pdf/TortoiseGlance.pdf.

Good thing I have a decent camera so I could zoom in on him. I have no idea how old he is and don't know how to tell such a thing.

Sometimes he blended right in with the rocks. We did some geocaching on the way back home. There was a cache right by the cactus in the picture above. And we all loved this huge Palo Verde tree. See? Just because we are in the desert doesn't mean that we don't have trees. This one was a beaut! As it was sitting on the edge of a dry wash you can see where limbs and debre had washed up to the tree roots. And under the tree were homes where pack rats lived or had lived. This also the Arizona State tree. I sure hope anyone who reads this blog will enjoy the pictures. We just love being here and miss it when we venture back home to Bremerton, WA for the summer. I tried to get pictures of the little cotton tail baby bunnies, but they were way too fast. They sure were cute and there are lots of them now running about with mommy and daddy. They don't stop when they see us coming on the quad. At least the jackrabbits just stop and freeze thinking that we can't see them if they don't move. I get lots of good pictures of them when we're lucky enough to see one. Mostly we all keep our distance from each other and us and the wildlife just goes on about "life as usual".