Monday, May 16, 2011

Great Basin Grab Bag

This post has no theme other than photos I liked from my visit to Nevada. Whenever I could fit in time after work and running to go hiking, I would head up to Cave Lake State Park. On the evening I took this picture, the wind whistling through the pines and junipers died down for a couple minutes, I could hear silence.

View of the hill where Rose Guano Cave is located.

One of the butterflies I got to look at up close. I also saw what looked like Cabbage Whites, Mourning Cloaks, and Question Marks, in addition to little brown butterflies that I have no experience with.

This is the Snake Creek Road in Great Basin National Park where I saw the above butterfly.

I was excited to find an honest-to-goodness scorpion my last week. The little guy mostly wanted to get away and find somewhere dark. I was snapping the picture, looking at the camera, then I looked down at my hand and he was gone. That was a little disconcerting. I shook out my sleeve and my glove, and looked around, but I couldn't find him again.

The infamous raven pair, nesting in on a transmission pole.

Here is a photo Brad took of me climbing down from Rose Guano Cave. Climbing up was much easier. Getting down wasn't bad, once I got started.

We knew there were badgers in the valley. We kept finding active burrows and recent excavations, but had not seen a badger. Finally, one of our trail cameras caught this on film.

1 comment:

Kelly said...

Hey Ben, cool stuff! The butterfly might be either variable checkerspot or Edith's checkerspot, but I'm not exactly sure how their ranges line up with your location, nor do I really have experience with those species in the field. Nice badger.