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:

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete