Big Morongo Canyon Preserve

This month, Christian and I decided to check out the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve as it is not too far away and is supposed to be a popular migration stop for birds. It is on the way to Joshua Tree, but tucked away in the little town. When we arrived, we were a bit skeptical because there were quite a few cars in the parking lot and camp area.

As we walked in though, you can tell the place is kept fairly nice. The area was beautiful but we were still a little wary of what we would find going in as we heard a lot of noise of machinery or a loud vehicle in the distance. Christian got a neutral density polarizer for his camera and wanted to try it out for his videos.

They have a little nature center just inside of the preserve. There isn't a whole lot in the office but outside of it has an area set up to feed and attract the birds and animals. It was actually quite nice and inspired us to maybe incorporate a few things in our own yard. We immediately started spotting various birds in the surrounding area.

While we have taken pictures of various birds over the years, we are mainly just enthusiastic photographers, not birders so when some of the other birders there were asking us questions or talking amongst themselves, we had no idea what they were talking about for the most part. We are obviously aware of some of the popular birds we've run into over the years, we didn't know about some of the not so common birds that have not been so easy to spot while we were out hiking, like the Tanagers, Towhees or Thrashers. We know a quail when we see it but is it a Gambel's Quail or a California Quail?

I've been taking pictures of birds a lot lately. First, when I went out to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Preserve with Caitlyn this summer because she also loved to take pictures of birds. A few years ago, we attempted to take her to the Salton Sea for this purpose, but it was in the middle of summer and the water line was very low and was very disapppointed with what we found there. Once Christian got me my new insane zoom lens for my birthday, the excitement for bird photography was renewed and multiplied.

In an effort to learn more, we talked to the people at the nature center about whether they had a field guide for birds in our area. They did not really have anything that specifically targeted our area and they suggested an app called Merlin or eBird. Looking into all this made us fall into the rabbit hole of "birding." 

It was vey relaxing and even somewhat therapeutic to sit there watching the antics of the little birds around us. I was jealous that big groups of hummingbirds seem to be able to coexist together at the nature center. They didn't have any crazy, super territorial hummingbirds which guarded the feeder and chased all the rest away constantly like I have here at home.

However, there was a Cooper's Hawk that flew into the area every 20 or 30 minutes and all the little birds would scatter and hide. The second time that one flew in, we finally dragged ourselves away to explore more of the canyon trails.

A couple of the trails were closed off because of damage from heavy rainfall earlier this year but the trails are slated to be fixed by the end of the year. The canyon was fairly well maintained and kept pretty clean. When we got farther down the trails, it was pretty peaceful. We didn't have the whole place to ourselves or anything. People were still wandering about on the trails here and there but it wasn't too bad. It is definitely worth returning here. In fact, by the time we whipped back around to the nature center, we were already making plans to return in another month or so when the cottonwood trees changed into their fall colors!

And as we continue down the rabbit hole of birding, after all the new pictures of birds we've collected, we ended up starting a "life list" to help us keep track of what we've captured. We got a handful of "lifers" and our life list is steadily growing.

Calico Trails

 At the end of the month, on one of Caitlyn's days off, we set off for Calico Ghost Town. There are supposed to be some interesting 4x4 trails going to all the different mines that used to be worked out there.   In fact, trails spread out all over the place like spiderwebs so it was a little hard to figure out which trail we were looking for. Sometimes the trails lead to something and sometimes you just want to avoid the super hard trails that you know are out there.

Our main trail was the Wall Street Trail. 

We mostly came out to test on the new suspension lift. The Jeep handled great. It just rolled over everything! We were pretty excited about it. We did end up breaking the other stabilizer bar link though. We have plans to replace them anyway and have parts on order.

Some of the mines were closed off while others were left open for people to roam through. The Bismarck mine was mostly open but that means morons end up chucking their trash into the pits and tagging their graffiti everywhere. Since it was blazing hot out, we at least got to explore in peace.

We explored some of the off-shoot trails but we didn't care to spend too much time in the area. It was getting too hot to really enjoy getting out to take pictures and stuff so by early afternoon, we headed off to find the tail end of the Mojave Trail. It is a famous trail that we've been talking about going on but have thus far ended up going elsewhere. We didn't have time to do the actual trail but we wanted to find out where the opening was. Unfortunately, we had many false starts as a bunch of places seemed to claim to be the Mojave Trail. 

We finally found it in the end but our enthusiasm for the trail was waning. There is a famous water crossing that everyone loves near the end of the trail, so since we found it, we decided to check it out.

It was actually quite beautiful there but it smells like the Salton Sea...not so great. We probably wouldn't have tried it, but we knew that someone had partially filled it in with gravel somewhat recently, otherwise, it would have been too deep for our taste. Anyway, it was fun.

We were done after that and headed on the long trek home. It was actually very long. We took the scenic route back and miscalculated exactly how much longer it would be to get back that way. We got home very late.

June

We returned home Sunday, June 12th to a roaring party down the street from our house. We deeply regretted not staying out in the mountains longer. I quickly threw a dinner together while Christian brought our stuff in from the Jeep. Caitlyn had gone to get her Patriarchal Blessing earlier that afternoon.

We sat down for dinner and did our weekly video chat with Emily. During the week, Emily had been helping Caitlyn register for her fall classes. Caitlyn worked most of the week but took off Wednesday to hang out with her high school friends. One of them turned 18, so they had all taken the day off to go to the beach to celebrate. Aubrey had already turned 18 and was able to drive them all to Laguna Beach. 

Caitlyn had the next Tuesday off, so we decided to go for a drive. We let Caitlyn choose where we were to go. She decided that we were going to go to Salton Sea. She saw some pictures in our archives from when we took them when they were little but she could not remember it. Since she is into photography these days, she wanted to go back to take pictures of all the birds and dead fish and stuff.

Before we went, we decided to start our Father's Day celebrations a bit early because we got Christian some little accessories for his Jeep that we knew that he would love to try out on this trip.

I got him some little entry guards and Caitlyn got him some side mirrors so that he can take the doors off his Jeep and still drive legally. So he put them on and we left the door behind!

Unfortunately, Salton Sea is pretty much a dump. We went through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods to find the marina we visited years ago. Also, some company bought a lot of the land up so much of the access to the beach was no longer open to the public. It was pretty frustrating. We also did not really see any birds anywhere. We decided to go to the Sony Bono National Wildlife Refuge...where we saw no birds. The water has receded so far that you cannot even see it from the observation deck. We travelled a long way, it was getting really hot and poor Caitlyn was so disappointed at there being no birds there.

We decided to traverse up the other side of the sea to see what we could find and started to talk about alternative plans. We found ourselves at the boat launch.

It was bone dry. We could have driven off of it. You can almost see the sea off in the distance. It is astounding how much it had dried up. But I guess if you think about it, we saw the same issues at Lake Powell and Shasta Lake. We have, however, passed a lot of smaller lakes that don't seem nearly as affected. A few of them look totally normal, so I'm not really sure about what is going on with these lakes and if there is more to it than the drought to contend with.

We eventually found a few birds here and there but you had to be pretty quick on the draw. To be honest, we saw more birds going through the farms than anywhere else.

Once we had our fill of the Salton Sea, we decided to head over to check out the Painted Canyon Canyon near Mecca (unfortunately). But it was a really neat canyon. We just kind of drove through it. If it wasn't so hot and getting late in the day, it would have been nice to stay here much longer to explore, but as it was, we were on the verge of getting heat stroke.

We headed out of the desert and went in search of some Icee to refresh us for our drive home.

For the actual Father's Day, we had Terry and Jackie come over for dinner after church. Christian smoked us some ribs.

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Emily has just been spending most of her time working to get enough money to return to school in the fall. Her new job is very tiring but she has gotten some good experience working there and the money is definitely better. In her free time, she hangs out with her friends. Her roommate, Lanie, has decided college is not for her and will be returning home to Tennessee to pursue a nursing career. So they have been trying to spend as much time as possible together. We are sad that she won't be up there with Emily anymore.

Grandma Jackie gave Emily some funds to get a top for her truck. She decided to get a soft top so that she can take it off if she needs to or just put it down. Traveling with her stuff back and forth to or from California will be a lot easier to deal with with a top.

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It has been difficult for Christian to work in the shop in the extremely hot temperatures we are currently having but Christian will try to get out early and get some things done before the heat gets totally unbearable. We need to finish Caitlyn's vehicle for her to go to college so we have a deadline to make. 

We had a brief summer thunderstorm on day, but we didn't get any rain from it. It was really neat but we didn't get more than a few drops of rain. Christian took Caitlyn in the out just in the neighborhood to teach her how to take pictures of lightning. She got some really good shots.

Also, the TJ got a bit of a lift. Although, it should have just taken half a day, it ended up taking a full two days in the usual fashion. So that set us back a little, but boy does it look so much better. I think we will not have as much problems getting over things now. We drove it around a little to make sure there were no problems but haven't gotten a chance to test on it yet.

Vacation - part 1

Since we missed out on taking the girls somewhere this summer and we needed a vacation really badly (however short), we decided to take a mini-vacation. This past weekend, we were invited by our neighbor to go to the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area with them and we decided to take them up on their offer. They went up the week before and the plan was to join them on their last weekend down there. We made up our mind to go at the last minute and went out to get a permit Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, however, we found out that his wife got into a serious accident on her new quad on their first full day out. She got a pretty bad break in her leg and has had two surgeries already. We almost cancelled our trip at that point as we did not want to add to any of his problems.

But in the end, we figured we would just head down anyway. We told him not to worry about us and if we met up, then great, otherwise we would see him and his wife when they made it back home.

Our first stop on our trip was the Salton Sea. Christian and I have always wanted to go there for some reason but never made it out that far.

The Salton Sea seems to be a strange mixture of beauty and repulsive land fill. I guess it had it's hey day back in the 1930's through 50's when it had some success as a resort area but has been long forgotten and neglected. With the rise in water during the 1960's and 70's, came a steady increase in the salinity level as well as the bacteria level from wastewater runoffs mainly from Mexico. So a lot of the fish in there are all dying off as well. The shore lines are littered with dead fish...so you can imagine the smell. There are the remains of an abandoned marina, rusted up boats, abandoned houses, RV's and whatever junk and trash people have dumped there or was left behind.

Even the kids were delighted and appalled at the same time with the place. After watching the water fowl and dodging dead fish along the shore line, dad showed them how to skip rocks across the water. They still had a fun time and wanted to stop by again on our way out but it didn't quite work out.