We kept close to home for the holiday, happy to visit with a friend from New Mexico and dance with our neighbors at the Riverside Park band shell before last night's fireworks. We've had enough rain this season that the "grand finale" wasn't grass fires on S Mountain, as it was last year.
This morning we took a hike up Bear Creek, just downriver from town. I'm finding it quite delightful that a year after his arrival in the Upper Arkansas valley, the DM is finding new routes and taking me places I haven't been in my seven years as a local. We marked this trail a winner, full of an amazing diversity of plant and bird life. Dry slopes and wet creek bottoms... warbling vireos and hermit thrushes. Pine, fir, scrub oak, aspen, maple, juniper... cactus...yucca... moss.
And one particularly lush stretch of horsetail... (I decided to be kind and not post the images of the DM making his way to and from this particular slippery perch.)
On the way back down, we took a pic of this lovely butterfly, some species of comma, but I'm not sure which one. (Hoary comma?) Once I started messing with the image, I realized there's likely another linocut in here. Yikes! Suddenly a backlog of linos.
And I'll be lagging for another week, since tomorrow I'm off to Crested Butte for a week of teaching at the Wildflower Festival. I'm looking forward to it, but Double Yikes! It's already 5:00pm and I still have to pack gear and food and clothes and...
I'd better get with it.
Not sure if I'll be able to post whilst away since hijack-able wireless signals can be hard to find. See you all when I get back!
I'm guessing a green comma. Check it out at Butterflies and Moths of NA (http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species?l=1757) and look especially at the row of yellow dots on the lower edge of the hindwing. May Butte week go wonderfully well!
ReplyDeletethat photo of the butterfly would indeed make a great linocut :D lots of different shapes and textures to it.
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