adventures

Saturday morning, Adia and I headed over to Joshua Tree, where we backpacked into the apparently little used area around Black Rock.


Backpacker magazine told us the Joshua trees would be flowering but unfortunately was wrong, although we were still glad we went.


Adia hadn't ever been to the desert, and didn't like it at first, though by the end she seemed to appreciate it better. She was upset that there weren't more "real cacti"--saguaro cacti.


We hiked through a couple of areas that had burned.


Never having backpacked in the desert, Adia didn't realize we would need to bring our own water. I carried two gallons, which made my pack super heavy even though I didn't bring a tent, cook gear, or a campstove.



Confusing maps made us overestimate the mileage of our loop, and we wound up coming out of Black Rock after one night, then headed over to the Wonderland of Rocks, which we then discovered was a day use only area. After scouring the map, we figured out that we could camp if we went west of one of the branch trails.


After a beautiful sunset, we retired early to a night so cold the water froze in my water bottle.


We woke up at 5 the next morning to hike out in the dark and get to Barker Dam, where the ranger said we might see the endangered desert bighorn sheep. We arrived at 6:30 to a beautiful sunrise but no sheep.


We finished walking the nature trail before the next people showed up at the trailhead around 7:30. Throughout the morning, we passed only a few cars.


Happily, we finished our Joshua Tree visit by driving through the prolifically flowering Colorado desert, which mostly fulfilled my wildflower needs and justified the flower guide I bought.

Although they've been trying unsuccessfully to capture a mountain lion since May, we caught two lions in the span of three days last week. Both were juvenile males about a year and a half old, and the biologists suspect they're brothers.


After blow-darting the lion with a sedative, the biologists remove him from the leg snare and move him to a tarp in a flat clearing.


For the hour or so the lion is out, the biologists take measurements, blood, tissue samples, and fit a GPS collar that will track the cat's movements every few hours.


The cats weighed about 90 and 115 pounds.


We caught the first cat on a hot day, and he got really worked up during the darting, so to cool him down, we poured alcohol and water all over him and fanned him with papers.


The head mountain lion biologist documented his teeth and paws.


Emmanuel demonstrated the length of the lion's tail so that interpreters will have a picture to show people who think they've seen a mountain lion but probably have seen either a deer or a bobcat.




Mountain lion's paws are assymmetrical, so you can tell right from left. In its tracks, look for three equal divisions on the rear of the pad.


The lion is given a reversal for its sedative when it starts to blink when its eyelid is touched.


We waited nearby for the cat to recover enough to walk away--the danger is that they'll fall asleep with their head on their new collar and suffocate. This photographer has been working on a documentary about the Santa Monica Mountain cougars for a year and these were the first live cats he's seen.