Tag Archives: desert

The Cat on My Patio

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Weird on so many levels.

Last night, my husband and I were sitting outside on our back patio. We have two back patios — one upstairs and one downstairs. We seldom sit downstairs in the evening, but that’s where we were last night at around 8 PM.

We were talking, looking out over the empty desert southwest of our house. We have 2-1/2 acres of land and our house is perched on the side of a hill on one corner of it. There are four houses “nearby,” one of which is vacant. None of them are within 500 yards of ours. It’s very private and that’s probably the best thing about our house.

All of a sudden, my husband said, “There’s a cat behind us.”

I looked and, in the darkness, saw a bit of white. I reached back, expecting the cat to run off, but it stayed in place, arching its back and pushing up against my hand as I stroked it.

This is weird on so many levels:

  • We live in the desert where common house cats are predators, but they’re also prey. The area is full of coyotes, which often travel in packs, and my husband saw a bobcat in our backyard this past summer.
  • Our dog was lying less than 5 feet away in his favorite spot on the patio, between two planters, where he can look out over the desert, keeping the house safe from small critters like…well, like house cats. He didn’t see or hear this cat either.
  • The cat was clean with soft fur. It was friendly. It was not at all like the feral cats we normally see from our patio, the ones that never get anywhere close.
  • If this cat belonged to a neighbor — which is possible — it walked a long way across empty desert to come visit us.

As Mike and I chatted about the weirdness, Jack the Dog happened to glance back. He caught sight of the cat and gave chase. The cat ditched him easily in the dark. While the dog jumped off the patio and chased him around the front of the house, the cat really ran around the back of the house. A moment later, it was on the wall around our backyard, not far from the barbecue grill. For a moment, I thought there were two cats — after all, what was the dog chasing? But no, it was the same cat. Our dog is just plain dumb.

Wondering if the cat was hungry, I fetched a small handful of dry dog food and put it on the wall in front of the cat. It sniffed the kibbles once, then went at them. It was hungry.

We retrieved the dog and went in for the night. I haven’t seen the cat since.

Back when we had horses and chickens — when we lived in our house full-time — we had a mouse problem in our shed where we kept the horse and chicken feed. Back then, I really wanted a barn cat — the kind of cat that could keep the mice out of the shed and fend for itself against predators. I never got one because I always assumed that some predator would get it in the end. Now I’m wondering.

I’m also wondering if the cat has begun hanging around because I’ve started putting out bird food again. While I haven’t seen it here during the day when the birds are around, I know mice must go after the seed after dark. Chances are, it comes around every night for a fresh mouse meal. But since last night was the first night we were downstairs, it was the first night we saw it.

I just hope it doesn’t start going after birds.

PhotoJeeping: A Trip to Dragon Mine

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I’m almost surprised we found it.

The wildflowers in the Sonoran desert around Wickenburg have been amazing lately — too amazing to ignore. So yesterday afternoon, I decided to tack a little PhotoJeeping excursion onto the end of my errands. Along the way, I picked up my friend Janet, who is an artist and likes photographing the desert almost as much as I do. We also squeezed in Jack the Dog and Janet’s dog, Maggie; they sat on the back seat beside the recycling bins.

Backlit Lupines

Lupines, backlit with late afternoon sunlight. (Click for larger view.)

At first, I’d considered another trip up Constellation Road. The last two times I was up there, the flowers hadn’t been blooming yet. Surely they must be blooming now. But when my errands called for a stop at the Shell gas station just south of town (they stock AeroShell aviation oil, if you can believe that), I thought about the desert southeast of Wickenburg. Dragon Mine was an old mine site I’d visited by Jeep years before with some friends. I thought that perhaps the juxtaposition of mining ruins and wildflowers might make a good subject.

Trouble was, I didn’t remember how to get there and hadn’t brought along my GPS.

So after one wrong turn that dead-ended in a subdivision, we tried another left turn off Grand Avenue and headed eastbound. The road wound through a subdivision and, at its east end, we spotted a dirt road winding down the side of a shallow canyon wall into San Domingo Wash. I followed the road.

Although this particular road had tire tread prints on it, the tracks were very close together. It wasn’t a Jeep road, it was an ATV road. It was painfully narrow at places — so narrow that I almost turned back several times. But I squeezed the Jeep through one narrow place after another, trying not to be bothered by the sound of branches scraping up against the side. I was glad I’d left the doors on; we would have been beaten up by thorny branches if I had taken them off. The floor of the canyon was rocky and then sandy and then rocky again, with short, steep climbs and tight turns. The Jeep, in 4H, performed admirably, as usual. The wheels spun just enough in those turns to give the illusion of a 90° turning radius sometimes. It was fun.

We stopped a few times to photograph flowers here and there. At one place, I captured a so-so image of lupines backlit by the sun, along with a shot of owl clover. The whole time, however, I was really looking for a trail that would take us out of the narrow track we were in. Something that would be easier to drive and get us to our destination — if we could find it — quicker.

Janet scouted ahead a one photo stop and found where the ATV trail climbed up a short hill to intersect with a nice dirt road. This was probably the road we were supposed to be on. I pulled up onto its relatively smooth and definitely wide surface, glad to be out of the wash.

We continued mostly eastbound, heading toward the low mountains in line with San Domingo Peak. As we drove, we kept a sharp eye out for the wildflowers we wanted to photography. The light was behind us and relatively low; it was nearly 5 PM and the sun would set in less than two hours. That gave us a great view of the scenes on either side of the road as we traveled east.

Strawberry Hedgehog Cactus

This “Desert Still Life” features a strawberry hedgehog cactus, the “skeleton” of a cholla cactus, a blooming creosote bush, and an iconic saguaro cactus, all under a perfectly blue Arizona sky. (Click for a larger view.)

I caught sight of a blooming hedgehog cactus about 100 feet off the side of the road and pulled to a stop. We got out and explored the area on foot. I’ve been trying hard to do all my photos with a tripod these days and although it’s a bit of a pain in the butt, I admit that I am getting used to it. After doing a few ho-hum horizontal shots of the cactus and its flowers, I scrunched down on the ground and took a look though the lens, holding it vertically. I liked what I saw. I made several shots, with and without a polarizing filter and at different angles to get the photo you see here.

There’s a certain feeling I get when I know I’ve captured a good image. I’ve felt it before, several times. I can see the image in the tiny video screen at the back of the camera, but as I age, my close vision is deteriorating so I can never really see it to be sure. It’s only when I get back home to my computer and can view it on a 24″ monitor that I know whether it’s good. I’ve been disappointed many times, but not this one. I’m very pleased with this image and think it might just be the best I’ve ever captured.

I didn’t know that for sure yet, so the rest of the trip was a slow drive toward our intended destination with me wondering whether I’d be disappointed. We made several stops and took more photos along the way. For a while, it seemed to me that the road was getting too close to the mountains. But then it swung to the north and we passed a big flat area that I remembered being south of the mine. A while later, we rolled up to the mine site and climbed out.

Marigold Steps

Desert marigolds bloom alongside the ruins of a long-abandoned mine. (Click for larger view.)

The shots I took there weren’t anything special. There’s a lot of concrete shapes, such as the stairs you see here, and plenty of metal and wood. There are two mine shafts — a vertical one at the top of a small hill and a horizontal one that enters the area from the small wash on the north side. They might join somewhere under ground; I don’t know and don’t plan on every finding out. (Exploring mines is dangerous, folks.)

It was nearly 6 PM when we were ready to move on. I was hoping to take a different and better route back. So we continued along a road that headed west from the mine. I was pretty sure it was the road I’d taken back on our last visit years before. But it swung around to the north and then the northeast. This was wrong. We wanted to head west or northwest. My gut told me to follow it, but my brain reminded me we were headed in the wrong direction. Sunset was in less than an hour and the light wouldn’t last long afterward. I told Janet that she should never allow me to take her out in the desert again without my GPS.

We followed the road for another five minutes. It headed east and north and northeast. Just when I was getting ready to turn around, it intersected with a broad, sandy wash. The tire tracks of previous travelers headed up and down the wash. Down the wash was west, so we made the left turn. I threw the Jeep back into 4H and we sped down the wash.

Topo Map

This topo map offers an overview of the path we took. I was able to map it pretty well using the points plotted by my GPS data logger. (Click to see a larger view.)

It was a long drive — maybe as many as 5 miles. The wash twisted and turned, but always headed mostly west. The sun, now very low in the sky, cast long shadows that shielded our eyes from the glare when the canyon walls were high, then blinded us when the canyon walls dropped. It turns out that we were in Monarch Wash. We passed through a gate that had been left open — without a “Keep Gate Closed” sign, we left it that way — and eventually wound up on Grand Avenue, about a mile north of where we’d turned off nearly three hours before.

It was a good little trip that might have been made better by having my GPS along. (Frankly, I still can’t figure out why so many people depend on them when traveling on paved roads with signs. But that’s another blog post.) Best of all, I managed to capture one of the best images I’ve made so far. That’s plenty of reward for the dust in my hair and clothes.

How a Tripod Can Make You a Better Photographer

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My take.

Last month, my husband Mike and I went to a photography lecture at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. (If you’re in the Phoenix area and have never been to the DBG, treat yourself; you won’t be disappointed.) The lecture was given by Arizona Highways magazine photo editor Jeff Kida and covered photographing wildflowers. (Jeff took the excellent portrait of me that you’ll find on this Web site and elsewhere; I wrote more about him and this photo in February.) We’d had a very wet winter and although the desert was greening up at the time, no one was sure whether we’d have a good wildflower season. So far, it’s turned out to be spectacular in certain parts of the Phoenix area, including Wickenburg, where I live.

Poppies and Desert Chicory

Desert chicory’s white flowers among golden poppies. (Click for a larger image.)

The lecture included a discussion of equipment and that equipment list included a tripod. I have a tripod — in fact, I’m ashamed to say that I have numerous tripods, far more than any one person should have. (I was always looking for the right tripod and have finally zeroed in on a good combination with a Manfrotto tripod and ball head.) And I agree that everyone serious photographer should have a tripod.

But then Jeff said something I’d never thought about. I wish I could remember his exact words. The gist was that using a tripod would automatically improve your photographs.

Whoa. This was something that interested me. Although I have all these darn tripods, I don’t use them very often. Maybe I should.

A Tripod Eliminates Camera Shake

I mostly use them for low-light situations when I absolutely must have a tripod. After all, a tripod’s main purpose is to hold the camera steady to take the shot. When used with a cable release (or similar device) or the camera’s built-in timer, motion from external sources should be eliminated. The final image should be clearer. But that was low light. Surely on a bright sunny day — just about every day here in Arizona — a tripod wouldn’t be necessary.

I also put a lot of faith in my camera’s VR (vibration reduction) lenses. I have two of them now and I can clearly hear the VR motor kicking in when I prepare to take a shot. Surely that would help keep my camera steady for each shot.

Poppy Blanket

A blanket of poppies and other wildflowers cover a hillside in the Sonoran desert near my home. (Click for a larger image.)

But since that lecture, I’ve been giving my photography a lot of thought. For the past two years, I’ve noticed a serious decline in the clarity of my photos. I was beginning to think it was the camera (a Nikon D80, now 3-1/2 years old) or my preferred lens (a Nikon 16mm-85mm zoom). Perhaps one or both of them needed adjustment or cleaning. I even went so far as to print out warranty repair authorizations for both of them in preparation for sending them back to Nikon for inspection, cleaning, and possible repair.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t my equipment. Perhaps it was me. Maybe I think I’m holding the camera steady for each shot or that there’s enough light to get the image, but maybe I’m moving the camera when I “snap” the photo by pressing down on the shutter release. Maybe I’m ruining my own photos. Or at least preventing them from being as good as they could be.

I decided to experiment by using my tripods and cable release more often. By ensuring that there’s no camera shake when images are being captured, I can eliminate camera shake as a cause of my problem. If the problem persists, I know it’s either bad focusing on my part or the camera’s. Since I don’t have the best vision, I trust my camera’s autofocus feature to get the focus right. So either I’m not telling the camera to focus on the right thing (my fault) or the camera can’t focus properly (the camera’s fault). Using a tripod would help me troubleshoot the source of the problem.

Using a Tripod Forces You to Slow Down and Compose Properly

Vulture Peak Poppies

This is my secret poppy place on the east side of Vulture Peak near Wickenburg, AZ. (Click for a larger image.)

I went on a photo shoot the other day out in the desert near my home. The poppies were blooming and I knew exactly where to find a lot of them. (Hint: Getting there requires a Jeep, ATV, or horse.) We took the Jeep out and found the poppies right where I expected them. We also found lupines, chicory, and a bunch of other flowers I didn’t even know existed.

The big problem with the site is that the flowers covered a steep hillside. Setting up a tripod was a royal pain in the butt. I admit that I cheated and took quite a few shots the lazy way. But then I remembered my mission and went through the bother of setting up my tripod and cable release and framing the photos. It slowed me down considerably. But I reminded myself that I wasn’t in a race. The best light was already gone for most of the day and the flowers weren’t going anywhere.

And that’s when I realized that using a tripod had yet another benefit: it forced me to slow down and pay close attention to what I was doing. It forced me to try harder to make every shot count. Because of all the extra time and effort required to make each photograph, I was motivated to put more effort into composition.

Could that be what Jeff meant?

The Jury is Still Out

The few photos on this post are among those I made that day. In general, I’m more pleased with the quality of the images. But I’m not done testing to see if the problem is with me or my camera. It’ll take more photo shoots with the tripod to convince me.

In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see if I can shoot better photos just because I’m using a tripod.

Any thoughts on this? I’d really like to get some feedback from other photographers.

Jack the [Desert] Dog

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Not exactly a “dog park” dog.

Wickenburg just put in a dog park. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a fenced-in area where people can let their dogs run around. It’s especially nice for folks who live in apartments or trailers or don’t have fenced-in yards. Wickenburg’s dog park isn’t anything special — at least not yet. I hope they plant some trees and do some cross-fencing to spruce it up a bit. Right now, it’s just a big area adjacent to the airport that’s surrounded by chain link fence. There are two leaf-less trees, two cheap park benches, and a bunch of molded plastic patio chairs.

But it’s better than nothing and I’m glad whoever put it in did so.

Throughout the day, folks gather there with their dogs, letting them run around together. The dogs bark, the owners shout. The dogs play, the owners socialize. It’s a relatively pleasant scene. Since the dog park is right on the other side of the fence from my Wickenburg hangar, I see its dynamics each time I’m at the airport.

My dog, however, will never set foot inside the dog park. You see, Jack’s a desert dog. He — like my neighbors’ dogs — roams freely on our property on the outskirts of town. On a nice day, we open the back door and let him out. He chases rabbits and squirrels and, when it gets a bit warmer, lizards. We have 2-1/2 acres of property, but he occasionally wanders off to visit with my neighbors, too. Their dog comes to see us once in a while, so it all evens out.

Jack goes lots of places with us. When I head out to the airport or store in town, he rides in the back of my Jeep or pickup truck. He likes to bark when he’s in the back of the truck, as if to yell out “Look at me!” It’s actually pretty annoying and I have to break him of the habit again soon. (Stopping the truck suddenly and throwing a cup of water on him usually does the trick.) When he rides in the Jeep, he likes to sit in my seat while I’m in the store. I don’t have the back windows on the Jeep and he’s fallen out twice. Once was when I was parked at the supermarket. An announcement over the loud speaker said, “Will the owner of a black and white dog please come to the courtesy counter.” I went out to the parking lot to find him circling the Jeep excitedly. He was very glad to see me. A woman standing nearby said, “Is this your dog and Jeep? He’s been trying to get into it. I was going to let him in, but I wasn’t sure if it was his.” I opened the door and he jumped in. We all had a good laugh. He hasn’t fallen out since.

Jack the DogJack also goes hiking with us out in the desert. He’s well behaved on the trail and never bothers other hikers. He’s a bit of a nuisance when we go out to take photos, as we did the other day. He always seems to get into the shot. But now that he’s older — he turned nine this year — he’s starting to slow down and spends a lot more time just relaxing in the scant shade of a tree while we bend over wildflowers and lie prone to shoot up at cacti. It could also be his thick winter coat — which I’ll soon be vacuuming up off my floors and carpets — that keeps him too hot in the springtime to run around.

In answer to a commonly asked question, yes, Jack has flown in the helicopter. He’s been flying with me three times now. I think he considers the helicopter just another vehicle. The last time we flew together, he was very well behaved alone in the back seat.

Jack’s a good dog — the best I’ve had so far. Although he tends to get excited easily and seems to live to be petted, he’s smart and listens — unless, of course, he’s chasing a rabbit. We may spoil him by making him a part of our lives, but we don’t pamper him and don’t allow him to misbehave, especially when there are other people around. In other words, we don’t allow him to give people a reason to complain about him. If more people disciplined and trained their dogs properly, we wouldn’t need so many “No Dogs” signs and leash laws.

And we probably wouldn’t need dog parks, either.

Off-the-Grid Camping in the New RV

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Working out the kinks.

One of the improvements I made on my old RV was to add a solar panel to the roof. It was connected to a battery charger which, in turn, was connected to the camper’s batteries. When the sun was out — which is during most daylight hours here in Arizona — the batteries were charged. This made the camper extremely useful for off-the-grid camping. My husband and I did a lot of that last year on our way back from Washington to Arizona. We never ran low on power, which was a good thing because we didn’t have a generator.

There are a few things that won’t work in an RV without a connection to A/C power:

  • A/C power outlets. This means you can’t plug in and use any device with a standard plug.
  • Certain light fixtures. Some lights are A/C while some are D/C. A/C fixtures won’t work without an A/C connection.
  • Microwave. Even if it’s standard equipment on an RV, it’s plugged into an A/C outlet.
  • Air Conditioning. It’s A/C and it sucks a ton of power when it is plugged in and running. That means that even if you have a generator, you need a pretty powerful one to run the A/C when you’re not hooked up to campground or city power.

There are a few things that will run on propane or battery (D/C) power if you’re camping off-the-grid:

  • Refrigerator. Setting the refrigerator on “Auto” tells it to look for A/C power first; if that’s not available, it uses propane from the onboard tanks (assuming the valves have been opened).
  • Stove/Oven. Obviously, they’re propane. It would be dumb to put an electric stove in an RV.
  • Water pump. If you’re not connected to a pressurized water line, a D/C pump activates when you run the water to pump the water from the onboard fresh water tanks.
  • D/C devices. Some RVs include D/C outlets — think of power ports or cigarette lighters on a car. My old RV had one and I added a second; my new RV had three and I added a fourth. These are handy for charging cell phones or plugging in low wattage inverters to plug in low wattage A/C devices like laptops.

Other appliances use D/C power all the time, but if you’re plugged in, your battery is being charged all the time, so it’s no big deal. The heater, stereo, and certain light fixtures are good examples.

As you can see, RVs are pretty much designed to be self-sufficient when you’re off-the-grid. There’s a limit, of course, to how long you can live in an RV without a hookup, though. The solar power (or a generator) helps take care of electrical needs. Eventually, however, you’ll run out of water or fill up your black water sewer tank. There are ways to get around these issues — for example, minimize toilet use by using public toilets whenever possible, carry extra water in external tanks, etc. — so two people can easily live in a well-equipped RV off-the-grid for several weeks if they need to.

Oddly, however, most RV owners do not live in the RV off-the-grid. Instead, many of them tend to pull their RVs from one parking lot-like RV park to the next, cram them into narrow spaces between other RVs, hook up power, water, and sewer lines, and retreat inside their luxury boxes to watch television.

I’m not like most RV owners.

Before trading in the old camper, I pulled the 135-watt solar panel off the roof. This past week, I had it installed, with a new battery charger and controller, on the roof of my new RV.

This weekend, my husband and I are out in the desert about 25 miles west of our Wickenburg home, testing the trailer’s off-the-grid setup. I’m out in Aguila, at a private “resort” where my clients are testing some wireless networking equipment. The test requires me to fly their equipment around in the helicopter to see how well it works with ground-based mobile and stationary equipment. There’s more to it than that, but for the sake of my client’s privacy, that’s really all I’m willing to say.

At Robson'sThe job has a lot of down time — time when I’m just waiting around for them to be ready to fly. It made sense to bring the RV out here for the weekend. It gives Mike and I a chance to get away and relax away from home and we can bring along Jack the Dog and Alex the Bird. And, of course, we can test the off-the-grid setup of the RV close enough to home so that if there’s a serious problem, we’re not suffering. So the RV is currently parked about 100 yards from the helicopter’s landing zone out in the desert.

We’ve discovered a few things:

  • When the refrigerator works off propane, it makes a noise that sounds like a fan running inside it. We’re not sure if it should be doing that. It seems to work fine and the fan noise does stop when the refrigerator reaches the correct temperature. But my last two RVs had silent refrigerators, so we’re a bit concerned.
  • The fresh water in the tanks smells like shit. I do mean that literally. We’re not drinking it, but we are washing with it. It’s making the RV stink a bit on the inside, so we have a lot of windows open to keep the air cleared out. This is our fault. We should have flushed out the system before using it. We’ll do that after this trip and likely run at least one tankful of clean water through it, too.
  • The new solar setup works great. It had the batteries fully charged before 10 AM. While it was doing that, we were using the lights, stereo, cell phone chargers (all D/C) and a 300-watt A/C inverter to charge my MacBook Pro and some aviation radios.
  • The 2000-watt Honda generator I bought so I could run A/C devices if I wanted to works great. It’s easy to start and can be very quiet. We gave it a good test on Saturday night when we ran it to see if we could watch a DVD (Up) on the 32-inch (or thereabouts) flat screen TV the RV came with. It ran hard when we first started it — likely to recharge the batteries we’d run down a bit after sunset while giving us A/C power — then settled down to a lower, quieter power setting. I don’t think I’d run it in the future just to watch TV, though.

Everything else works exactly as expected.

At this point, I consider this second test a success. It proves to me that the new RV can be at least as comfortable — more so, of course — than the old one when camping off-the-grid. Even though I didn’t get the solar power system I wanted, I think my less expensive solution — one solar panel to charge the batteries and a portable generator for more power when needed — will work fine.

One thing’s for sure: having a portable house along on these weekend long gigs is very nice indeed — even if I’m not plugged in.