The Summer house in Brown's bay

The Summer house in Brown's bay
The Dixon's summer residence

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Our final ATV ride before we store the ATV for the summer!

We went for a 4 hour ride yesterday out back into the Sonoran desert for our final ride of the season. We always do this ride with Ann & Trent and take a light snack with us and just enjoy all the cacti flowering. It was a very hot day, up in the 90's and even though I used 50 SPF sunscreen, I still managed to get burnt!!

 We started out our ride going out to visit our little great horned owl chicks and were amazed to see there were two of them and how big they had grown! Mom had just flown away from the nest before we got there so we had a wonderful view of the babies

 I could have stayed there and watched them forever but we didn't want to spook Mom so took some quick pictures and left them alone

 Down here in the valley, the Staghorn Cholla are now blooming and this is the yellow version - my least favorite

 The orange coloured flower on the Staghorn Cholla

 
The more burgendy coloured Staghorn Cholla

 The Bonker Strawberry Hedgehogs were flowering everywhere

 
The Hackleberry bush flower with beautiful white flowers back in early March and now the fruit are on the bush and they are a beautiful orange colour

 A close up of the Hackleberry fruit


 There were lots ofg Arizona thistle blooming and though you really can't see by the picture, they are huge in size

 Just a picture of the desert as we are driving along

 The Englemann Prickly Pear cacti are starting to bloom. They are at least 2 weeks behind this year most likely because of the colder winter we had.

This is a pink flowered hedgehog cactus. Their flowers are just as pretty although not as deep a pink as the Bonker Hedgehog
 


 A close up of the Bonker Strawberry Hedgehog flower

 More Englemann Prickly Pear flowers - yellow just isn't my favorite flower colour!

The Ocotilla bushes are now flowering and add a real burst of colour to the desert
We ended our day by washing our ATV really well, loading the ATV in our cargo trailer, taking the battery out, adding buckets of water to the trailer to keep some moisture in the air over the summer and moving the trailer over to our frind Jim's RV spot where he lets us leave it for the winter. Rather bitter sweet but Doug is ready to go home and begin fishing again.
Trent and Ann then took us out for a lovely dinner at Applebees so a great way to end the day with special friends!

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