Southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is famed for its sudden explosion of colorful wildflowers that follows the first springtime rains. From a distance, I saw bright splashes of pink from across the arid hills, and as I got closer, I found this Parry’s penstemon in all their fuchsia glory. It never fails to amaze me how such
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My favorite palm! The paurotis palm is a wonderfully beautiful palm that I have a personal connection to. As I was starting to build my photography business back when I was still living back home in Southwest Florida, I worked in a plant nursery and planted many hundreds of palm trees all over the Fort
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One of my very favorite types of wild native orchids I’ve found in the wild are those belonging to the tribe Cymbidieae, all of which are found in the tropics or subtropics. Not only are the flowers spectacularly colorful and often large, each plant often has many flowers in bloom at the same time. Some species can be found
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If it may seem like I’ve been a little quiet lately, it’s for good reason. I took on a personal project of an enormous magnitude that while I’m still working on it now, I have enough of it put together to show and share with the world. After a recent trip to California, Arizona, New
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Just outside of the city limits of Salt Lake City, Utah – on the Great Salt Lake is a remarkable mountainous island called Antelope Island. Also a state park, this island has a wonderful natural history along with a very interesting habitat and diversity of wildlife. In order to keep this post short and sweet,
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A few days ago I was driving eastward across the state of Washington across the barren sagebrush desert with my family when one of my boys needed to use the restroom. We stopped just east of Ellensburg at the Ryegrass Safety Rest Area in Kittitas County, and as usual… I started poking around the rocks and sages for
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A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us – like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness – that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men
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Recently I made yet another foray into the deserts of my increasingly favorite area of the Pacific Northwest, the Oak Creek Wildlife Area in Yakima County, Washington. As I’ve stated in other posts across the years, I am a big fan of cacti – and especially when they are in bloom. What I never would have
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Today’s post is brought to you by my stomach. Since I moved to the Pacific Northwest three years ago, I’ve sorely missed my well-developed knowledge and skills of natural foraging any time I was out in the woods or Everglades of my native Florida. In the past three years, I’ve learned quite a bit (and it is
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Not a title I’d ever believed in a millions years that I would write, but I couldn’t think of a better one. A week or so ago I was passing through Selah, WA and stopped at a rest area on Interstate 82 just outside of Yakima and within the circle formed by the exit ramp and
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