Hello friends, 5 March 2005 I've just spent 6 super days on 'El Camino del Diablo', a completely isolated remote dirt road, sometimes rough, which meanders 150 miles across the extreme southwest corner of Arizona between Ajo and Yuma, just north of the Mexican border. The only sign of humankind is the road itself, and a few little signposts, nothing else. There are mountain ranges all around, both near and far, and the scenery is splendid. This is a record winter for rain, so the entire desert is more green than the usual tan, and the flowering bushes are beautiful: there are more than a dozen different types blooming, the most predominant being Brittlebush, Scorpionweed, and Globemallow. It's too early for the big Saguaro, but many Ocotillo are blooming. Until I approached very near Yuma, I had seen only 3 other trucks the entire way (not counting the dozen or so Border Patrollers). Near the middle of the route there is a 'playa', or dried lake bed, which this year is impassable, all gooey mud with standing water in the tracks the Border Patrol even got one of their Hummers stuck in it. I'd planned to turn around and only do half the route, but right at the playa I met a camper who had just come through from the other side! He had bypassed the worst of the mud a few hundred yards to the north of the official track, driving between and over bushes to find a way through; since I would not be making new tracks (ugly)I decided to break the rules and give it a try, and made it ok with only a few moments of heart-in-the- mouth. I was so happy to be able to go on and do the whole way! The route is mostly in the Cabeza Prieta NWR and the Barry M Goldwater Air Force Range, so you have to get permission and register, and phone in before entry. You agree to 'hold harmless' the Air Force if you get blown up by unexploded ordnance, and the last 5 or 10 miles is along the edge of some sort of laser range, with warning signs on the road shoulder every 100 feet. Primitive camping is permitted anywhere within 50 feet of the road, and the few other people and the great scenery made for great camping. What a great experience. After restocking in Yuma for food, fuel, water, and propane, and finding a free open WiFi hotspot in the parking lot at Fry's Grocery to upload the NmexAZ slideshow, I drove up the little road to Ferguson Lake, on the Colorado River in the Imperial NWR, just across the border in California. There was nobody else up there, and I found a great spot to camp just a few feet above the edge of the lake, which is very marshy and reedy and so naturally is also 'birdy'. Before I even had the camper set up, a huge white pelican cruised by just 50 feet from the truck, so I got the scope set up hoping to catch it if it returned. It had the strange looking protuberance on its bill which appears during the breeding season apparently potential mates find it attractive. Another nearby backroad, the Picacho Peak / Indian Pass Road, is rated a scenic 10 by the same guidebook author who rated Camino del Diablo a 9 I thought he must be crazy, but as I got up into the mountains I started to think maybe he knew what he was talking about. A tiny hummingbird was hanging out on top of a little tree right by my camper, so I had plenty of opportunity to photograph him. At first the sun was behind a cloud, which made it hopeless trying to catch his iridescent rather peculiar 'chin whiskers' and 'ear muffs', and then he kept turning his back to me, but finally the sun came back out and he posed properly, and after around 100 shots I got a few good ones. Through the scope I once saw him flick out his tongue, a tiny thread nearly as long as his bill. I'm getting more experience getting photos through the big Pentax 20-60x/80mm spotting scope, and today have made a huge improvement by adding a sighting device so I can quickly get on target trying to find a bird in the bushes at the narrow field of view at 20x is really slow and frustrating, and trying to find a moving target is nearly hopeless. I removed the Red Dot 1x scope from my shotgun and made a rigid mount to hold it above the scope, so by hardly moving my head I can shift between peering through the Red Dot and through the scope. It works great! 17 March, a couple of weeks later: Much of Arizona, especially around Tucson, is busy with Air Force jet fighter training, and it seems almost rare to have the sky entirely quiet. I even got jolted by three sonic booms, the first since hearing the Concorde out in the Atlantic 15 years ago. As I was returning to Tucson to meet EV, I noticed a lot of particularly acrobatic activity over the highway ahead, so I stopped to see if I could get any fun pictures with my longest tele lens, a 1.75x booster on the camera's 100mm tele setting. Four F-16s appeared to be making simulated low level bombing or rocket attacks and then pulling up over the highway quite low, racking into a vertical bank and then a 45 degree climb to around 2000 fee, then rolling over nearly inverted to a circling dive to come around for another pass. I set the camera on rapid fire and tried to pan with them as they went overhead, and although the results wouldn't win any prizes, they were better than I expected. EV and I had a great 5 days, starting with a couple of hours drive west to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Along the highway, in the middle of the huge Tohono O'odham (Papago) Indian Reservation, there is a section with the best wildflower display anywhere I've seen. The next day we drove Organ Pipe's 25 mile Ajo Mountain loop, lots of cactus and flowers and fine mountainous scenery. We then drove the first 30 miles (20%) of the El Camino del Diablo and camped for the night at 'my spot' I could just see my tire tracks from a couple of weeks earlier. Next we went back to Buenos Aires NWR for a day of birding, and we saw more Vermillion Flycatchers than anything else, around a dozen pairs. EV spotted a nesting Great Horned Owl camouflaged in the fork of a cottonwood tree around 8 feet off the ground, and although the owl was in the shade she was pretty photogenic. A pair of beautiful Northern Cardinals was flitting around the trail, but they were shy and hard to photograph well. We saw more than a dozen mated pairs of Vermillion Flycatcher, the brilliant red bird I'd photographed earlier they I think we saw more of them than any other bird, even Sparrows. I'm now just into the California desert, an area I've cris-crossed several times in the past a lot of this country is so isolated it's hard to believe it is the same state that has all those people. Last night 4 wild mustangs bedded down only 70 yards from my truck, and I was surprised to see them still there in the morning. I'd have liked to get a telescope picture of the dramatically colored pinto, but they moved off before I was ready to try it. 26 March, a week later: I'm visiting an old IBM friend, Joey Tuttle, near Santa Cruz. Back to Civilization, California style! I had a nice time coming across the California desert, lots of beautiful mountains with carpets of flowers, and no people. As I approached the population centers nearer the coast, I found a great way to drive 200 miles along dirt and tiny paved roads in real boondock country, in just the direction I wanted to go, first through the rolling grassy hills of the Tremblor Mountains on the San Andreas fault, then through the beautiful Oak and Grassland hills (foothilling the Coast Range) which are so unique to California. The flowers there were different from Arizona, both new kinds of flowers and also occurring over much wider areas and a bit muted. At one point I watched a large herd of rather unwary Pronghorn ('antelope') in a field beside the road; some of the younger ones were playing head-butting push-and-shove, and occasionally the entire herd would suddenly get spooked and swirl around as though they were about to race off across the plains, then settle down to grazing again. The address for the slideshow is as before: http://www.firestardesign.com/johna. (Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my recent email address change to be just 'john') Click on 05Sonoran.exe, and if using Internet Explorer you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, of choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to have it your hard disk for future re-viewing. I have used my updated Norton AntiVirus to be sure the file is virus free. Right-Click or Spacebar will advance to the next picture Left-Click will return to the previous picture Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc when you reach the last image ('Lupine') if the show seems stuck If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic to download these large files please let me know, as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the individual images, just let me know. Regards, John Armitage