Spring Break in 2016 - Death Valley

Death Valley, CA
Super Bloom of Wildflowers
One more item off my "Bucket List."
 Photo Overload

 Above. This looks like a water color painting, but was taken out of the front window of our moving car. There are really that many different colors of rocks in the hills. And dirt. There was no clouds to make shadows. I think I will call those the Calico Hills of Death Valley. I don't know what they really are. But the rocks were very impressive. So were the plains of flowers.

 We began in an area where we got out to pay for a pass in a kiosk.  But we also needed to use the bathroom. Well, I didn't, but Mike went in to the pit toilet and nearly gagged. His clothes were permeated with the stench! YUCK! But the flowers were beginning to become more visible, as you can see from the photo above. I think that was taken out behind the kiosk, while I was waiting for Mike. We ended up NOT paying there (partly because of the smell and we needed to get away fast ) but mostly because people over age 62 qualify for a Golden Pass, good for your lifetime, for only $10. So we waited and went to a visitor's center and purchased that at Furnace Creek.

 Outcroppings of rhyolite on the desert floor. Mike and I both enjoy geology. There is a lot here--and it's ALL very visible!

 Here's a "Badlands" kind of area. Just lots of different colors of dirt and rocks. This is one area where they did some Borax mining in years gone by.

 I wish I had a way to edit this photo here in blogger to point out those two strangely-placed boulders in that slanted piece of the mountain, but here it is again, below, zoomed in.

 We walked up this little path at Zabriski point to the overlook. Below, there is a line of people heading out on a hike through the badlands. I wish I knew how to put an arrow on this photo below to point them out to you.

 You can find them right near the edge of where the pink begins, near the center of the photo.

 And then, after viewing the film in the visitor's center and paying for our pass, we headed north on 190 to see vast fields and plains filled with these Desert Gold flowers.

 And they just grow in rocks and sand. They seem pretty happy.  The reason the flowers are so great this year is because of a 3 inch rain storm last October. It also damaged Scotty's Castle, one of the tourist spots in Death Valley. It was closed, so we didn't go that far north. Since it was a DAY TRIP for us, that was fine. I wanted to see wildflowers, go to the lowest point, and we did!

 So did a lot of other people!  Lots of people were on the roads, lots of people were at the visitor's center, lots of people were in the campgrounds, lots were pulled off the road photographing the wildflowers.

 You could see the fields full of yellow gold and drive on by. Or, if you stopped, then you would see more. And if you looked closer, you would see even MORE!  In some areas, it was pretty hard to walk around and not step on a wildflower. Pretty amazing. Even the rocks had a great variety.

Yellow Carpet on the Valley Floor

 Some, I think, were past their prime. The photo above is of dead petals gathered by the wind next to the side of the road. Below is the type of flower I think some of them came from.

 Above. Nice cute little ground cover. This covered an area of about 5 x 7 inches.  Like I said, you had to look CLOSEly and step carefully.

 Here are some mica-filled rocks.  They were so sparkley.

 When I opened the car door after Mike pulled over for me, I stepped out onto this little cutie. Almost stepped on it, anyway.

 The cactus were just about ready to bloom.

 This is something called a desert five spot. I think. It's bowl-shaped and quite cute. The flower is about an inch and a half in diameter. Maybe two inches at the most.

 Yes, I know I have a big finger.  But the flowers were just that tiny.

 Purple, white and yellow, with textured leaves on the shrub below. And there were probably tinier things below that I didn't take the time to look for.

 I like this series. It was a white little ball I hadn't seen before. Different elevations reveal different flowers. When I changed to the macro-zoom and took the photo below, I didn't know until viewing it later on the camera that  I'd included a little red spider in the shot, too! That was a happy little surprise.

 I took pictures of the signs at the Sand Dunes. This one told how sand dunes occur, since most deserts HAVE sand, but not all have sand DUNES. Interesting.

 There were quite a few people walking around on the sand dunes, waaay far out there. Check out the variations of colors in the far mountains in the zoomed-in shot below.

My failed attempt at getting the elevation sign and us in a 'selfie.'

 Mike snapped the shot below of the Sand Dunes as we were leaving. They were big. He just took this out of the window of the car while we were driving.  One nice thing about THIS national park is that because it's so big, the speed limits are quite fast. (60mph)

 We traveled down to Bad Water, the lowest spot in North America. The sign above is posted WAY above the valley floor, about in the middle of the mountain.

 Salt crystals on the floor.

 I didn't actually have him pointing at that "Sea Level" sign from my perspective. It's half-way up the side of the mountain. Sorry you have to tilt your head. Don't know how to edit once it's this far.

 It was 79 degrees in Death Valley.  Perfect.  Sunny, breezy, nice. Looking North-ish from Badwater.

 I loved this strange, BRIGHT ORANGE stringy growth that was covering a number of shrubs. I have no idea what it is, but it was on different sizes of shrubs. This one is about 2 to 3 feet wide. Maybe a fungal growth? A type of flower? It wasn't on all of them, just some. It was like hair.

And then some mountains just had funny streaks of white running through them. Don't know what that was, either.  Mike guessed gypsum.  Death Valley is truly a geologist's delight.  We are semi-knowledgeable about geology and enjoyed seeing alluvial fans, striated rocks, volcanic stuff and sedimentary things.

We left Cedar about 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, drove there and ate a picnic lunch I'd packed while we perused the map given to us at the Visitor's center. We just ate in the car, out of the breeze. Then we picked our route to drive, took lots of photos (less than 100, all total). Saw some cool stuff, then headed out of the park by 3 or 4. We drove back to Las Vegas, ate out with a gift card given to us at Christmas, then got home by 9:45 pm.  A lot of driving, but a lot of fun.
Happy Spring Break!

Wisconsin, Twins and Moving

 I went to Wisconsin to meet our newest grandbabies AND to help tend and help them move to a new apartment. I left February 23 and returned March 2. More like March 3 since we didn't get home until 5 a.m. on the 3rd. That was a long day.
 
 Hayden is a new Cub Scout. Katie went out and got him some pants and the neckerchief, hat and belt. That was one of the few times I went out of the house while I was there. I sewed his  Bobcat badge on and hemmed the pants (temporarily with safety pins for the first night; sewn up correctly in time for next week's meeting).

 It was a pack meeting. Wednesday nights are also YW/YM, Activity Days for 8-11 yr olds, Scouts, ...busy night at the chapel. One activity that the boys just LOVED after their pack meeting was this Jenga game. It got pretty intense!  Hayden got a whole bunch of belt loops at the Pack Meeting.

 Sleeping Corbin, Sleeping Katie while feeding sleepy Hailey. My other time out of the house was to go to the grocery store with Katie, and one other time after the move to go to the laundry-mat. That's all. We stayed in the rest of the time. One day it was stormy, but the rest of the time was not too bad.

Hailey

Quintin

Hailey is so quick to smile!

 The newer house is coming together. They are still renting. A washer and dryer are coming soon. That's a good thing because that is the last of her disposable diapers...she has a great collection of cloth ones. I used them when we were still in the old place and she had access to a washer and dryer. They (the new-fangled cloth diapers) really are nice.  Much better than the old cloth diapers and rubber pants we used in the olden days.

 Katie, sorting baby clothes that were given to her. She has enough for both babies to not have to buy much of anything for about a year or more. We sorted through tubs and totes and bins and boxes of clothes, including the older boys' grown-ins and out-grown-turning-into-grow-ins....so many clothes!

Sometimes Quintin is a smiley-guy, too. But I just couldn't capture it on my camera very often.

 Toward the end of my visit, both babies were getting the hang of finding their fists and gnawing on them. That's always satisfying for a baby!

The whole group of us. Wednesday, March 2, 2016.

This little cradle in the foreground is on loan. It's the favorite and they both sleep for hours when snuggled into it for naps during the day. One at a time, of course, so they take turns having longer naps.

Art time after school for the boys.  They had fun with paint and play-dough while Katie and I kept putting things together. And sorting clothes. Katie put her kitchen together all by herself, so she knows where everything is. It lacks a nice pantry like her old place had, so its a challenge to find space for everything.

Corbin took this picture of me and the babies. It is kind of tricky to get both of them picked up at the same time, but I managed -- without damaging anyone in the process. :-)

Just hangin' out on the little play mat. They really enjoy looking at the stuff hanging there. But sometimes they look way beyond it and find the ceiling fan and laugh at it.  Or, perhaps they are laughing at angles going for a spin on the ceiling fan?  Who knows what these little ones fresh from Heaven would tell us about what they see and know if they could only talk.

Hailey's hair is bright red and disappearing fast.

I had a great week at Katie and Casey's house.  We got a lot done. They've moved from a small 2 bedroom, one bathroom duplex to a much bigger one just a couple of blocks away. It was still a lot of packing and moving and unpacking and cleaning and sorting.  Katie plans to downsize before the next move. Or so she says. ha.  We ALL want to downsize, but us Liebhardt's are kind of hanger-on-ers. We are hanging on to all these cute grand-babies, that's for sure!