Intersection Logs

Yesterday I went with some families from my church to the Wildlife World Zoo in Phoenix. The weather was flawless all day. I got to feed bits of apple to a lory parrot perched on my arm; it nibbled away the flesh with its sharp little hooked beak, leaving the skin and core behind. There were swans, both black and white; flamingoes, elegantly two-tone in salmon and pale pink; exquisitely spotted ocelots; colourful parrots; oryx with yard-long horns curving to needle-sharp points; dainty gazelles with smart dark stripes along their sides; monkeys brachiating effortlessly across their mesh-roofed enclosures; snoozing hamsters; thick-furred fennec foxes with big ears; prairie dogs setting lookouts atop tall rocks. The kids romped with baby goats in the petting area and fed grain to the giraffes at the tall feeding station.

As a photographic expedition, it wasn't a huge success for me, between the low winter light, the cages, and the fact that my camera batteries ran low halfway around the zoo, but I'm rather pleased with the giraffe shots.


Afterwards, we adjoined to White Tanks Park for hotdogs, and then went for a fairly gentle hike, only a mile there and a mile back, on a trail that wound among the bushes, rocks and cacti, mostly in the shadow of the mountain. I'd forgotten the way low light draws glowing outlines around a saguaro on the skyline. Some of the boulders bore ancient native pictographs, pale stylized scribbles of snakes and flowers and less identifiable things.



Towards the end, the trail turned steeper, and involved a bit of scrambling over the rocks. The destination turned out to be a waterfall, in the sense that my local Rillito is a river; no water to speak of, but an impressive rock cauldron, with a chute down maybe forty feet of cliff, to suggest that it must be quite something when it rains.

Here are the photos to go with the previous entry.

Approaching the Winnats Pass	Climbing the Winnats	Mam Tor, from near the top of the Winnats
Hope Valley from Mam Tor	The old Mam Tor road	Vale of Edale, from Mam Tor

here. These were all from the Thursday of the second week, which was a glorious day when we had a very good walk and saw much heather.

Heather, in closeup The thing about heather is, it covers whole hillsides and turns them purple. But it's pretty up close, too.

From a trip to Chatsworth a couple of weeks ago. There are more in the gallery.

	Waterlily On the Ring Pond
	Peacock Butterfly

It's been a while since I last posted, I know. Well, let's see. On Friday we ran errands in the morning and in the afternoon walked through the woods over to Graves Park, a high and windy place where there are highland cattle and rare-breed sheep and a few leftover semi-exotic waterfowl, as well as woodland and rolling lawns and an overgrown and abandoned open-air theatre. On Saturday my sister and her family came to visit, and we did the Whirlow Park walk again, in rather better weather and enlivened by the antics of the two boys -- aged almost-seven and ten. There was a wedding reception going on at the park, and a small band playing, which made our sojourn there rather pleasant. Sunday was Sunday, a very fine thing in itself but not especially bloggable.

Today we went to Chatsworth, which is a very fine stately home, park and garden only a relatively short bus-ride away. ( Read more... )

Monday was a rather grey and gloomy day. We took our traditional walk up through Ecclesall
woods to Whirlow. ( The woods are lovely, dark and deep )
On Tuesday I woke to blue skies and sunshine, and we decided to do the Round Walk -- or at
least the half of it that we usually do. We started off in town, though, to drop off my last
film -- maybe the last ever -- at Boots, strolling through the Winter Gardens where the tall
conifer tree is already encountering the roof and pausing to admire the pair of steelworkers
fashioned in flowers and houseleeks outside the Town Hall.
( Round about and round about )