Thursday, July 23, 2009

Several more photos and some details

Amazingly, people have not returned from the pool so I am revelling in a few moments of cleaning up photos with GIMP for PC and reminiscing...



Our KOA site though without a pool had a lovely view of a nearby mountain range. And it's a chance to see the green I mentioned earlier.

The caves were very cool both temperature wise (50 "in the shade") as well as looking. Despite shooting about 30 pictures of the caves, very few came out of any interest. Such is life with a basic SLR setup and lack of Kleig lights. The boys were huge fans of the thumbs up.





What I found more cool was how the down and up of stalactites and stalagmites can go sideways as can be seen here. I also learned that stalactites start out as soda straw shapes and have rings like trees. However, rather than 1 ring/year, it is more like 1 ring/epoch. Some stalactites broken 100 years ago only have 1 inch of growth, and that inch is the width of a soda straw.



On our way out of the caves, there was a small grove of apricot trees and deer loving the fruits of the trees. Unfortunately it started to rain quite hard, so we ran for Landshark.



Wildlife adventures did not end there. In a particularly back to nature moment, I was taking a shower behind Landshark in a seemingly secluded spot, when I heard a noise. I turned around sharply to see a young 6 point buck lowering his head in my direction. Oh about 10 ft away. I froze. He looked at me again, and lowered his head again. Then I noticed that the rains had caused a small stream to build up behind our campsite. He just wanted a drink. I told him it was OK. He would have gotten that drink had James not come by with his mouth loaded with carrots. Such is life with nature. I dressed and told Martha it was her turn with the shower. :)

And just one more shot of those doing the stargazing...

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