Scenes from Cave Creek Regional Park

This park, located about 8 miles (12.5 km) from home is a great place to experience the Sonoran Desert. Today, I went for a short walk along the Slate Trail, pausing to take a few photographs along the way.

There was one thing I wanted to see, the Michelin Man Saguaro cactus. One needs only to look at the following picture to know where it got its name. It’s very unusual. There are literally millions of Saguaro cacti in the area and never have I seen one that even remotely resembles this one.

Another very common cactus found in the Sonoran Desert is the Teddy Bear Cholla. It is well known for the spiny pods that dislodge easily from the plant and affix themselves to the unwitting passerby. You can see a number of the pods on the ground at the base of the plant. I was very careful to steer clear of them. The barbed needles on pods are very difficult and painful to remove. The ease with which they move from the plant to passers-by has led people to refer to them as “jumping cholla”.  I under-exposed this photograph to better display the pods. In late afternoon, with the sun low in the sky, backlit spines literally glow.

The next shot is a wide angle view of the desert looking in a northerly direction from the Slate Trail. The area around Cave Creek is quite mountainous, a common feature of the Sonoran Desert. The clouds were quite striking and I couldn’t resist the scene.

Leaving the Park, I paused for a few pictures at Spur Cross Ranch Trail Rides. They have a number of horse and I managed to find one that looked good through the camera lens.

Returning to my car I was struck by this beautiful late afternoon sky. The cloud pattern is very unusual, including the colourful patches in the middle, refracted sunlight coming from the left of the picture.