Wildflowers of the Sage Brush Desert

I took a drive up to Cow Camp for the Stoddarts this afternoon to see if I could capture some of the beauty that this unusually wet spring has given us.If you want o know what the individual flowers are named I invite you to look them up, because I am not going to. It has taken me at least an hour and half to shrink all these  small enough to be able to get them on the computer. :-)

The desert is as beautiful as I have ever seen it in the 14 years that I have lived here. There are 37 pictures here and not very many are duplicates. Click on the first one and they will go full screen.

Yanking and banking!

I took a flight yesterday and took a lot of footage where I flew. There was one part that I particularly wanted flying below the cliffs down into the Crooked Creek drainage. Unfortunately my camera was pointed too far down, and I was unable to turn it upward so that you could see some of the sky as well. The creek is about 30 feet or so below the surface of the rest of the ground. I kept trying to peer up at the top of the screen to see more, so I finally scrapped the video and made a new support for the camera that is a bit taller. Here is the result.

https://vimeo.com/340501352   password-   owyheeflyer

I get information from Vimeo about how many times my video's are watched and whether they are watched to the end. I will repeat as in most years-  If you are not interested in getting the blog or the video's kindly tell me and I will gladly remove your name from the list. I do not monetize it and the last thing I want to do is to bore someone with my ramblings. No harm, No foul, no hard feelings.

Sheepsheads

Wonder of wonders today dawned calm and clear. Its probably one of the few mornings that the ground wasn't wet from rainfall the night before. The wind wasn't blowing either. That was really strange. I woke up at 0530 and the temperature was already at 56 degrees. 50 degrees is my cut off for flying, At that temperature I am quite comfortable with just a jacket. I have been a bit shy about flying since Karen's death. There is just something about not having a radio back up that makes one a bit more cautious. I leave the door open for the Dogs and Cat, just in case I don't come back.

I have a couple of friends coming and they expressed an interest in seeing some of the feral horses that infest this country. (There are just too many) There was about 1400 of them in the Sheepshead's last year, so I wanted to check the roads to see if it was possible to get up there. There is no excuse for tearing up the roads, so it was best to check, besides it gave me a mission for an excuse to fly.

It didn't take all that long to decide that I wasn't going to drive up there, besides I didn't see any horses. They were hanging out on the side hills along Hwy 78 going towards Burns. I saw a couple of Antelope that had survived the drought and the Horses that kept them off the waterholes last fall.
I flew for an hour, burned 4 gallons of fuel. The plane performed perfectly and best of all, I had fun.

  https://vimeo.com/339877641    password    owyheeflyer