Arches National Park

Jan and I made a weekend trip to Arches National Park. As soon as Jan got off work at 1:30 p.m. we jumped in the car and took off for Moab. I wanted to get pictures of Delicate Arch with the late afternoon sun on it. We made it to Arches about 5:00 p.m. and hurried to the Delicate Arch trailhead. It's a 1.5 mile hike out to Delicate Arch with a 450 foot elevation gain, and we had less than an hour to get there. As you can see from the pictures, we made it with plenty of time to spare, although clouds were covering the sun. Jan has been walking 3 miles every day, and you could really tell she was in shape. I was glad we made the effort to get there Friday afternoon.

We stayed the night in Moab, and then came back to Arches the next morning. It was cloudy, but the weather forecast hadn't said there would be any rain, so we drove out to Devil's Garden and were going to make a 4.5 mile hike out to Double O Arch. We made it a little past half way when suddenly the clouds came rushing over us, hail started to fall, lightning flashed, thunder roar and echoes, and we were climbing on slickrock. It was really scary. You can see the before and after pictures of Landscape Arch. We very carefully hiked back off the slickrock to our car, grateful to make it safely. We thought we might be able to wait out the storm, but it just kept coming down, so we finally gave up and left for home. It was truly amazing to see and hear Mother Nature change so drastically so quickly. It was truly a wonderful adventure.

I saw these mallard ducks swimming on the water on my pool cover, and thought it odd that two females would be together without any males. Then i noticed that the beaks were different, and did some research to discover that duck with the yellow bill is the male in "eclipse plummage". I went to the website http://10000birds.com/the-eclipse-plumage.htm to get this explanation:

"Different groups of birds have evolved different “moult strategies”: raptors, for example, replace body feathers and wing feathers in a set order and over several years; many passerines (eg thrushes) keep their wing feathers into the second year of life but replace their body feathers in the first year. Ducks, though, shed most of their feathers twice each year, and in mid-summer most male ducks moult from the bright and colourful breeding plumage into a drab, female-like “eclipse plumage”. The reason for this is that ducks have a rapid but complete moult after breeding, dropping both body and wing feathers, and for a few weeks are completely flightless. Temporarily unable to escape predators by flying away, many male ducks have opted to do what the females do for most of the year and merge safely into the background (or, like eg Shelducks, gather in large flocks offshore or in the middle of large lakes.)"