Two weeks ago Kristina and I went for a hike to celebrate Earth Day. Since we hadn’t had gone out on Easter Sunday the previous week – due to cold, stormy weather – we brought along our Easter baskets and boiled eggs and had a picnic.

We hiked to one of our favorite places. It’s nameless on the map, but we since we always seem to see coyote tracks there and once saw a coyote nearby we named it Coyote Canyon. We enjoy getting photos of coyotes and other animals with the trail camera that we have positioned there.

As we hiked I realized that while some things along the way were very familiar to me there were other things that I’d either forgotten about or never noticed before. I had thoughts like “I don’t remember noticing that little ledge before”. It’s fun to go back to the same area on a regular basis for the comfort of the familiar and the excitement of things that are new or hadn’t been noticed before.

Visiting natural areas and getting to know them can inspire us to want to protect them. And wanting to protect individual areas can help us to want to protect this great Earth that we live on.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day here are fifty photos, with notes, from our hike (if you click on the first photo you can look at each of them one at a time as a slideshow and read the notes).

Every trip is a new adventure

The little chipped rocks are evidence that other people were here a long time ago – making stone tools. These “chippings” are officially called “lithic scatter”. “Lithic” means “rock” (the outer surface of the earth is the lithosphere). The little pieces of rock could also be called “leaverites – leaver her right were you found her”. It’s illegal and unethical to take artifacts from public land, so what I do is add them to my archaeological photo collection and leave them where I find them.

There are so many pretty rocks to look at

There’s life on this rock. The orange stuff is lichen, which is a combination of fungus and algae. A student at Cedar Ridge Academy told me a good way to remember this: Fred Fungus took a “lichen” to Alice Algae and the relationship has been on the rocks ever since. The fungus holds things in place and the algae provides energy by photosynthesizing

Kristina photographing some Indian paintbrush

One of Kristina’s Indian paintbrush photos

It always amazes me that cottonwood trees can get enough water to survive here

We kept seeing little caterpillar droppings, and then we found this little guy (or gal). Not sure what species it is.

Whenever I see a hole like this I wonder who’s home it might be. Maybe a rabbit? Sometimes one species digs a hole and then this or that other species ends out living there.

This photo shows evidence of different stages of a food chain. There are leaves from plants, and rabbit feces containing undigestible plant material. The larger stuff appears to be bobcat feces, which contain undigested fur from rabbits and/or other animals

The desert contains such striking landscapes

The little overhang at the top of this cliff provides a fortress for the nest of some kind of raptor (hawk, eagle, falcon, or owl)

A close-up of the raptor nest. The white stuff on the rock, called “whitewash”, is from the feces of the raptor

The plant in the foreground is wild onion. When it’s plentiful I like to pick a little piece of leaf to nibble on. You have to be careful, though, because there’s another plant that looks similar – death camas

We decided this would be a good place to have our lunch

Kristina removing a sliver (splinter), which she probably got while taking close-up photos of plants

We didn’t dye our eggs; they were already pretty colorful

When I cut this egg open I commented that it looked like the sun, which led to a conversation about how everything we eat gets its energy from the sun – directly in the case of plants and indirectly in the case of animals

One of Kristina’s delicious homemade lavender cookies

The view from our picnic site

Rocks are an abiotic (non-living) part of ecosystems, but this one appears to be alive

This boulder reminded us of a camel (another “has that always been here?” moment), so Kristina went for an imaginary ride

One of the things we enjoy about hiking in the desert is all of the different kinds flowers, many of which are yellow. We don’t know what species this is but it appears to be some kind of legume (member of the pea family). Nodules in the roots of legumes contain bacteria that fix nitrogen (convert nitrogen from the air into a form that can be used by living things)

These flowers growing in a crack in the rock reminded me of plants growing up through cracks in cement in cities

Kristina walking up the wash in Coyote Canyon. Note her tracks on the left and a bunch of coyote tracks on the right

Can you see the trail camera in this photo? We’ve gotten photos of lots of different animals with it (I’ll have to put some of those photos in a future blog post)

We hid Easter baskets for each other to find, complete with naturally sweetened organic candy

Another rock that looks like it’s alive. What kind of animal does it look like to you?

A Bobcat’s feces, which it left in a little hole like a house cat would. I once watched a bobcat walking up a little two-track road in the Book Cliffs and its behavior reminded me so much of a house cat

It’s amazing that plants can thrive in this dry, cracked soil

Coyote tracks made when this soil was wet

The dark stuff on the right in the foreground is biological soil crust, also known a crytogamic soil. That name is fitting because “cryptogamic” means “hidden marriage” and this crust contains a bunch of different kinds of microorganisms living together in a symbiotic relationship. This living material plays an important role in desert ecosystems by holding the soil together and storing moisture

A bone breaking down and returning calcium and other minerals to the soil. Calcium, carbon, and the other chemicals we are made of originally came from exploding stars, so we are all made of stardust!

Here we found evidence of a natural landscape-changing event – the force of gravity pulling rocks down into the canyon

You may surprised to know that the beautiful Indian Paintbrush is a semi-parasitic plant, making some of what it needs and getting the rest by tapping into the roots of a nearby plant, like a sagebrush. Here’s a website with some great information about Indian paintbrush, including a Native American legend about where they came from: https://owlcation.com/stem/The-Indian-Paintbrush.

Sagebrush. The little thing that looks like a berry is actually a gall, produced by the plant in response to an insect larvae burrowing into the plant tissue. Sagebrush have big deep roots that allow them to pull up water from far below the surface. They’re amazing plants – and I love the way they smell. I was delighted when, earlier this spring, I found three little sagebrush plants starting to grow in our backyard.

Another nice view

Shadow people on the flat area above Coyote Canyon

A pronghorn antelope footprint

This was the second or third place we found something that looked like this – urine, feces, and hoof marks from pronghorn antelope. I suspected it was a way of marking a territory, but when I did some research at home I found out that according to a study done in Montana this is probably the work of a male antelope urinating and defecating and pawing to try to cover up the smell of one of his females to prevent other males from finding her. A male will evidently also take his little group of females down into a wash or ravine to hide them from other males. Animal behavior is so fascinating

You can see the snow-capped Uinta Mountains in the distance

A couple of different species of flower growing next to each other

I don’t know what kind of flowers these are, but they sure are pretty

This appears to be another member of the pea family

Coyote Canyon

We have yet to figure out what this tiny, mysterious-looking plant coming up out of the dry soil is

This appears to be some kind of stink beetle. They get that name from their defense strategy of standing on their head and squirting out a noxious spray. Kristina didn’t get sprayed when she took this close-up

I love the badlands look of this area, with its rocks and clay soil

When I looked at this rock I noticed what looks like a coyote head on the left and a little bear head on the right. Do you see them?

I love clouds. I think they’re pretty, and they’re a part of the water cycle – one of the many cycles so important to life on this wonderful planet. Happy Earthday, Earth!