The wind had stopped by the time we woke up this morning. :) I had my normal breakfast and made my coffee to go. We left at 7:15 in the Jeep.

We went to Coyote Canyon in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to photograph the wildflowers. There were flowers everywhere, but they were scattered enough that there were no large fields of color. We stopped to photograph some ocotillo blooms, and the wind had picked up enough to make macro flower photography a challenge even with our plamps. A Plamp™ is a fantastic plant clamp made by Wimberley that can help hold flowers still in a slight breeze. J finished shooting the ocotillo and started looking around for other subjects. She found some desert lilies and excitedly told me about them. I went over to photograph them too, and got my favorite image of the morning (left).

On our way back out of Coyote Canyon, we stopped to watch a female peninsular bighorn sheep high up on the mountainside — too high to photograph. J was thrilled because bighorns are her favorite animal, and the peninsular bighorn, a special segment of the desert bighorn (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) subspecies of bighorn (Ovis canadensis), has been listed as a federally endangered species since 1998.

We went to the Center Market in Borrego Springs around 11:10 to pick up some milk, and we were quite impressed by the selection in the little store.

We returned to the RV around 11:45 and I downloaded the images I took this morning.

I had lunch at 12:05, then prepared the images that were selected from my previous stock submission. More images were selected than usual, which was good, but it also meant I had more images to prepare, which was bad — it's a tedious, boring process. We left around 4:20 in the Jeep.
We headed to the Pumpkin Patch in the nearby Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area. We took the dirt Cross Over Trail from the S22, and most of it was very bumpy! Think "washboard," but the bumps were about 2-3 ft (60-90cm) high with the peaks about 8-10 ft (2.4-3.0m) apart! We were only able to travel around 5 mph (8 kph)! When we turned onto the Tule Wash road, it was like an expressway — we could go about 25 mph (40 kph).

We reached the Pumpkin Patch around 5:25, about 10 minutes before the sun set over the nearby hill. We didn't plan to arrive so late — it took way longer to get there than we thought it would. The "pumpkins" are 2-3 ft (60-90cm) diameter concretions that are enclosed within a fence which is good to keep the off-road vehicles out. However, the fence is placed too close to the boulders, and there are only few places where one can photograph without getting the fence in the image if one wants to include the sky. The clear sky was pretty boring, so the fence to the east wasn't much of an issue. However, because we arrived so close to sunset, the fence to the west was casting shadows on some of the boulders which was a big problem. So, I just waited for the sun to go behind the nearby hill before I started to photograph the boulders. The image to the left was my first composition of the evening. It's unusual for my first composition at an area to be my favorite, but I had some time to scout the area while I waited for the sun to set. It also meant that we could have left a lot earlier than we did (around 6:15).

It was too dark to find the Pumpkin Patch Trail south, so we took the Tule Wash all the way back to the paved CA-86. Some sections were rather soft and sandy, and I was quite happy that we made it all the way out to CA-86 without getting stuck. We did have some difficulty getting up out of the wash and onto CA-86 because the wash widened quite a bit as it went under the high bridge for CA-86. In the darkness, we didn't see the exit from the wash until we went beyond the bridge and turned around to look again.

We returned to the RV at 7:40! What a long and tiring "afternoon"!

I had dinner of leftover cold pizza, fresh strawberries, a plum, and some leftover brownies. I took some Advil for dessert because bouncing around in the Jeep for so long had given some of my muscles a workout that they weren't accustomed to. J had some Bear Creek Creamy Potato Soup for dinner.

I downloaded the images from this afternoon and then downselected them in Capture One (C1). I processed two images for the blog then went to bed.