I made instant coffee to go and left by myself at 6:35 in the Jeep.

I had Clif Bars and coffee for breakfast on my way to Coyote Canyon. By the time I reached the entrance to it, the wind had already picked up enough to make macro photography difficult. I was able to get some nice shots of a desert sand verbena (below left) before I left.


I decided to go to Borrego Palm Canyon because I wanted to photograph the brittlebush, and didn't want to try to do it on the weekend when there would probably be a constant stream of hikers on the popular trail. I parked at the Visitor Center and hiked across the flat desert to get to the real trailhead by the campground. I was surprised that the wind was calm there, so I took some time to photograph the flowers along the path. My favorite image was of a desert chickory bloom (above right).

I reached the Borrego Palm Canyon trail, and there were quite a few people on it. Fortunately, the good brittlebush was away from the trail so I didn't have to worry about avoiding the other hikers in my compositions. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a great composition with the brittlebush growing among interesting rocks like I had wanted, so I had to settle for a less interesting composition (left).

I returned to the RV around 10:45 and downloaded the images I took this morning. I also continued to upload the images that were selected from my previous stock submission — the upload speed was slow. I downselected the images from this morning in Capture One (C1).

I had lunch at 11:55 then worked up a blog entry. J and I talked about near-term travel plans and I called some folks to get more information to help with our plans. We left at 4:20 in the Jeep.
We went to Font's Point to photograph sunset. I was astonished at the view that opened up when I walked up to the overlook over the badlands that stretched out before me because it was a shear drop from the overlook. I mainly concentrated on photographing the layers and patterns created by the erosion (left). Sunset itself wasn't very interesting because the sky was clear so there were no clouds to light up. Plus, the town of Borrego Springs was practically due west, and I'd rather not have the lights from the town in my images.

We returned to the RV around 6:15 (much better than yesterday!), and I set up the grill. I downloaded the images I took this afternoon while the grill heated up.

We had dinner around 6:50 of MorningStar Farms® Grillers Prime® Veggie Burgers with pepper jack cheese for J and Johnsonville Original Bratwurst for me. We also had some potato salad and J's Bean Salad. It was the first time J had had those veggie burgers, and she absolutely loved them. She said they were better than the real burgers we had had recently.

After dinner, I had some Asbach Uralt while downselecting images from this afternoon. Then I processed four images for the blog. The wind really picked up around 8:25, and we brought in the slide around 9:10. Our slide has a canopy that keeps debris off of it, and it flaps in the wind and makes noise that disturbs our sleep.