Photos from Sabino Canyon Recreation Area (#FOTD)

Hubs and I visited Sabino Canyon for the first time yesterday. We only made it about a half mile on the trail before the heat sent us scurrying (OK, plodding) back to our air-conditioned car. I hear tell there’s a lake and running water further up the trail, but we’ll see that another time, when it isn’t in the 90s and monsoon-humid.

Hot or not, it was lovely out in the desert. We’ve had tons of rain–the wettest July on record–so the desert is lush and green and smells of fresh rain and creosote. The cacti are plumped up, and we even saw tadpoles in a puddle along the trail. I didn’t bring my proper camera, so these are all snaps with an iPhone, taken in late morning so the colors aren’t as vivid as they would be early or late in the day.

The first pic is a closeup of a fishhook barrel cactus flower. Here’s the same flower but showing more of the cactus. The fishhook barrel cactus is a common sight around here. They get their name from the curves in their spines, though those are hard to see in this pic because of the angle (looking down from the top).

Here’s a glimpse of the Sonoran Desert landscape, all greened up from a month of rain. I love this shot, because it shows so many kinds of vegetation and saguaros in so many sizes, from just a couple of feet tall to 20 feet or more. You can also see prickly pears and cholla. The trees in the background on the right are mesquite. They’re everywhere down here. And those clouds are the beginnings of the thunderheads building for the afternoon monsoon rains. This pic was taken at about 11 AM.

To get a sense of what the desert looked like before the rain, see my post from last November with pics from Saguaro National Park. It’s a different place but still Sonoran Desert – and a lot less green.

The first pic in this post is my entry in Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge.