Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

A little autumn hunkiness for your Thursday morning. 🙂

Tenaz hangs out with his band near Spring Creek canyon. There are limited places in Spring Creek Basin where we either have cottonwood trees (very few) or can see them lining Disappointment Creek in the distance. Behind Tenaz is a tamarisk/salt cedar at the edge of Spring Creek. Like the rabbitbrush, they turn sort of yellowish in the fall, but it’s not blooming or leaves turning golden, just sort of a dying-toward-winter (dis?)coloration. But for purposes of imagery, it sure seems to *crown* our handsome Tenaz very well, don’t you think?

All in a row: Dundee, Aiyanna and Rowan. Such glorious girls!

The bokeh in the trees shadowing Chipeta is divine, as is the girl herself.

Now, for you Southwest-rock-art aficionados, don’t get *too* excited about/by the title of this post; I don’t mean rock art in *that* sense. I mean just that I used a uniquely weathered boulder at the base of Filly Peak to frame a band of horses napping along a ridge above Spring Creek in the western part of the basin.

I’m not sure whether it *works*. … The mustangs are pretty far and not much more than dots (white or otherwise!), but I like trying to use the basin’s other, maybe minor (!), natural beauties to show off her obvious ones.

While there is a much-weathered panel of rock-art petroglyphs on a rock wall several miles north of Spring Creek Basin, just across the highway from Road 19Q/Disappointment Road, I’ve never found any in the basin.

(I thought I’d taken a pic of the boulder with my cell phone, but apparently, I didn’t. I’ll try to rectify that missed opportunity in the near future. The pic might work better if viewers could tell that the weirdly shaped orange blob at left IS a boulder!)

To further illustrate Winona’s adeptness at keeping me in view while clipping the good grasses from the bases of boulders, here’s another image from the same evening as yesterday’s post.

But I think I like this one most of all:

She’s a master!

Winona, resourceful mustang that she is, was grazing among the boulders at the base of Filly Peak the other evening. Coincidentally, she may have been practicing her boulder-picking skills.

While I kept my eyes peeled for interesting compositions among the lichen-splashed rock giants, Winona interrupted her grazing at times, making sure to keep her eyes on me. 🙂

Sun-setting shadows already had grown long over the area east of Spring Creek canyon by the time I got down to Skywalker and his companion bands. I tagged along as they moseyed uphill from their evening drink, to a slice of sunshine over the rimrocks before night started its descent over our little piece of heaven.

You don’t survive in the wild as long as Houdini has without learning the art of where to get the best swish for the buck. In her case, bestie Alegre has the tail that’s best for the job of keeping flies away. I’ve seen Houdini numerous times following Alegre with her head positioned to take advantage of Alegre’s swishing. And it’s always Alegre. These ladies have been together for a very long time.