
All that remarkable grass. Gaia and her bandmates are in grazing heaven.
The forecast can’t make up its mind whether we have rain on the way or not. … I’m hopefully in the “on the way” camp.

All that remarkable grass. Gaia and her bandmates are in grazing heaven.
The forecast can’t make up its mind whether we have rain on the way or not. … I’m hopefully in the “on the way” camp.

I love how Dundee not only shares the swish-power of her tail but also some of her zebra stripes with Rowan. 🙂

There’s a lot of mutual bug-relief-seeking behavior among the horses, including Juniper and one of her band mates.

As I was following a couple of bands as they grazed their way through a grove of pinon-juniper trees on their way to an open area, I caught sight of this bull snake, slithering into the safety of a hollow trunk.
Maybe it didn’t like the activity, or maybe it was searching for a place of coolness on a hot day. Maybe it had its own snakey priorities in mind. … Just a little reminder that as we follow the obvious, littler critters are following their own, slightly more subtle lives in Spring Creek Basin.

With the good moisture and lush vegetation (maybe not to some, but it is to us!) comes the dreaded gnats. They’ve been out for a month or more, of course, but the hordes seem even more horrid and obnoxious since the rains. Mosquitoes, too, if you can believe it.
It’s hot and dry again, and we’re ready for the next teaser of rain to show up in the forecast.
As they do with everything else, the mustangs – like Buckeye – take the bugs in stride … but I think it has to make them at least a little bit crazy. It makes this human a lot crazy.


Our BLM range tech, Laura Heaton, was out in Spring Creek Basin last week doing some utilization (of vegetation) monitoring with her lovely assistant, Roo!
Do you see how GREEN it is?! We both think the grass is growing inches per day. It’s awesome to have finally gotten rain (now a stretch of hot, dry days looms).

Handsome Sundance catches the light just right among the pinon and juniper shadows of Spring Creek Basin’s north hills.

(Oops – a bit late this morning! I thought I had posts scheduled for the weekend.)
Juniper shines in a swath of late light that illuminates both her and the yummy galleta grass she and her band and at least four other bands were taking advantage of in the – apparently well-watered! – north hills. That rain was such an incredible and huge boon for this entire region. Spring Creek Basin and its mustangs and other wildlife are taking advantage.

I mean, wow, right? Does anyone doubt this latest proof of magic in Disappointment Valley (or on planet Earth?)? 🙂 That was absolutely as wide as my cell-phone camera could go; the rainbow was (seemed to be) right above me.

As usual, the rain forming the prism of the rainbows fell in the atmosphere, but not much actually made it to Earth.

And after sunset, this was the storm to the southeast. Only in a video clip was I able to catch the lightning bolts. Time between first and third photo: about an hour and 15 minutes. (And that rain didn’t make it to my location, either. I’m not greedy, but it’s still annoying to have rain *that close*! :))