The awesomeness of water

25 10 2025

We got more rain Thursday. 🙂

Buckeye and his band knew exactly where to find relatively fresh water trickling down this rock arroyo, where it fills pools and puddles and tinajas along the way. I LOVE seeing the horses find new water. It doesn’t last long, but the fact that it’s there is, really, just cool.

The perspective is weird, but this is looking DOWN the rock arroyo. The bright part is the reflection of clouds in the water of a tinaja in the rock.

This looks like a bigger scene than it actually is. It’s actually only a couple of feet from the little “waterfall” – which is only maybe 6 or 8 inches tall? – to where I’m holding my phone along the little rock wall on the left. Is it cool or what?! (It looked a lot cooler in reality; it loses something in translation to still image.)

This twin-trunk cottonwood is downstream from the rock arroyo. I wonder how far under the soil surface is that bedrock? Not far downstream is another cottonwood, still very green-leaved!

It doesn’t look it, but all that ground is very nicely damp to downright muddy.

Another gorgeous post-rain day in Spring Creek Basin. 🙂





Fallin’ for the view

24 10 2025

It really is that divinely beautiful right now. 🙂

Top to bottom: Temple. Madison. Temple photobombing Madison. 🙂

Mustangs in Spring Creek Basin, which is part of Disappointment Valley but does NOT include Disappointment Creek, along which you can see the glowing cottonwoods snaking across the distant landscape, headed west.

(Disappointment Creek currently is as dry (well, muddy, as I type this during intermittent rain waves) as Spring Creek … maybe with a few more puddles along its considerably longer length. But it generally runs from … February? Ish? Into July if we’re lucky. That’s enough water to (mostly) support the cottonwoods along most of its length. Spring Creek runs only when there’s a major rain event. We have a couple of cottonwood trees in Spring Creek Basin (I think I can count them on one hand and have fingers left over), but they’re in higher drainages that may not get more flow (?) but might get more rainfall. The cottonwoods seen in the distance in the above images are along Disappointment Creek outside/west of Spring Creek Basin.)





Heading down to water

22 10 2025

Tenaz and Skywalker make their way down a hill at sunset to one of Spring Creek Basin’s water catchments, now holding plenty of water after the rains a week ago.





Watcher

21 10 2025

Do you ever get that feeling like you’re being watched?

In the best possible way, of course! 🙂

I was sitting way up high on a hill in the northwestern part of the basin, after a huffin’-and-puffin’ kind of climb, and I was looking out at the view when I happened to look straight to my right to see a pretty little face looking at me from under the cover (or so she thought) of trees. Ha!

Pretty Rowan in Buckeye’s band is a curious girl!

We are having some absolutely gorgeous weather. It’s mostly dry again, though I keep finding little pools in arroyos and canyons and other little places of still-damp ground. The mustangs are growing their winter coats and starting to look fuzzy. My favorite time of year.





Admiring

20 10 2025

Not a bad view. 🙂





The blingy side

19 10 2025

Cassidy Rain remains morally opposed to posing for marvelous mustang portraits … but now and then, I “catch” her looking gorgeous (as she always does, willingly or not)!





Uplifted

18 10 2025

Lovely, wise Terra, napping on a sunny – and windy! – fall day in Spring Creek Basin.





So much water

17 10 2025

That’s Winona, and this is the same pond from a few posts ago featuring Temple. The rain FILLED this pond, which was looking a little weak (but better than dry).

Same Winona, same pond, same almost-overtaken-by-setting-sun-shade time of day after she’d walked around it.

It was like taking pix of a mustang at a LAKE with all that water in the background. 🙂 It was a weird and wild and most wonderful situation, and I hope to see a lot more scenes like it.





Changes

16 10 2025

Mariah was not impressed about being disturbed from her nap in the shade. I didn’t bother them long as I investigated the sound of water trickling and discovered it to be rain-remnant water trickling over rock down an arroyo just behind her band. Amazing!

By tomorrow morning (?), she might want more sunshine than shade as temps are predicted to drop to freezing for the first time this season!





Gold ‘n gratitude

14 10 2025

Mysterium contemplates … something? … while grazing with her band in the still-muddy eastern part of Spring Creek Basin. Spring Creek is still trickling, and the horses had been drinking there before making their way up this ridge.

I’d have loved to catch the ponies there, at the pond, drinking that glorious rainwater. … But I can’t begin to tell you how much I LOVED to see that glorious rainwater, its still surface mirroring the sky like glass.

I may have shouted and screamed and whooped and hollered with pretty massive, uncontainable joy. 🙂

Water, folks. It’s pure gold.