The Trip Home...

Late last fall after finishing the job in Oregon, I was able to get some excellent pictures illustrating numerous edges in nature on my way home to Texas. I had to head south to Riverside, CA, to drop off some things that we had used in Oregon. Then, I headed east across AZ and NM, stopping overnight at my cousin's house in Tuscon.

As I made my way across NM, I decided to take a slightly different path than usual, traveling up over the continental divide at Cloudcroft, NM, and then along US 82 into Texas. I had never been that way before from Alamogordo to Hobbs, but I'm so glad I chose that way.

The pictures here will document a lot of my trip as I traveled home. I have been trying to figure out a way to tell the story and tie it in to Edge Habitat, but I guess the best way is by showing the pictures.

As I prepared to leave Oregon the week after Thanksgiving, snow threatened to close I-5 at Siskiyou pass. But it was open when I got to Ashland, so I was able to get over and out of Oregon w/o traveling the coast highway, as I had feared.

As it turns out, the post holiday traffic on I-5 was a much larger obstacle than any snowstorm could have been. Wow! What an idiotic mess! If there was ever an example of "territorial imperative," that was it!

When I got just south of Yreka, CA, I was able to get these shots of Mt. Shasta as the clouds would open up just enough to show me the mountain. If you've never witnessed Mt. Shasta before, it is truly another of nature's majestic mega-edges. Stratovolcanoes have an aura anyway, but Mt. Shasta is at the top of the class, IMO. One day it will blow again, like St. Helen did, and it will show it's power to all the world. But many of us can feel that awesome power every time we get near it.

Further north in Oregon lies Mt. Jefferson, and further south and east is Mt. Lassen. But nether command the aura of Mt. Shasta, at least to me anyway.

Mt. Jefferson

Mt. Lassen

After stopping in Riverside, CA, I continued across to my cousin's house just north of Tuscon and west of the Catalina Mts. The pictures below are from her back yard just before dawn.

Looking SE



More southerly

  As I traveled across southern AZ and NM later that day, I decided to get off the freeway at Truth or Consequences and head over to Alamogordo and then top out over US 82 at Cloudcroft. As the following pictures will illustrate, it was a great idea to see some country and critters that I'd not seen before.


Climbing up toward Cloudcroft and looking back toward Alamogordo



Mule deer just over the top on the east side (The tint is due to my not having time to open my PU window.)



Elk cows and beef cows... a little further down the hill...

Altogether, it was a great trip home and a great 3 months spent out west. And, hopefully, a graphic illustration of how edge effects and edge habitat exist everywhere we look... if we look closely enough.

Point is, we need to preserve and develop such edge, as best we can, to improve our environment for wildlife AND human life. Awareness of the need is what Edge Habitat is trying to improve... along w/ whatever we can do to physically nurture the habitat along the way...