Exploration

     I never know where curiosity will take me.  For instance, last September I was up at Pyramid Lake, a large lake in the high Nevada desert, on a Paiute Indian reservation.  Conditions are dry at the end of the summer, there wasn't much to see.  But I found a small canyon I hadn't explored before, and started going deeper.  There's a shrub called rabbit brush that for some reason blooms in the fall, a rich orange-yellow, and there was lots of it.

But mostly, the canyon was dry and barren and I walked along a long ways with nothing much to see.  Then, around a bend, out of nowhere, a  bush of showy penstemon, a brilliant blue as blue as the sky above the canyon walls,  the first wildflower I'd seen.  Spectacular, this burst of life in the midst of a parched canyon.  Something inspiring wonder:  THIS flower in THIS dry place.

   I kept going and never saw another one.  I kept going past meanders and narrows where the canyon cut through harder strata, and some dry waterfalls I scrambled over until I got to a dry waterfall 12 feet high, impossible to climb over.   So I turned back to a fork in the canyon and proceeded up that, and came to the remains of a deer that had fallen into the canyon.  It had been pretty well cleaned off except for tough skin, and a little ways further I found a skull--clearly carnivore--with criss-crossing fangs, mostly likely a coyote.   I never did find a spring like I have in several of the canyons, but I found things I never expected.  And on the way back, from time to time I could see the blue of the lake and the distant mountains.  I can't wait to get back there.