One of the things I want to do and have been looking forward to in the Victor Valley area (Hesperia, Oak Hills, Apple Valley, Victorville, aka the high desert) is getting out to hike and explore. I haven’t done much of that yet due to time pressures and most of my spare time (even now) going to the ongoing tasks of moving in and getting organized. Yes, it’s been 8.5 months, which is a far longer time than I ever thought it would be, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint. I can do marathons – a sprint would kill me, and that wouldn’t be any fun at all.
But I’ve been looking at the maps, and I knew that a nearby major street ended just a few miles away when it ran into the edge of “the Mesa.” We’re near the south end of the valley floor here, with the ground dropping off into the Cajon Pass where the I-15 Freeway heads “down the hill” toward San Bernardino, Riverside, Rancho Cucamonga, and then intercepts the east-west freeways which will go west toward Pasadena, Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and Ventura, while a left turn to the east will take you to Palm Springs, the low desert, and Arizona. Up here, away from the I-15 and the Cajon Pass, the ground just drops away at “the Mesa” down into the canyons which lead down to San Bernardino and the Coachella Valley.
Where the Mesa drops off, we also have the BNSF train tracks coming up through the Cajon Pass (look on YouTube for “Cajon Pass live railcam”) so I went looking for the dirt roads and hiking trails along the edge of the Mesa. I found them, I found the train tracks, and I’ll be sharing those pictures and adventures over the next few days. Today, let’s look at the new birds I found.
The north-south road that I was following ended the paved segment about a mile south of the east-south main road that our house is off of. There’s a huge electrical substation there, a couple of really isolated homesteads, and then the road continues another quarter mile or so as a dirt access road for emergency crews and the power company that services the multiple high-tension power lines running to Los Angeles and SoCal from Hoover Dam and all of the solar and wind farms out in the desert. I parked the car at the end of the pavement and walked on the dirt road – no need to risk getting the ancient Volvo convertible stuck out in the boonies!
While walking on the dirt road, I suddenly flushed a small group of birds out of the tumbleweeds next to the road and I was pretty sure what they were. When I was a kid, pre-teens, I went hunting with my dad in South Dakota and recognized these birds as being similar. When I got back to the car later, I saw a group of five or six crossing the road, then one popped up on a sign to stand guard for the others.
I couldn’t get too close without spooking them again and this “adventure” was sort of spontaneous and spur of the moment, so I didn’t have my good camera and telephoto lens with me, just my cell phone, and it was getting dark shortly after sunset, so the couple of photos I got were marginal. But… That’s a California Quail, not much doubt about it.
Not expected, a pleasant surprise to see, but not unreasonable to see now that I think about it.
Cool! Next time maybe I’ll plan ahead a bit more and bring the big gear!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 