Chocolate Mountains

As tasty as that title may sound, it refers not to anything edible, but to a jagged range of hills in the northeastern portion of Imperial county. That was where the last survey I worked took place, and it was really amazingly lovely. That was a whole month ago, and I am just now downloading the photos from my camera. I have been too consumed with other matters to bother with it until now.

I just received some fabulously good news this morning--my worker's compensation claim (for my knee injury incurred on said Chocolate Mtns. survey) has been approved and they are going to write me a check for the past month that I haven't been able to work. Thank god! I was starting to be very very worried about how I was going to pay my bills this month, not to mention that I need some extra funds to be able to find a new place to live.

Now, on to the photos! I will only post a few here; the rest are on my Flickr page (click on the little animated badge on the right), so be sure to check them out. I can't really tell you how gorgeous this area is. I would love to be able to go there again. Seeing as how it's not accessible to the public, and that it's a military firing range, that may not happen anytime soon. I don't suggest hiking around out there unless you don't mind losing a few limbs or possibly your whole self in the undertaking. One morning when we got horribly lost on our way out to our work site (it was an hour away from our hotel in Calipatria), we found ourselves in the middle of a very eerie and fantastic tableau. There were dozens and dozens of mangled and rusting tanks sunk into the landscape for target practice, and even more ominous, hundreds and hundreds of bombs sticking up out of the sand like upended metal fish. It was exciting in a frightening sort of way. We beat a rather hasty but careful retreat--after Matt snapped a few photos. I don't have any of those, but I'm not sure they would really do the scene justice anyhow. The camera lens can only capture a few tanks at a time; they were so huge and were scattered over a really wide area.

At any rate, here are the few photos I promised. These are a sampling of the fauna we saw during the survey; be sure to click on them to make them bigger, they look waaaay better that way. There are more landscape photos on Flickr, as well as detailed descriptions; I'm too lazy to type them out twice.
Unidentified but beautiful snake (June 14th--I just learned that this is a coachwhip snake)

Very tiny baby tortoise. See the sand grains clinging to its shell for scale.

Very cool desert iguana

This isn't a good photo, but these lizards are REALLY hard to photograph; they are lightning fast and very leery of humans.