Our Day 1 Scouting Process
We spent many hours acclimating to the Arroyo wash area and left completely confounded and sunburned. Everything just looked like an unremarkable rock or an unremarkable log. This makes everything look like a remarkable rock or a remarkable log! If nothing looks promising, perhaps everything is promising? But not today. The possibilities were just too endless.
Day 2 Scouting: We Found an Exciting Location
We rode our bikes back to the Arroyo in the late afternoon of July 5th. As we rolled up, we could hear the yelping of coyote pups down in the bottom of the wash as we approached Explorer Road. The reverbant sound of their yipping and singing was urgent, eerie, and thrilling. So we stopped our bikes to find them and, of course, they went completely silent. But we did eventually find them! Or… some of them. And we were totally captivated.
The coyotes silently nipped and tackled each other and rolled over on their backs for about ten minutes in front this beautiful clump of trees. They would stare at one of their coyote pals in the distance and that coyote would come running to play. They then eventually stared at us for a few minutes with their rigid bodies and fast-flicking tails. Should we come running to play? No. We could only be stupid frozen humans on our clanking and farting bicycles. And then they bolted away. Was their playful teasing an invitation to revisit clump of Cottonwoods? Or was this just a thunderclap of thirsty delirium? Or was this just us trying to find signal in the noise of the Arroyo? Either way, we shouldn’t have let our water bottles go empty two hours ago. We wrote in our notebooks, took photos with our phones, and rode home.
We had cataloged this odd clump of Fremont Cottonwoods before. In the video below you can see a blanket of dusty rose-colored feathery seedlings covering the ground in right of the frame.
