Sphinx moth



We hiked another mile past the palm grove and stopped for lunch in a verdant…ahhh..”glen”.





…in which we found, to my great surprise….who’d a thunk it, in the desert?



After lunch we hiked back down the canyon, pausing above the Palm Grove to look at the view.



We scanned the canyon walls, and Joan spotted them! There were four of them, three full-grown rams and a younger fellow. We stared and stared for a good 45 minutes until they finally moved off on up the hill. These guys are an endangered species, there are only a few hundred desert bighorn left. Last year we had the UNBELIEVABLE experience of seeing twenty-one of them in this same canyon. However, that’s a once in a lifetime lucky break, and seeing four on this trip is still fantastic. We didn’t see any sheep at all the first three times we hiked up the canyon.