Saturday, August 04, 2018

looking for sunflowers...and water

LOOKING FOR SUNFLOWERS

I set out on an adventure last Wednesday.
A quest, if you will.

I was looking for sunflowers to paint.
And so were my friends:
Jillian, Barb, Susana, and Susan.

It has been at least 6-7 years since I've been to Bosque del Apache.
I called about a week ago and they said the sunflowers were just
starting to bloom, so I thought, let's take a day trip.
We'll drive down, see a lot of ducks, geese, water, maybe a crane or two. 
And sunflowers.

We left the house about 7:35am.
It took us longer than we thought to get there and
when we arrived, it was already HOT.

But we found sunflowers!

They were not all fully open yet, 
but enough so that I got a few good shots.





 Jillian enjoying the scenery

Susan looking for that perfect shot.


 We also saw a cool old truck!

 Peaceful and serene

More suns


 The only water we saw

 I see a painting here

 And here

 And here!

 The trees were full of all kinds of variations of green.
And this yellow-rusty plant - we didn't know if it was 
normally that color or dying.

 BEAUTIFUL!

 Taking a close-up

 My best shot of the day.
But look how dry it is!

 We finally painted at the Coyote Observation Deck.
At least it was shady.



 Hmm, I'm goofing off.

 This is a beautiful scene 

 We saw two deer!


Okay, this is confusing to me.
When I went several years ago, there was SO much water everywhere.
I went in the winter when the birds were already there
and maybe still migrating.
A few scenes from that time:



So much water!


So, can someone enlighten me?

Do they keep the fields dry during the summer
and flood them in the winter?
It just looked so different from what I was expecting.

The water above with all of the ducks was a huge dirt field on Wednesday.

Bosque Del Apache was still beautiful.
Just different.

I'm going to call the Visitor Center tomorrow.
It was closed when we went.

I WILL HAVE SOME ANSWERS.