Back when I lived in Denver, Great Sand Dunes was always one of my favorite places to visit. It’s about a 3 hour drive southwest of the city. Back then it was only classified as a National Monument but today it is given full National Park status. Mule deer and pronghorn are common grazers in the fields that lead up to the dunes. In this photo, a mule deer was keeping his eye on me as I pulled over to the side of the road.

I got up before sunrise everyday on my recent trip out West hoping for great clouds and fiery skies for landscape photos. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky on a single morning. And without the clouds, I usually resort to plan B — shooting the sun. This was in Monument Valley, another National Tribal Park on Navajo land in the southeast corner of Utah. Like yesterday’s post from Maroon Bells in Colorado, this is a location that gets photographed a lot — most notably as the backdrop to countless Westerns and Marlboro Man ads.

This is the most photographed spot in Colorado — the two Maroon Bells peaks as seen from Maroon Lake near Aspen. I tried to be at least a little original by including the geese.

When you can’t find any other wildlife to photograph, there are always prairie dogs. This one was part of a colony along the side of the road, next to a gas station somewhere in eastern Utah. It was chirping a warning signal to the rest of the colony before it had finished eating its lunch.

Being only about an hour from Denver, Mount Evans is a location that I’ve been to a lot. I see mountain goats about 75% of the time that I go there. I’ve shot a lot of close ups of the goats in the past, so on my most recent trip, I really wanted to get some photos that show their environment in the high Rockies. These two kids were taking a rest while there mother was grazing just to the right of the composition.

I’m off for a few days for the 4th, so this will be the last post until later next week. What  you see here is prickly pear cactus and some desert indian paintbrush. What you don’t see is the snake that came slithering out of those rocks after I almost stepped on it.

Another photo of the wild burros that I stumbled across in Moreno Valley, California. These two kept chasing each other back and forth, enabling me to get some nice slow shutter speed, motion blurred shots.

This used to be called a rufous-sided towhee, although the powers that be have decided that the western and eastern variants in the US are separate species. So to be hip, we’ll call it its new name, the spotted towhee (the eastern guys are appropriately called eastern towhees). Regardless of the name, both suffer from the cruel injustice of the female cowbird. Seems the cowbird sneaks into the towhee’s nest when an expectant mother isn’t there, removes the towhee eggs and then deposits a few of her own. The cowbird splits the scene before the towhee knows what’s going on. Unable to distinguish that a switch has occurred, the towhee will incubate the eggs as if her own.

This coachwhip snake was out hunting lizards when I came across it on a hike in the Colorado Desert of southern California. Of course, my first instinct when I see a small animal is to get down on the ground for a few pictures. Fortunately, the snake cooperated by raising its head up out of the bushes for a few seconds before continuing on its way.