Montebello 2009

My superlative wife let me go on my second annual Monte Bello 24-hour solo backpacking trip this weekend. October is just about the worst month for wildlife here, but that was only part of my reason for going. Here are a few pictures culled from the 300 or so I took yesterday.

One of my main goals was to find snakes. Most of my hiking plans revolved around poking around the karst outcroppings up near Black Mountain to find snakes. I found none there. I did however see a Pacific gopher snake directly on the trail right at the parking lot before I had even taken a single step:

In the undergrowth around Stevens creek I found a western skink [no newts because of the season]:

1000 feet higher, at Black Mountain, I spent a lot of time taking pictures of flowers and searching for snakes. I didn't find a snake but I did find a completely intact 5-foot gopher snake skin. The scales seemed like little lenses to me, so I shot the setting sun through the skin:

This is my favorite of the bunch. The shadows from the wide ventral [belly] scales are visible as well as the in-focus dorsal scales:

For 45 minutes or so I sat alone on Black Mountain and watched the sun set, while a doe stood still on a hill several hundred feet away and... watched the sunset too, is all I can figger.

I spent a foolish portion of last night rigging up creative ways to catch opossums in my lens, to no avail. They were everywhere and impossible to nail down.

It was great! I hope next year I can go in a better season...