Cactus Column #3

The trip just ended, and I am writing this post from my comfortable, air condition bedroom. The last half of the trip was just as exciting as the first half. Some of the highlights were scorpion hunting and the Grand Canyon.
On day 6, we arrived at our hotel pretty early and decided to make good use of our extra time by going scorpion hunting. We had gone scorpion hunting previously at Anza-Borrego, but had no luck. We drove to the Sonoran Desert National Monument and started shining our black lights at around sunset. But, it was only after the sky became dark when we finally started to see the scorpions. At first, we were expecting the scorpions to only illuminate a little, so we were stopping at every little thing that looked like it was glowing. But, after finding the first scorpion, we realized that it lit up like a light bulb and it was very hard to miss. We ended up finding around 6 or 7 scorpions. Most of them were the desert hairy scorpions, but we did find a banded scorpion, which was really cool!
On the last day, we visited the Grand Canyon, and it was pretty grand. The layers of rocks were beautiful and we saw the biggest animals on the trip: elks. They were very tame and we were able to walk very close to them to get some awesome photos. But, my favorite part was lying on a rock at the edge of the cliff. It was a chilly day, so having the sun on my face while overlooking the breathtaking canyon was the epitome of “the good life”. Instead of “What is the Good Life” class, the university should make Desert Biodiversity mandatory so everyone can experience “the good life” instead of learning about it.

由使用者 xiaoruiyang 在 2018年03月23日 02:39 所貼文