Beautiful! “Seek” app says it is “purple prairie clover.”
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Haha yeah, I do enjoy plants as well, will see what I’ve got on my computer to post up here. My uncle has so many various species at his home including many cacti.
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Nice, thanks!
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Pilot Peak, NV, driving by on I80
Someone left a negative review of this mountain on google, and there were a couple of reviews in response to it, so my husband and I are trying to think of a random/bizarre review to add…
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Pretty nice example of what is sometimes called “God light” coming in from the right side. Is the mountain volcanic in origin? Sure looks like it. But I don’t understand who was trash talking your photo. Did you post on Facebook?
The review was just a google maps review of the actual location, and not that particular picture 
I wonder if I could liken it to Mount Doom? I’ll have to look into it’s history. There are ridges surrounding it, but it’s pretty neat how it seems solitary and conical.
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Oh yeah if I had the one ring of power this is definitely where I would take it.
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As a break from Arthropoda, here is a pic of Box Canyon Falls at Ouray Colorado. It formed along a fault line, and the rock layers have a 1.3 billion year nonconformity near the top. It is fascinating to see the bluffs on the mountains here with multicolored layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone representing rising and falling sea levels over the ages with thousands of feet of sediment exposed by erosion. And then to have the igneous intrusions from which precious metal ores were mined interspersed.
Pics not so good, will try to get some better tomorrow
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I wonder if that is anywhere near Durango or Silverton. We once made a month long trip through lots of parks and monuments and I remember putting my wife and stepson on a old train in Durrango and picking them up in Silverton. I seem to remember seeing signs for This town somewhere around there. We also drove through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado and looked at some dinosaur fossils nearby. Good times. Having fun?
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I really want to spend some time hiking through mountains in the future. Ive been thinking that I’ll buy another backpack and a few nature guides dedicated to various mountains and valleys and hop on a plane and fly out to them and just camp a night or two and hike during the day before returning. They are such a dominating landscape feature.
Ive always thought it was really cool that the Appalachian mountains in USA are older than the Atlantic Ocean. I believe they were around back when we were still Pangea. When the western interior seaway ran through USA in the Cretaceous they are what kept most of Appalachia ( eastern usa ) above sea level. Supposedly southern Appalachia was dominated by now extinct crocodile species including a bipedal species and that at some point they believe crocodiles, or proto crocs, were mostly herbivorous and that someone did a study on them now and kept one species on a vegetarian diet for 5 years and it was perfectly healthy .
Most of this info came from the podcast, “ Common Descent” in the episode about crocodilians.
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Great spider pictures! Could be a Dolomedes sp? And given that the pedipalps are swollen in the first image, I would say immature male.
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That’s what I originally was thinking too. In the video I have I even refer to it as a male. Then in a spider ID group they all kept saying looks like a female. But I don’t think I they know what they are talking about.
On second thoughts, I don’t think this is Dolomedes. Is think you are correct with your Rabidosa suggestion. The eye arrangement, body shape, and pattern look more like Rabidosa. Though I am not expert on US spiders.
Really!? I mean I could be wrong… but I would be very surprised if that turned out to be a female.
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Thanks for mentioning the Seek app! I’ve had it for a while on my iPad, probably from when it was first published, but had forgotten (probably because it was nighttime when I downloaded it 
). It’s now on my iPhone, too.
Hoary vervain has similar ‘sparkler’ blossoms to the prairie clover that ‘burn down’ (I wonder what a more scientific description of that is – any botanists around? ):
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That’s what the Seek app ID’d it as, too. As big as it is, the size would be indicative of a female.
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A pretty sad slice of creation Colin and I hiked through this week in Colorado.
But there are some hopeful signs:
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I was a bit surprised when they said that too. I’m fairly certain it’s a wolf spider and not a fishing spider. I think it’s a male and in the video I took I referred to it as such because of the swollen palms.
I think the others just don’t know what they are talking about because they mentioned it being a female because of its large size and I pointed out that the females was only 1/8th larger on average than the males.
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Sexual dimorphism is common among spider species, but not ubiquitous. Some spiders show very little size difference before they approach maturity, and even then the sexes might not be that different in size. As seems to be the case with this spider:
Also, sexual dimorphism is a two way street. In the uk, males of the eratigena have smaller bodies than the stocky females, but also much, much longer legs. As a result they are larger than the females.
So when it comes to spiders, size isn’t everything. Swellings on the final segment of the pedipalps (‘feelers’) are the best diagnostic for males and a small opening (epigyne) on the underside of the abdomen for females. Even then, these may not be present before the spider approaches maturity.
I just was going by the Wikipedia entry on it, not that it is the final word (hey, I found it on the internet):
The females are larger than males, and have a body length of about an inch, while the males’ body length comes as a half of that.
We have funnel-web grass spiders here that actually look very similar to the wolf spider, and there is a distinct size difference, not that that has anything to do with the wolf.
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Interesting that the white sand of Gulf Shores and Destin near you is quartz eroded away from the metamorphic rock in those mountains.
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