Back to the Butcher Jones trail

A little over 2 years ago, I hiked along the Butcher Jones trail. It follows the shoreline of Saguaro Lake for a little ways around the lake. Back then I wound up practically running all the way back to the truck because the gate at the park entrance is closed at sunset. This time I thought I was getting a much earlier start, but I still didn't have time to go everywhere I wanted to go. Still, I went far enough. My feet and ankles ache today.

There's an interesting dead tree near the beginning of the hike. Here's one of its branches. What does it look like to you?

There was a homogeneous layer of high, thin clouds all day. They are, in my opinion, the worst clouds you can have for landscape photography. They seem to be pretty good for closeups of flowers, though. Anyway, there are not any spectacular pictures, and I'll blame that on the clouds. Here's one that turned out pretty good, but the sky is very blah.

HDRI's even look sort of blah.

I like this blue lupine photo, though.

Remember the Desert Belle? It's a paddle wheel boat I got a picture of a few weeks ago. Here's a picture of it out on the lake, loaded with tourists.

Near the far end of the trail, a bald eagle flew by right in front of me. I didn't have time to check camera settings; I just snapped a few pictures. The shutter speed was set on 1/30 of a second. Normally, the image stabilization can handle that, but I was trying to follow a flying bird. All of the pictures are blurred.

The clouds resulted in some nice sundogs.

I made one 3D picture. It's hard to do that with a lake scene. I edited out the boat that was moving, but I couldn't do anything about the wakes.

My plan from the beginning was to make an @trip map of this trip. I didn't put the exact same set of pictures in the trip and in the web album, so if you're OC about seeing all of the pictures, you'll have to look at both of these. Also, if you click on the @trip map, you'll see elevation changes and how long it took me to make progress along the trail. I moved pretty slowly, though. I had to stop a lot to take pictures.

Butcher_Jones_2009_02_21