There’s no question that we saw condors today, flying overhead, past us, and below us. This is our friend, number six.

They really are a limited edition bird, with only four or five hundred alive, but that is up from twenty seven in 1987, when all the remaining birds were captured to set up a captive breeding program.

The day dawned sunny and cold. We saw the first cows at 9:36am, along with a coyote, and were on the trailhead by ten. (If you want up to the minute news on our first cows of the day, follow @AndrewConway on twitter.) We headed up the Juniper Trail, which starts beside a creek through some lovely woodland with wildflowers and exciting mushrooms, or maybe toadstools. Yellow fungussy things, anyhow.

Leaving the creek, the trail headed up, past more wildflowers. Let’s just get all the wildflower pictures out the way, shall we?

According to the sheet they handed out in the ranger station, the flowers in the last picture are called shooting stars. Apparently the blue dicks are also in bloom, but we didn’t see any of those, which is probably just as well.

I think the mentioned the trail was heading up.

There is a series of relentless switchbacks that take you up about a thousand feet, to an area of rocky pinnacles (duh!)…
and fallen boulders.

We stopped for second breakfast, and while we were sitting eating, the turkey vultures started to circle overhead. “I’m not dead yet!” I yelled at them. Then the condors arrived.

Suitably refreshed, we headed on up the trail some more, to a bit that was marked as “steep and narrow”. They were not wrong

Eventually it go to the point where the trail was footholds cut in a rock face with a vintage handrail.

I decided that was a bit much for me, so we had lunch and headed back down. As I get older, I’m having more difficulty with steep slopes and high places. To deal with this I imagine that I am a calming manatee, drifting through the Florida backwaters with no danger of falling at all. I know that if I do this often enough every time I look at a picture of a manatee I will have a panic attack.