Thursday, February 4, 2010

KOFA National Wildlife Refuge

The road through the north portion of the KOFA refuge --



Lots of majestic saguaros -- and ocotillos --




Lots of rocks --






Named after the old King of Arizona (Kofa) mine -- the richest gold mine ever in Arizona!





Today we made a trip to the post office in Salome to mail Valentine's packages to the grand kids and then went on to visit the north end of KOFA National Wildlife Refuge. It was a ninety-some mile round trip -- the 36 mile portion of it in the refuge was gravel unmaintained road for the most part. I think the road is mainly used by the natural gas line and electric tower maintenance people -- we met one motorcyclist and saw no other traffic.

The refuge has an interesting variety of terrain and flora with its changes in altitude. We saw lots of majestic saguaros, many ocotillos and a lot of chollas. But, there were absolutely no prickly pears.

We didn't see many birds. Forry saw a high flying buzzard and then we didn't see any others until almost the end of the road when a flock of bluebirds flew into a dead tree. They weren't close enough for us to distinguish whether they were Western or Eastern. We think they might have been Easterns, but couldn't tell for sure.


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