On Sunday, the second day of 2011, Daryl, Les, and I went hiking in the South Mountains near Phoenix. \u00a0Les, a good friend and hiking partner of Daryl, and incidentally a professor of botany at Arizona State University, gave me an introductory lesson of plant life in the Arizona desert. It was amazing to learn the names of the various plants and their characteristics. \u00a0I hope I remember some of the interesting traits, and that I will\u00a0be able to identify a few species when I’m in the field again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the chill of early morning we had the trails mostly to ourselves. A few mountain bikers and scatted hikers were enjoying the bright sunshine and crystal clear views from the mountains. \u00a0We stopped to admire some petroglyphs left by ancient natives and then ate lunch in the lee of a rocky ridge.\u00a0By the time we walked back to the parking lot, the place was getting crowded with bikers, runners, and hikers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0It felt good to exercise after a week of holiday feasting and inactivity. Both Daryl and I are aware of too many calories going in and not enough burning off. Only the day before, we took a 6 mile bike ride with Apollo, and while it was great exercise, Apollo got the ultimate workout. \u00a0I hope to keep\u00a0hiking and be more careful with what I eat as I head out to the west coast for a few days. I owe many thanks to Donna and Daryl for putting up with me the last few weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Check out my Gallery to see a few pictures of our hike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Sunday, the second day of 2011, Daryl, Les, and I went hiking in the South Mountains near Phoenix. \u00a0Les, a good friend and hiking partner of Daryl, and incidentally a professor of botany at Arizona State University, gave me an introductory lesson of plant life in the Arizona desert. It was amazing to learn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}