The Hawk At The End Of The Road

Although we are no longer on our last road trip (AZ & UT), I still have at least two blog posts to do relating to it. At this moment we are in Oceano, California, which is on the central coast. I'm happy to report that today's long drive from the southern end of the state was the easiest on record. We actually breezed through Los Angeles and the Valley. Once we got to the RV campground (is that an oxymoron?), we took a nice (not so much) long hike through coastal sand dunes that seemed more like they belonged in the Sahara Desert. At the end of the hike there was a magnificent oasis called the Pacific ocean. You don't get to see those photos yet! First, we have to do a couple more posts from the last trip.

This wasn't the roughest ride on our trip, but we "heard" it would lead us to a nice place.

And so it did.

When you are in this part of Arizona, it seems like every road leads to the Oak Creek. Back roads don't seem to be enough for us, so we started hiking along the banks of the creek.

As out of the way as it was, the rope swing over the creek (behind my wife) told us that this was somebody's swimming hole.

Oak Creek is an awesome free flowing large creek that meanders all over this part of Arizona.

I posted a sample pic of this guy a week or so ago.  I wish he was sitting next to something else to give the size of this guy some scale. He was HUGE!

He was no more than 10 feet from us and had no fear what-so-ever.  We have many red tail hawks where we live, but none of them are as big this guy. I'm still not sure exactly what kind of hawk he was.  I wanted him to take off so I could get a photo or two of his wingspan. We waited and waited, he did nothing. We yelled, he just stared at us. I had given up when all of a sudden he took off. I didn't really have time to aim or focus my camera and had to shoot from the hip. That didn't work out too well. I got a shot of my own knee, one of the sun, one of blue sky and one of him that was too blurry to use.

No post about this part of the country is complete without some of this.

Or this...

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Road Trip Teaser

My wife and I had just finished a rough drive to get to a remote part of Oak Creek, about 10 miles outside of Sedona, Arizona.  We were hiking a creek side trail when this guy landed on a branch less than 10 feet from us. We think it's a Coopers Hawk. Whatever kind it was, it was HUGE!  Talk about death from above! This guy was pure predator.  He couldn't care less that we were so close to him.  I took so many pics of him that I got tired of it.  We have Internet for a couple of days, so I thought I'd post him as a teaser!

When we were in the Sedona area last year, I posted a bunch of photos of the red rock formations. This year I'm concentrating a bit more on the back road places and things like that. Of course, I'm taking some pics of the formations and will post them because I think Sedona is one of the most beautiful place I've ever seen.  I'll catch up on responding to comments and commenting on your blogs (if you have one) as soon as I have a chance.

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