The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

Colorado National Monument has a lot of wildlife for a desert.

We mostly only saw lizards though.

And plants.

Because it was too hot for most animals to be out and about.

But some cool lizards were showing off how tough they are.

This is a spiky plant.

There were signs next to all of the plants, but we’re writing this months later and don’t remember what any of them said.

We do remember that this is a cactus flower.

Partially because we have another picture of it attached to the cactus.

Some of the cactus flowers were orange.

They are also pollenated by bees.

These were not cactus flowers.

This is yucca.

The leaves at the base catch rainwater and funnel it toward the root.

The flowers look like garlic.

They are pollenated by the yucca moth.

Then they make these green pod things.

This is not yucca, it’s juniper. Though the flowers still look garlicky

This is a beetle.

This was a longer hike in the desert, so we had to be prepared and carry lots of water. Matt carried 4L in the backpack.

Kerri was more creative.

The path was beautiful but sometimes difficult to follow.

We kept running into these “no hiking signs”, which indicated we were not on the right path. But they didn’t give us any clues how to get back to the right path.

This turned out to be the wrong path.

But we didn’t find that out until after Kerri celebrated.

Landscape Arch doesn’t look that impressive from a distance.

Even though it’s much bigger than Kerri.

As you get closer it separates from the background a bit.

And then you can see how fragile it is.

We had to climb on top of this big long rock, which was much scarier than it looks in the pictures.

It was also much prettier than it looks in the pictures.

It was a good spot.

To one side you could see open fields with things growing.

But in most directions were desert and mountains.