DryStoneGarden

Misión San Ignacio Kadakaamán

Mission San Ignacio de Kadakaaman was founded by the Jesuits, but the actual church was built by the Dominicans (completed in 1786), and it’s quite different from the other missions as a result. The door is more moorish in style than the other mission doors, and none of the other missions have big crests flanking the doors. Close ups of the crests and a few other photos are below. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bell

Along with the plants of Baja, we checked out the missions down there. Pretty interesting, with more varied stonework than I expected.

My knowledge of California missions is mostly based on some half-remembered grade school field trips, but the basic outline is this: the Jesuits established most of the Baja missions, starting in 1697 at Loreto. They were expelled by the king of Spain in 1768, and the Franciscans briefly took over, but then the Franciscans were sent up into Alta California to found the missions up here, and the Dominicans took over the Baja missions. The indigenous people of Baja took a massive hit during the missionary age, with 90% of the population or more dying from European diseases, so there weren’t enough people to keep many of them going, and most were abandoned in the early to mid 1800’s, with the rest taken over by the main Catholic church. A lot of them are in ruins; a few are in use.

The La Paz mission is one of the ones still in use, though it’s not the original building. It was established in 1720 and closed in 1749, and the current building was built much more recently. Surfing the Spanish google, I found a video with photos of the towers (with Edelweiss as the soundtrack) under construction in the 1920’s, so that might be an approximate construction date. There was an outdoor mass underway when I visited and I got a chance to climb up to the top of one of the towers. Nice views of the town. I resisted the temptation to ring the bell, which was good, because one of the church officials eventually noticed the gringo up in the bell tower and was somewhat horrified I had been let up there.

Misión de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de La Paz Airapi

We also checked out the missions at Mulege, Loreto, and San Ignacio. I started to upload photos from them, but decided to put them in separate posts which I should have up shortly. Photos of another historic building in La Paz and the mission in San Jose del Cabo (built in 1940) are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cerro Colorado in the distance with Volcan las Tres Virgenes beyond it

I mentioned that we started bicycling from San Ignacio, an oasis town about half way down the Baja peninsula. Before we started riding, we spent a few days exploring the desert and checking out the plants there, and especially checking out the succulents on Cerro Colorado, a volcanic hill a few kilometers from town.

Closer to the hill

If you’re interested in succulents, Cerro Colorado is the place. The Center for Sonoran Desert Studies/Desert Museum did a survey and found 44 unique species, which they claim is the highest number of succulent species of any spot in the southwestern U.S. Would that then make it the highest number of any spot in the world? I don’t know, but there’s a ton of succulents there, regardless. Anita and I did our own personal survey and identified 19, which we’ll obviously have to improve before we can start leading botanical bicycle tours of Baja (now accepting reservations for winter 2031). Looking at the species list for the hill, I see that it broadly defines a succulent as just about any plant that has tissue designed for storing water. The list includes a couple of Asclepias species and a bunch of caudiciform shrubs and vines: cucumber relatives, shrubby euphorbias, a wild fig, and two species of elephant trees (Bursera). Some of those are plants I wouldn’t have considered succulents, but then I’m not a botanist, and with 24 species of cactus, it’s not exactly lacking in conventional succo’s.

Organ Pipe and Cardon

Cardones

More Cardones

Barrel Cactus

I think these are two different species of barrel cactus. I lost track of all the chollas. We could tell there were several different types, but the desert museum lists eight, including hybrids. A couple were jumpers.

Cholla and Barrel Cactus

Slipper Plant, Pedilanthus macrocarpus

Fouquieria Trunk with Cardon Trunk

Fouquieria Trunk with Organ Pipe

Agave cerulata subcerulata

It’s probably the spiniest place I’ve ever been, but plants are spaced far enough apart that we could make our way through it as long as we occasionally pulled spiny branches out of our way. I found that walking with all those spines everywhere kept my attention always focused on my immediate area and each plant immediately in front of me, so that I was constantly looking up to discover yet another awesome specimen in front of me, over and over and over.

Elephant Tree, Bursera microphylla

Elephant trees get the nod as my favorite plant down there. Has anyone seen or grown one in the Bay Area?

Red Elephant Tree, Bursera hindsiana

This is probably the best trunk I saw on a Red Elephant Tree while I was down there.

Limberbush, Jatropha cuneata, in the Euphorbia family

There were two kinds of Jatropha. The other one, J. cinerea, looks a lot like the mexican redbud, but with somewhat swollen-looking branches and twigs.

Palo Verde

The hill had great palo verdes. They aren’t a succulent, but they have chlorophyl and photosynthesize on their wood, which seems like justification for getting in with the succulent photos.

Palo Verde

Cerro Colorado from the bridge near San Ignacio

Manos Arriba!

Here are a few photos of our trip to Baja. We just got back, and we’re still catching up on everything. Apparently, there has been a bit of rain while we were gone. Our plants are happy, but no one else seems to have enjoyed it.
I can’t say I missed it. Baja was great, one of the best trips we’ve taken and definitely our best bicycle tour. We travelled about half the peninsula, from San Ignacio to San Jose del Cabo, cycling about 300 miles and busing through the boring section south of Ciudad Constitucion and the busy section near Cabo; the 150 miles of riding along the Sea of Cortez from Santa Rosalia to south of Lareto was perfect in just about every way. And, the sign of a great trip, at the end we felt ready to come back home but also determined to go back to Baja in the future. We spent a lot of time checking out the Baja plants, so I should have some posts about the desert soon.

Volcan las Tres Virgenes

It’s a big desert down there, so some of the small-format photos don’t do it justice. As always, you can see them at a bigger size if you click on them.

Cemetary South of Santa Rosalia

Playa Ligui and Isla Danzante

Roadside Tire Repair

Playa Escondida, Bahia Concepcion

Taylors Mistake

Here are some more New Zealand watercolors and drawings I scanned from another one of Anita’s notebooks. These are from an earlier trip, travelling without me. A little random, I know, to post landscape studies of New Zealand while I’m traveling in Mexico, but Mexico posts will have to wait until I get home.

Pohutakawa aka New Zealand Christmas Tree

Willow Tree in Queenstown

Cave Rock, Sumner

Akaroa

The Remarkables

Taylor’s Mistake, Cave Rock, and Akaroa are all near Christchurch. The Remarkables are in the south, near Queenstown.

Te Hapu

I mentioned that we didn’t have a camera with us at Te Hapu; it got edited from our gear when we began trying to get everything to fit on our bikes. Instead, Anita carried watercolors and painted landscape studies at the places where we spent a significant amount of time.

Te Nikau

The watercolor of Te Nikau, on the west coast further south than Te Hapu, scanned in a little differently than the others; I’m not sure why. We got a bit stuck Te Nikau, waiting over a week for the rains to let up enough so we could keep cycling. It was a beautiful place to be stuck — lush rainforest, dramatic cliffs, wild beaches — and I loved the excess of greenery everywhere, but all that vegetation needs a lot of rain, and I came to the conclusion that the west coast might be better seen from a car. We had better weather and better cycling in the northern parts of the island, Te Hapu, Upper Moutere, Abel Tasman, and the Marlborough Sound.

Upper Moutere

Abel Tasman

Marlborough Sound