Nothing – and a whole lot of it! If you’ve been following along with my blog for a while you may recall a sunset picture I posted from Queen Canyon from a couple years ago.  My friend Allen and I had been exploring around the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and more or less just happened upon the canyon.  Well as I was saying last week, this past year when I visited the area I was bound and determined to see the rest of the park, a mission that would send me on a hike to the park’s highest point: Signal Peak. The trailhead was actually further up Queen Canyon than Allen and I had made it; luckily the road was in much better shape, though still not great shape.  The trail to the top is listed as ‘hard’ in AllTrails, and I can confirm, it was definitely hard!  The trail has over 2,000 feet of elevation gain across 2.1 miles; 1,200 of which happen in the second mile.  It was a burner to say the least… BUT… the view from on top was absolutely incredible.  One of the things I love about this area is just how desolate it is.  Frankly, it takes a bit of eyeing to come up with things to photograph, and I felt like I was failing on more than occasion!  Whether I got any good photos or not was secondary on this particular hike, the view was my reward.

The valley below is known as King Valley and was made famous by the “King of Arizona” gold mine.  Interestingly, the property and shipping containers of the mine would be stamped “K of A”, and that’s how the park got it’s name, Kofa.  After the mine closed down the US Military used all the land you see in the image as part of their proving grounds.  The operation has now been reduced to the land inside the Yuma Proving Grounds, just further south, but according to signage all over the place, you can still find weaponry laying around – in some cases live! – and so extra caution is recommended.  Fortunately this area is well traveled, so my assumption is that any dangerous ordnance has been discovered by now, but who knows!  The only thing I saw was a tarantula, which unfortunately hid itself under a rock before I could snap a photo.  Bummer!

One other thing I’ll point out here is that last week I called attention to the neat looking Castle Dome butte, that feature can be seen in the distance of this photo, and I think lends another view into why it caught my eye.  It’s a commanding rock in an otherwise sparse landscape!

For this particular image I chose infrared and black and white to tell the story of how stark the landscape is, though to be honest, the color version was almost colorless, save for shades of brown!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson