Photo Blogging Challenge (March 2014): One

"One is the loneliest number number that you'll ever do.  Two, can be as bad as one.  It's the loneliest number since the number one."  My favorite bad when I was in junior high school was Three Dog Night.  I had most of their albums and knew most of the lyrics to most of their songs.

This month's photo blogging challenge by theme, P.J., is One.  To be honest, I really hadn't thought much about this until a couple of days ago, but when I looked back at the shots I'd taken this month, I came up with quite a few One shots.  As I write this, I'm still debating which of the seven original shots I've picked to use in challenge.  Whatever I pick, I'll warn you ahead of time, the last shot might make you cringe if you haven't already seen this on Facebook or Flicker.

1.  The first weekend in March, I went on a nice 3.5 mile hike in the foothills behind me.  The trail too me up into the hills off to the right of this shot and then back down behind me to this level portion of the Thompson Creek Trail.  The last part was a nice level walk back to the car, nothing too tough on the legs.  I found 9 geocaches on the hike as well, so it was a very successful trek.  Having your camera out all the time allows you to take candid shots like this.

2.  Most of you know I geocache.  In fact, I've started to geocache a lot recently, so almost every one of my shots seems to have a geocaching tag attached to it nowadays.  It's what I love about this silly game.  It gets me outdoors to all sorts of interesting spots.

Last weekend, my friend and I took a day trip down to San Diego.  We were working on a challenge cache that challenges people to find 10 caches of a similar type.  The catch is you have to find 7 different types, 10 times.  Fortunately not all at the same time as that would be ridiculous, but this day, we were working on virtual caches.

From the geocaching website: "A Virtual Cache is about discovering a location rather than a container. The requirements for logging a Virtual Cache vary—you may be required to answer a question about the location, take a picture, complete a task, etc... In any case, you must visit the coordinates before you can post your log. Although many locations are interesting, a Virtual Cache should be out of the ordinary enough to warrant logging a visit."

We were trying to find 10 virtual caches (we found 11 that day).  This virtual cache took us out along a beach south of San Diego to look at a naval communication set up.  We couldn't get really close, but we got out on a rocky jetty to take a shot of the installation and on the way back I got this shot of this one Marbled Godwit looking for food along the shoreline.

3.   As we worked out way around San Diego Harbor, we were very fortunate to have been there on a such a beautiful day.  The temperature was in the high 70s most of the day with a slight breeze blowing.  It was perfect for sailing as this one lone sailboat showed while we were looking for the answers for this virtual cache which was located on Shelter Island on the northwest side of the harbor.  We were looking for a marriage proposal that someone had sent to his girlfriend by way of those engraved bricks.  It was actually pretty clever and we enjoyed the time we spent there looking at the sailboat and other boats that were out on the water.  This particular cache ended up being our 8th virtual find for the day.

4.  Finally, in La Jolla (pronounced La Hoya), we found out 10th virtual cache of the day.  We actually ended up with one more virtual just to the west of this particular shot, but we spent quite a bit of time right here, mainly because the weather was, once again, perfect for the day and there was a lot of great scenery around. 

The gulls seemed to want to cooperate with me on this shot, although I would have preferred to have the waves splashing high on the rocks.  I just kept my camera focused on the point and every now and then out of my peripheral vision, I could see solitary gulls float by.  I caught this one gull flying over head and called it good.

To the right of this shot was as cove where there was a conglomeration of animals.  There was a ledge that had nesting cormorants, and another where there were gulls and pelicans just sitting in the sun.  Further down there were kayakers and snorkelers looking at the kelp growing in the cove and on several of the rocks, there were large congregations of sea lions basking in the late afternoon sun.  I caught a sequence as two of them started to squabble over a particular spot and it only ended when one of them got pushed back into the water.

5.  Finally, last Friday afternoon, a couple of friend and I went on a hike in Chino Hills State Park.  You might not know exactly where the park is, but if I tell you it's within a couple of miles of where the 5.1 earthquake hit Friday night, you'll probably have a better idea.  

We parked a car at one trailhead, then drove down to the other trailhead in Carbon Canyon and hiked up and over, finding 18 geocaches in the process.  Near the end of our hike, we startled this nice sized rattlesnake from its siesta at the side of the trail.  None of us got within striking distance, but it remained coiled up like this while we were in proximity to it.

I've encountered rattlesnakes while out hiking and geocaching in the past, but I've never seen one quite this color before.  Most of the ones I've seen are usually a much darker color, almost blackish, with a diamond pattern on their back.  Based upon what I've been able to find on-line, this one is either a Southwestern Speckled Rattlesnake or a Panamint Rattlesnake.

There's my five "Ones" for this photo blogging challenge.  Please stop by P.J.'s page to see how others interpreted the theme One.  As always, feel free to comment.  Don't worry, I won't bite.