Chiricahua National Monument – June 2020

2020 has been a challenging year so far. We did enjoy a wonderful trip to Chile and Argentina in January, but then COVID-19 upended everyone’s existence. Planned trips to Portugal and Spain (April) and Colombia (June) were rescheduled to 2021, and staying home became the norm. And while we’re luckier than most, in that we live in a rural area and it’s easy to enjoy outdoor activities such as biking and hiking while social distancing, by June we were getting pretty antsy and just wanting to go *somewhere*. So, off we drove to the Chiricahua National Monument, a couple of hours away, on a much-needed day trip. Somehow, going to a national park just says “vacation”!

We stopped off first at Turkey Creek, a well-known birding area, taking a stab at looking for Crescent-chested warbler; alas while others had seen it earlier that day, we heard not so much as a peep. We then drove into the monument to Massai Point (6870 ft), walked the nature trail, and enjoyed the wonderful views as a thunderstorm built up (we’d actually gotten rained on a bit at Turkey Creek). It seemed fitting; we were supposed to be in cloud forest of Colombia that day, birding around 6000 ft, so to be over 6800 ft, birding, and getting rained on made it seem like even more of a vacation. 🙂

A few photos from the day follow. Click any photo for a larger version, to see captions, optionally slide-show your way through them.