May Day and Spring Wildflowers

Wildflowers in the Southwest

Happy May Day!  No May pole in my day today, but...I was looking through some old photos and found these lovely wildflower pictures I took during a romp around the American Southwest a few years ago with my sister.  Spring there was lovely and subtle...big skies and tiny drought tolerant little blooms that thrive in all that desert heat...so resilient and pretty.

Another thing, less pretty but just as common to the Southwest as wildflowers, are rattlesnakes.  I was down there with my sister, naively taking these great pics, when somewhere in Nevada, we had quite a fright!  We stopped the car to photograph the cactus growing everywhere, and in flip-flops began tromping into the sagebrush covered desert.  You'd think we would have been wiser, but growing up in Idaho, sagebrush was no stranger to us, and we felt right at home.  Not ten seconds into it, I heard my sister scream bloody murder as she jumped five feet in the air and yelled, "SNAKE"!!!  I'm not exaggerating when I say that this rattlesnake was as thick as a fire hose...and who knows how long.  We took a while to recover but I now have a lot more respect for the necessity of the cowboy boot in desert country.