A very condor weekend

The weekends over.. Just got back from a short trip to page to buy some groceries and get refunded for the alternator jess bought on saturday. Condor-heavy weekend this one.

Headed out to the forest on Friday night to have a monster bonfire and pass out early like an old lady cause I got up around 5 for work. What happened to those days when I could function on 2 or 3 hours of sleep with heavy alcohol drinking in between? *sigh

Saturday morning we went out the Vermillion cliffs viewing area to see four new condors get released into the Arizona-Utah area! Very exciting. The viewing area was quite far away from the release site so generally you had to look through intense scopes and binoculars to see anything but it was still really cool.

Condors are the largest soaring land bird in north America and were and still are severely endangered (got down to 9 condors in the wild in teh 80s) picture on right for scale.

There were a bunch of ravens flying around the bait (they tried to lure in some wild condors to set good examples for the ones being released-one that had been relased before and 3 newbies) and once they released them you would see these enormous black figures among the ravens (picture on left- hard to see sorry)... Condors are huge!

Through the scopes you could see them hanging around the pen eating and some of the scopes were even pointed at the nest site... neat.

After we had our fill of viewing condors through telescopes, me Jess and Jake headed to Page for some groceries and an alternator for Jesse's truck (which was still stranded in the forest about an hour or so drive from any major road).

On our way back we tried to hike down badger creek a bit (one of the drainages that feeds into the Colorado river in Marble Canyon .. on right) but were soon thwarted by a pretty impassible drainage cliff that had some rappel anchors next to it. We'll just have to return with the proper equipment and try again :)

Stopped at Navajo bridge today and finally saw some condors there! Lots of 73, 70, F3 and another one whose tag I didn't see.

Number 73 taking flight on left! So cool to see him close up. He was just chilling right underneath us on the bridge for a good 15 minutes or so.

First time I saw condors so up close so it was pretty exicting :). Very funny birds those guys... especially 73 traipsing around underneath the bridge.