Another beautiful day in the neighborhood!

Saturday was another lovely day!

But first... on Friday evening, we had a bit of rain, followed by a rainbow...

Carl positioned the picture so it looks like the rainbow ends on top of Gracie!

On Saturday morning, we decided not to use the morning generator hours, so Carl was out early trying to heat his coffee on the propane grill.

He got a nice picture of the sun coming up!

He was doing some evaluation on the solar delivery -- it was steadily increasing. He decided to try to reconnect the panels so all 4 would be in serial (they had been 2 by 2 -- two in serial that were in parallel with the other two in serial). The big drop out on the graph was when he had them disconnected, but we think we got a small incremental benefit (the graph went up by a little more than a linear amount from the curve it was previously on).

A disadvantage to all panels being in serial is that if there is shading on one, it could interrupt the power delivery from all. I went onto the roof with a blanket and tried covering part of a panel. Each panel has 36 smaller squares (about 6"x6", I think). We found that if just one of the 6"x6" squares was impeded, it would initially lose quite a bit of power (about 50%) but then it seemed to compensate in some way and recover to almost the same power delivery. But, if I covered a column of the 6"x6" squares (4 out of the 36 on a single panel), it would drop the power delivery by about 90% and it did not recover! We are going to reconnect them as 2 by 2, because, while that may impact one pair if one of the panels has shading, but should not impact all 4.

We also evaluated the impact of the shading that the kitchen vent fan top can cause. At the time we were doing the evaluation, it shaded just a part of two of the 6"x6" squares. Initially it dropped the power delivery by about 50%, but then it seemed to recover. 

Also interesting in the picture above is the cloud cover -- you can see it really close to the ground all the way across the valley south of us, in Mexico. I guess they may have had fog in the morning until it burned off.

Gracie and the Jeep in our site here at the campground

We went by the Visitor Center to check on a couple of trails that we were considering. Unfortunately, only one of the three would be easily accessible to us -- the trailhead to one was on a road currently closed to vehicle traffic due to construction, and while the other would be easy to drive to, then there was only a one-way road away from it (again due to the closed road) resulting in a 57 mile drive back (from a trailhead that was within 10 miles!).

That's okay, we decided that the Red Tanks Trail would be nice...

It actually connected to one of the others we were considering (Senita Basin), but we'd have a long hike to get there.

Trail marker at the beginning of the trail

Most of the Red Tanks Trail was along what had been the road to Baker Mine, so it was wide and in good shape.

Beautiful landscapes all around us!

When we got to the Tinaja (water catch spot), the other trails split off.

We decided to continue on the route toward Senita Basin, planning to just go another half mile or so. This part of the trail was in a wash, so it was loose sand/rock, not as easy footing as on the old roadbed.

We stopped here to talk about perspective - it looked like it could be the side of a mountain with caves in the side...

But it was actually not a very large bank and the "caves" were pretty small...

This is a Palo Verde tree -- it doesn't have leaves, but, from what I have read, it "respirates" with its green bark/twigs.

There was another Palo Verde nearby with a mound of Desert Mistletoe in it!

I found a "comfortable" rock lounger... well... not really comfortable! You can see the sandy surface of the wash that we were walking in.

This shows the Tinaja - I went back down the wash when we were returning on the trail to get a picture of it. Since we had gotten rain the day before, there was actually water in the pools.

Another view of the landscape - so pretty!

And! We got our pins for hiking at least 5 miles while we were here at Organ Pipe National Monument!

Another beautiful day!