On the assumption they won’t last forever — maybe not even until next weekend — I wanted to take advantage of my 3-day Shavuot weekend to take a short nearby hike to see if we could get a little elevation to grab some pictures of saguaro flowers.

Ordinarily, the flowers are a dozen feet or more up the cactus, certainly out of my reach, but I thought I remembered looking down on some saguaro pretty close to the trail when I took this one a few years back.

So, naturally, though I had checked my camera battery before we left and it was more than half full, by the time we reached the trail head, after two mediocre bird photos, my camera was dead. I was left with only the weak little camera on my iPhone….

I did manage to catch that big old bee at the top of one rather shorter saguaro. And some fun shots of jumping cholla and close-ups of ocotillo blossoms.

Even better, I had brought my buddy with me, who was able to getter a better camera to a slightly higher altitude than I can manage myself, and snapped me some gorgeous shots of those big fat white saguaro blossoms.