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Death in an Oasis

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The Canon PowerShot A1400

At high noon, as I was preparing to shoot more snapshots of the oasis at the Whitewater Preserve, I stubbed my toe on a rock and fell on my face. My skin bore a few scrapes, and it took my brother and a large bystander to stand me up on my feet; but the lens on my trusty A1400 rangefinder camera was shattered.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to retrieve the pictures I had shot that day, but fortunately I had nothing to worry about. Even with a broken lens, I was able to copy the pictures to my hard drive and edit them for possible use in this blog. The following two photos were from my old camera.

The Oasis at Whitewater Preserve

Since Martine and I are scheduled for a trip to Tucson, Arizona the week after next, I wanted to replace the camera quickly. Fortunately, a lightly used A1400 was on sale at Amazon Marketplace. I jumped on it and received it promptly. I would rather deal with old technology at this point than spend great gobs of cash for something that would take at least a month to research.

Me at Whitewater

This picture was shot by my brother using my camera. (You can see his water bottle on the fence to my right.)

Whitewater

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The Whitewater River Near the Campground

On Sunday, my brother Dan suggested we visit the Whitewater Preserve. Now I was familiar with the desolate Whitewater exit off the I-10, all bleached rocky desert. But apparently, head uphill from the exit and one comes upon one of those little green paradises one often finds in desert canyons.

The altitude of the part of the Whitewater Preserve we visited was at 2,223 feet (678 meters). Whereas the floor of the desert was around 90° Fahrenheit (31° Celsius), the temperature at the visitor center was in the mid 70s (around 24° Celsius).

My brother took the above picture from his smartphone. The water is from the Whitewater River, which flows from Mount San Gorgonio and ends up, when not absorbed by the aquifer underlying the Coachella Valley, in the Salton Sea.

The Whitewater Preserve is part of the Sand-to-Snow National Monument, comprising parts of Southern San Bernardino County and Northern Riverside County.

Over the next few days, I will share with you some of the photographs I took there—the very last photographs from my trusty Canon PowerShot A1400 (R.I.P.).