Perhaps the thing I’ve neglected more than math is botany. Nonetheless, I think that the plant pictured above is the Claret Cup (also known as the Hedgehog). It has a ridiculously long official Greek name that translates into the phrases of a hedgehog, wax paper and three barbed bristles—all references to the plant’s resemblance to those items and its tri-clustered spines. The more easily cited Claret Cup refers to a reddish, cup-shaped flower that blooms from about April to June or July.
It was near sundown when I was across from the Park Headquarters and photographing the hill-sized Lone Mountain (previously depicted in this gallery). That’s when I looked down and saw this single, bright red glint in the waning sunlight at my feet. It was a very distinctive cactus (or cacti if the thing is more than one). It was so colorful that after my initial shot while standing, I laid down to get a ground-level angle (depicted later in this gallery).
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 1.60 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.