February 15, 2005 - Painted Desert National Park.

Having made the decision to stay another day allowed us to sleep in, have a leisurely breakfast, and attempt to take a relaxed drive over to the park. Interstate 40 in Arizona has a speed limit of 75, so the tractor trailer rigs are all doing 75-80 mph, which gave me the choice of blasting along with them or having them go roaring by me. I chose the former, but after weeks of driving the rig at 55 mph, driving 75-80 mph just seemed too, too fast and was definitely not relaxing.

This time we started at the north end of the park so that we could see the main Visitor Center right off the bat. It's an impressive and new-looking building, but there is just a small set of exhibits in a mid-sized room and then an auditorium that shows a film about the park on the hour and half hour. We made the mistake of also visiting the Fred Harvey restaurant and gift shop next door, and that ended up costing us $20. Still, we got out before running up the bill even higher and drove the first of the overlooks that we had skipped the previous day.

Since we had the time and Monika's ankle was feeling better, we elected to walk a ½ mile from Tawa Point to the old Visitor Center, which is currently undergoing restoration I believe. The walk took us along the shoulder of the ridge overlooking the first section of the Painted Desert, and provided absolutely great views of it. The first section is closer than the vast areas leading off to the mountains, so you really get an "up close and personal" view of this fantastic landscape from the trail.

The hues of the heavily eroded hills were simply stunning. Red or ochre predominated but large patches of white and some darker colors were also mixed in. The net effect is almost a crazy quilt or phantasmagoria of color patches, and I think it is like almost no place else on earth. According to the plaques we read, this area had supported a decent population of Indians in the old days, but it really was hard to see how they had lived in such a stark and severe place.

Returning to the truck, we drove around to the other overlooks, stopping at the ones we had previously missed. Each viewpoint gave a slightly different perspective on the Painted Desert, but they were all more distant views than the walking trail had provided. At one point we could see a vista where the reddish hills of the desert marched to meet some variegated mountains on the horizon, which must have involved a distance of 20 miles or more. Visitors are allowed to hike in the back country, but we had to postpone that pleasure to a future visit when Monika's ankle would be back to normal.

Taking leave of the Painted Desert, we drove south across a riverbed that normally, I expect, is quite dry. Given the recent rains we had in the area, however, it was flowing a bit when we crossed it. We were surprised to see cattle grazing beside the road, but on close inspection of the map, the actual park narrows down to little more than the width of the road at that point, so the cattle were grazing on private lands. I certainly had nothing against that, but I also sincerely hoped the owner would not decide to put up condominiums right next to the national park. (Has Xanterra heard of this?)

Just across the river were the ruins of the Puerco Pueblo, a habitat for the original inhabitants of the area from about 1100 to 1300 A.D. In comparison to the small pueblo ruins we had seen on the rim of the Grand Canyon, these ruins were quite a bit larger. The pueblo was rectangular and had many rooms housing a population of over one hundred folks. The brickwork was somewhat nicer than we had seen at the Grand Canyon site, but I expect that they took the trouble because this site was a fairly large and long term proposition.

Best of all, the folks had pecked out patterns in the rock faces right next to the pueblo, and the trail took us to where we could have a good look at those. Some things were identifiable shapes, but others, like a face with a big protuberance of some kind on one side, were more mysterious. Monika liked the one of a little girl jumping rope, or at least that was what it looked like to us. If you ever get this way and are interested in the petroglyphs, you should stop in at the Perco Pueblo ruins because you really get a closer view of them than most other places.

We continued on to Newspaper Rock, which had a much denser and larger array of petroglyphs. Especially on one huge boulder we saw what looked liked hundreds of designs pecked into the surfaces of the rock. The humbling aspect of seeing this 800+ year old art was that it has already lasted far longer than anything I'll ever create. The only things I've made that stand a chance at lasting centuries are some stained glass panels. With proper care and re-caning every couple of centuries, stained glass pieces can last at least 500 years like some of the pieces I have seen in European cathedrals, but what are the chances that folks 100 years from now will take the trouble to preserve the things I made? So seeing those ancient petroglyphs certainly made me think about the durability of things we do nowadays, and I don't think very much outside of scientific discoveries (e.g. Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, etc.) is very durable.

Our next stop was Blue Mesa, which has a circle drive on top of a ridge and a 1-mile loop walk that goes down into the valley. If you ever get this way, whatever you do don't miss the drive to Blue Mesa, and if you can walk a mile and the weather is decent, be sure to take the walk.

Although Monika's ankle was still a bit weak, she used me as a prop for the steep up and downhill sections of the walk. Really it was only the initial 300-foot or so descent into the valley that was steep enough to require my help; the rest of the walk was a fairly level loop around the valley floor.

The reason you should go on that walk if you ever have the opportunity is that the scenery is some of the oddest-looking stuff on earth, even odder than the Painted Desert vistas in my opinion. In one sense it is similar scenery to the Badlands of South Dakota, with striated bands of colors running through the hills. On close inspection, the hills themselves are eroded into a wrinkled maze of ridges and odd shapes. Part of the oddness of the landscape was not a trace of vegetation anywhere on the slopes or in the valley. Apparently the lack of vegetation was due to the ability of the Bentonite clay to hold water such that plants could not use it plus the quick erosion tendencies when rains did fall.

This Badlands area was, however, unlike the Badlands we had seen in South and North Dakota in at least one important respect. We saw hunks of Petrified Forest trees lying around pretty much everywhere we looked. There were also fossil clams, ferns, ancient animal bones, and such like strewn across the valley floor, but most of those fragments were quite small and I couldn't really identify anything. This combination of Badlands ecology with petrified trees I've never seen in my life, and I couldn't make up something that looked any odder than that even if I were trying to write science fiction.

While walking in the valley, however, I saw low-lying clouds with virga hanging down coming in our direction, and I feared we would soon have some rain. As it turned out, the rain politely held off until we were back in the truck and heading further south. We made another stop at the Jasper Forest site, but then the rain became more serious and the wind kicked up, so we decided we shouldn't chance the last trail to Agate House and another collection of petrified tree logs.

Exiting the park, we took the 2-lane highway that runs from the south end of the park back to Holbrook, and in distinct contrast to the interstate drive that morning, it was a nice relaxing drive. After a late lunch/dinner at Denny's we shopped around in town for some hardware for some odd jobs in the trailer (me) and food (Monika). I was trying to mount a power strip with 5 outlets above the sink so that we had more places to plug in various electrical appliances (water heaters, battery chargers, etc.), and I found the long sheet metal screws and washers I needed for trying that. The other thing I was trying to improve was the wastewater dumping hose. In particular, I needed to find a fitting that would easily connect to an elbow for dumping the tanks, but still store in the tiny compartment that Flagstaff had provided for the sewer hose. I found an elbow and a 3-inch hose connector that looked like they should work and spent an hour or so fastening the power strip to the wall and putting the connector on the sewer house when we got back to the trailer.

Since neither of us were hungry after our late lunch, we skipped dinner and I just spent the rest of the day processing all the panoramic pictures I had taken, which required several hours. Part of the reason was that I was saving a condensed version for display on the web plus a full-scale version for possible future printing of wall. The full-scale panoramic pictures ranged from about 5 to 15 megabytes in size and took a very long time to form and to store. Thank goodness Monika processed all the single-frame pictures on Daddy and then took over the final cropping and editing of the panoramic pictures so that I could at last break off and write the journal. Even with her help I didn't get done until 10 o'clock, so we once again didn't have any time to read our book before going to sleep. I must say if this was to happen every day, it might jolly well start to feel like work!