Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

 


Walking tours at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado are a guided, group affair. This is Cliff Palace, one of the most popular tours. The days of wandering around the park without a guide are long gone. I generally stay to the back of the group because I am taking photos. Most of the park is up over 7000 feet on a plateau and the ancient dwellings are in canyons cut into the plateau. It is amazing to contemplate how people could have built these structures by hand even given the time to do so. 


Friday, December 23, 2022

Slot Canyon with Chocks

 


This may look like the end but if you wanted to climb, you could use both side of this slot to climb up and over the chocks (rocks that fall down into the canyon) but that would depend on whether or not there was more canyon or if what we can see through the rocks indicates that this slot is going to widen out into another part of the canyon complex. This lovely slot is a short way past what is known as Sand Dune Arch in Arches National Park, Utah. 

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Fins, Arches National Park, Utah

 

Fins are thin slabs of sandstone weathered into parallel lines. Many of the arches in Arches National Park are formed when erosion makes a hole through the fin and leaves the surrounding rock intact. This image does not show an arch, but the rock formations are impressive enough. I also like the juniper tree that makes its own arch. I have lived with juniper trees (we called them salt cedars) for as long as I can remember. In parts of Arizona, they were considered to be invasive and treated like weeds. The ranchers dragged chains across the desert with bulldozers and destroyed the juniper trees under the mistaken notion that removing the trees would improve the rangeland for cattle. It didn't and the juniper trees are still growing back. But the use of chains and bulldozers hasn't stopped. See "Watch This 25,000-Pound Battleship Anchor Chain Rip Through Juniper in Nevada." The justification for this procedure is to improve the rangeland for species that already live in the area. Here is a link to the counter-argument, See "Old Chaining Page: Chaining in the American West,"

Monday, December 19, 2022

Graveyards for sale!

 


This is really quite a reasonable price for a graveyard, but I don't have any place to put one right now. 

Saturday, December 10, 2022

Canyonlands National Park from Dead Horse Point State Park

 

This photo was taken from Grand Viewpoint Overlook in the Dead Horse Point State Park looking down into Canyonlands National Park. Visible in the near distance is the White Rim. The view here is the equal of any in the Grand Canyon National Park and most other places in the high Colorado Plateau region of the huge area around the Four Corners where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. Access to almost all of Canyonlands National Park is only by well-equipped four-wheel drive Jeeps or the equivalent or by foot. From this photo, you can see why that might be the case. 

Monday, December 5, 2022

Another Timpanogos Sunset

 

Sometimes I have to rush outside with my camera to take a photo before the light changes. In this case, the light only stayed like this for a few minutes. This is not an edited photo except for a speck of clarity. It is nice living with this kind of view. 

Saturday, December 3, 2022

A Window to the Sky, Arches National Park, Utah

 


Most of the attention and advertising for Arches National Park is focused on one or two arches. However, there are over 2000 documented arches in this relatively small area. A weekend or one day visit to the park can only possibly see a very small number of arches. You can walk right by some of the arches and miss them altogether. This is the North Window arch. Actually, it is hard, from photos, to tell the difference between the north and south window arches. 

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Park Avenue, Arches National Park, Utah


You might want to click on this image to see the entire view. This is a small side canyon called Park Avenue in Arches National Park in Utah near Moab. This is one of the first major viewpoints in the park and there is a trail down from this viewpoint that is fairly rough and ends up back on the main park road. It is hard to photograph Arches because of the light, the distance, the size of the rock formations, and the weather. It was a lovely, very cold and windy day in November.