A Slick Rock View

This is an image you will likely want to click on and view in a larger format. The term slick rock refers to sections of the area where the ground is solid rock and nothing but lichen grows. It is not uniformly slick however, there are always cracks and such where trees and other plants can grow.

Ghost Hands

These outlines of painted hands in Canyonlands National Park are a common element in rock art. This type of rock art is usually a negative image of the hand, that is, the paint shows the hand blocking the paint. These are unusual because the hands are colored and also shown in "ghost" images with internal details as if the hands were transparent. This type of painting has also been called x-ray painting.

Rock Art

Ancient rock painting is distinctive from petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock surface. Rock painting is far less permanent and quite rare compared to the number of preserved petroglyphs. The conditions that will preserve the very fragile painted images over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years are usually confined to caves or protected rock overhangs. You can see the moisture seeping into this overhang as is evident from the ferns and moss growing in the cracks. The paintings are faint but evident from the reddish colored substance used as paint.

Early Morning View of the Needles

Canyonlands National Park is divided into three large areas by the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River. The southeast section of the Park is called the Needles District and these are the Needles. As you can see, the country is extremely rough and there are only a very few roads accessible without a dedicated 4-wheel drive vehicle with very high road clearance and a very low gear ratio. Even hiking on foot is a challenge since there are no "direct" routes as you can probably guess from the image above. By the way, this is wonderful playground for a bunch of older children, you just have to be very careful that no one gets lost.

Canyonlands

This image says it all. There is probably no other place on earth that has the color and variety of the Canyonlands. High snow mountains and other dramatic landscapes are beautiful, but for some reason the sandstone and colors of the canyons speak to my soul.

Sunrise

I generally get up well before sunrise. While camping in Canyonlands National Park, I wandered off into the desert until I had a good view of the horizon. As the sun came up, I was fascinated with the colors and the way the light changed from minute to minute. It is hard to get a feeling for the sun in this situation because it tends to blow out the camera's sensors. But the resulting colors for the rest of the image compensate for the part of the image that is overexposed by the sun. I could have cropped the image to remove the overexposed portion, but I thought that there needed to be a feeling for the impact the sun itself has on the image.

The Coming Storm

I had an unusual opportunity recently. I was waiting out in the middle of the desert for a couple of hours with nothing to do but wait. I had no Internet connection so I was not able to be absorbed in my usual activities. So, as I sat there waiting, I took a series of photos of my surroundings as the light failed and night came on. This was one of the photos. It is a radical departure from most of my landscapes because by this time of the evening, I would have already given up on the light and stopped taking photos. But with little else to do, this is what I saw.