Painted Desert, Arizona

My most recent post showed petrified wood at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.  The other big attraction at the park is often called the “painted desert”.

The painted desert stretches across much of northern Arizona, so this national park covers just a small portion, but it is easily accessible here.  The brown debris near the center of this photo is probably fragments of petrified logs.

The layers of color were created over millions of years of change in the earth’s surface.  Earthquakes, volcanic ash, and flooding deposited layer after layer of different minerals, and erosion exposed them for us to see.

These hills are known as “the tepees”.

I only had a few hours to explore the park, but I noticed that the best petrified logs are in the south, and the best views of the painted desert are in the north.

The variations of color are just amazing, and this photo gives some idea of the vast uninhabited space around the Park.

There are other attractions in the park including petroglyphs, pueblo ruins, and a Route 66 monument.  It is well worth the trip.

Thanks for looking, but remember that these are copyrighted photos that can not be used without permission, and in most cases a reasonable fee.

Petrified Forest

I drove to Tucson last month to visit my son Brian and his wife Laura.  On the way back I took an extra day to explore Petrified Forest National Park near Holbrook, Arizona.  There are two main attractions there, the painted desert and the petrified forest.  Here is the story of the Petrified Forest.

Some people think they are going to see a standing forest here, but the trees turned to stone after they fell and were washed downstream and buried during the late Triassic period around 200 million years ago.

As millions of years passed, the buried logs absorbed water and silica from volcanic ash which crystallized into quartz which often kept some of the logs’ details.

Spectacular colors were added by various minerals.  The colors in this photo have not been altered.

The crystallized logs were harder than the soil where they were buried.  Over time, erosion removed the surrounding dirt and the logs surfaced.  Sometimes the logs helped reduce the erosion under them, leaving them balanced on a narrow ridge.

Many of the huge logs look like they have been sectioned with a chainsaw.  This happened when they were still buried and earth movement caused forces that snapped the crystallized logs like breaking glass rods.

The petrified logs are mostly in the southern part of the park, but if you go be sure to see the painted desert in the north as well.

I hope you enjoy the photos, but remember they are copyrighted.  Please don’t use them without permission.

Knight Mill, Silver City, Utah

People seem to be attracted to large building ruins.  The Parthenon in Greece, Coliseum in Italy, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Mayan ruins in Central America are all big tourist attractions.  We have our massive ruins here in the American west too, but they are largely ignored except by ghost town hunters.

The Knight Mill ruins are a good example.  This massive concrete ruin is on the edge of Silver City, Utah, a ghost town that has nearly completely disappeared.  The smelter was built here in 1907 and it shut down in 1915.

Jesse Knight found several mines in the Eureka, Utah area, including the Humbug and the Iron Blossom lode, so he built this smelter and a railroad to process the ore.  The mill was closed and dismantled when it became more economical to ship ore to a more modern mill.

There are extensive ruins of solution tanks just outside the more massive ruins of the main mill building.  These tanks could be a source of dangerous contamination and should be avoided.

So much of the building has been destroyed that there aren’t many small details to photograph, but there is still some interesting rust on site.  It looks like iron beams were cut off and their stubs left to rust into fantastic shapes.  Is this a nightmarish bird or a bat?

Ore was crushed and mixed with mercury, resulting in an amalgam that had to be heated to separate the valuable metals.  I think this was a kiln used to cook amalgam to separate mercury from gold and silver.  Of course, the kilns could also be a source of contamination that should be avoided.

I like this desert arch, which is probably all that is left of another kiln.  It seems so out of place out there by itself.

While I can’t say that ruins like this are beautiful, like the classical ruins mentioned above, they are interesting and awe inspiring.  They are a big part of our western history, which is disappearing fast, and they deserve to be documented.

All photos are copyrighted and must not be used for any purpose without my permission.

30th Annual Camping Trip

I have been camping for 30 years in a row with the same guys; sometimes twice a year.  This has been called the "desert trip" even though we have camped in California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon.  Check out the story of the "Desert Rats" here:
http://www.hisandhersphoto.com/friends/hhdrats.htm

This year we are camping in the northern Sierra in California.  This was the first day of exploration and we included Donner Summit, Yuba Gap, Emigrant Gap, and more.

We heard rumors of indian grinding rocks in a remote location near Yuba Gap.  It was difficult to get to, but we did find the grinding rocks.  However, the main attraction for me was the surrounding area.  There were a number of natural patterns like this huge snag behind a lichen spotted rock.





















Another snag had been there awhile and formed a death pattern on the granite.



An un-named marshy pond added color and patterns to the scene.



Reflections of a dead tree made a great subject in the marsh.



I will try to add more photos as the trip continues.