Bird Brain: This peacock in Sonora TX thinks I will be sharing my food.
Peck on the cheek.
West Texas is big and empty. This is south of Pecos, where it can also be flat. Underneath is the famous Permian basin, where a bunch of oil gets pulled out of carbonate rocks.
Highway in NW NM.
Sunset in NW NM..
Some cliffs reflecting the sunset.
Shiprock at sunset.
Second view of the same.
Cool rocks on Navajo Land in Northeast Arizona. On Indian Highway 12.
More desert in Arizona, getting close to the UT Border.
Here is a desert in Utah. It's flat and barren, but I like the picture.
The nomadic American bachelor troubadour geologist hiking into Kane gulch on southeast Utah's Cedar mesa. Actually, he is hiking in the second time... the previous evening he tried it with his lightweight sleeping bag which turned out not to be warm enough for the desert nights. Oh, well...
Back-lit cliff the first morning in Kane Gulch. Who can find the fining-upwards sequence?
This rock formation makes a cool frame for a view up-canyon.
More Kane Gulch desert.
Tree Silhouette, at the Junction between Kane Gulch and Grand Gulch.
A maze of cottonwoods around Junction Spring.
Some cactus flowers. What kind of cactus? I am gonna go with, uhhhhh, the little red-flowered kind.
Trail winds through a tight spot.
Not enough shade at this spot: some trees got a start but in the desert, the sun gets the final word.
Another geology shot: dune fore-sets, anyone?
This chunk of dead tree is bleached white by the sun.
One of the many Anasaazi (ancestral Puebloan) ruins in the canyon. It's wild to know that you are walking where people have walked for thousands of years. Europeans, feel free to laugh at me.
This is a chunk of pottery from the ruin. People tend to lay them out on rocks around the ruins, though this is discouraged because some say it encourages folks to take the pieces out, which is not allowed. Being mostly a by-the-book player, I of course put it back. The map I had said on it that pottery with ridges heats and cools faster due to it's higher surface area so it was used for cooking (makes sense to me). I also think it's pretty. This one looks to have been done using a fingernail.
Until the sun came over the cliffs, the mornings were chilly!
Camped beneath the cliffs. It doesn't rain so the fly is left off the tent -- nothing like that fresh air for sleeping! The only reason for the tent at all is the few gnats that are out, and of course the scorpions which I am told like to crawl into your boots while you're sleeping. I don't have a lot of scorpion experience and wasn't excited to get it while hiking alone far from, uhhh, anything, so I was glad for the tent.
I know the sky is blown out in this shot. Anyone have some bright ideas on how to keep this from happening on bright days? Anyhow, there are some cool sun-dogs and also a muddy puddle full of bugs that I had been looking for for miles. Almost anyplace where there is even semi-reliable water is marked on the maps. And treating the water with iodine kills everything good and dead (if you have a personal aversion to drinking water with floaty things in it, I guess you could strain it through a bandanna or something).
This is the long-stemmed-lots-of-little-red-flowers-plant, which sometimes grows in the shade of juniper trees.
Another ruin, this one is called split-level (for obvious reasons).
Yucca Leaves Framing Cactus Flowers
Ahh, the peach-colored-trumpet-lookin'-flower plant.
And who could forget the orange-colored-clusters-of-flowers plant?
This cactus has a cool pink flower.
Taking pictures of lizards takes patience and also memory on your camera. You need to sneak up on them very slowly or they run away, and it's best to be constantly taking shots as you do because if you wait, they might be gone...
As it winds its way between the canyon's hot rock walls, the trail often crosses (or runs in) the dry bed of the creek. You can see lots of delicate sedimentary structures left behind by previous floods, probably undisturbed for months.
This is the stripey-backed-really-fast lizard, which high-brow ranger types tell me is a striped whiptail. They often occur in pairs and sun themselves in the trail and normally go scurrying down it as soon as you get anyplace near them. This one stayed still long enough for a photo -- maybe I found the village idiot. There are a lot of different species of striped Whiptail, but I think this one looks like the Plateau Striped Whiptail, famous for its females being able to reproduce in the absence of males (when this happens the young are clones of the mother). I guess the mothers are all perfect and just don't need men. This leads to one of two conclusions: a) Radical feminism is justified because here is a natural example of an animal which needs no males for reproduction and is doing just fine, or b) Radical feminists are lizards.
The less-common-fat-round-yellow-flowered-cactus
So you are hungry? How about some re-boiled summer sausage mixed in with a bunch of instant mashed potatoes and tossed on a tortilla with some Tobasco sauce? That would be great, but I forgot the Tobasco, so what you get is warm bland mush soft tacos, I guess. Haha, good thing you are hungry.
Dusk looking west in Bullet Canyon. The days start earlier and end later in Bullet than in Grand Gulch, becuase Bullet Canyon runs more or less east-west while Grand Gulch is more or less north-south oriented, so the cliffs on either side of Grand Gulch do a better job of blocking the sun in the mornings and evenings.
For those who don't spend much time off the beaten track: "kitchen."
Here is a ruin built into some cliffs with some rock are painted above it. I'm not sure but this ruin looks almost like a defensive position to me.
These little white flowers are growing in cryptobiotic soil. I know only three things about cryptobiotic soil: 1) The ranger said don't step in it, and 2) it's name means "mysterious dirt that's alive," and 3) It's that black crusty-looking stuff that's all over.
Fortunately the trail was at least this good (and sometimes even better!) almost the whole 22 miles. Or, at least one of the trails was good. There never seemed to be just one...
This is up at perfect Kiva ruin. This photo is of a grain storage room, you know it was for storage and not living in by the lack of smoke stains.
Here is some more ancient pottery -- the one in the center appears to have been painted.
These grooves are worn into the rock from grinding corn into meal. There are still little corn-husks around all the ruins. I heard that these populations had a reputation for having bad teeth because grit from the sandstone they grind their corn on would get into the meal and would wear the enamel of their teeth. So, geology is important for dentists.
This is a red painting of a man.
White painting of a lizard-man.
Here is a view of the main dwelling at Perfect Kiva. If you look carefully, you can see the rails of the ladder leading down into the Kiva -- they stick up in front of the hut.
Pefect Kiva ruin has been stabilized for visitor entry. This is the view out the hut.
And this is the view inside the Kiva. A Kiva is an underground room thought to have been used for ceremonial purposes. I don't know what they used them for, but I would think they were useful because they stay cool during daytime and warm at night.
The last day I tried hiking out Bullet Canyon in the high sun (normally I would get up early and hike in the cool, nap for the afternoon, and hike a few more miles after dinner). It was brutally hot. Admittedly, I had been sitting in an ergonomic office chair in an air-conditioned room staring at a computer in Houston for three months, so maybe I was not in tip-top shape, but with a full pack I was doing like twenty minutes walking, twenty minutes resting in the shade (this is a hiding-from-the-sun shot). I was overheating basically as soon as I got moving. The ranger told me it had been in the eighties and nineties on the mesa tops and that being down in the canyons it's often ten or twelve degrees hotter. Also since there is no humidity, you go through water fast, like a liter for every couple miles. I was careful to have extra water at all times.
Panorama showing a rock formation in Utah, on the the way from Grand Gulch to Moab.
Mountains (Wasatch, I think), heading west towards Provo, Utah.
