Mesa Verde National Park

24 ish August 2017

Aztec Ruins

Aztec Ruins National Monument - 22 August

Chaco Canyon

Chaco Culture National Historical Park - Gallo Campground - 20 August

3 nights, I'm letting myself have 3 photos.

Willow Beach again

Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Willow Beach Marina - 13 August

A chill day out on the river with the folks

The westward course of bathtub rings (Potash, Utah)

Where does salt come from? And how can I never have wondered that before? The bathtub ring of Lake Mead and the westward course of empire should have got me thinking about this sooner.

Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park - Island in the Sky - 3 July

On the beginning of the White Rim road

Capitol Reef National Park

Capitol Reef National Park - Cass Mulford apricot orchard, Fruita - 2 July

After picking apricots

Willow Beach

Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Willow Beach Marina - 27 May

Thanks to my amazing friend Jan for the brilliant idea of renting a boat.

Temple Bar Marina

Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Temple Bar Marina - 26 May

The '50s are alive and well and living in Lake Mead NRA.

Cure light wounds (pine pitch)

Pine pitch grows on trees, of course, or at least comes from trees. The clear gum drips like crystal tears, its delicacy against the pine bark strikingly lovely. As it ages, it hardens and dries. If left undisturbed, it will harden into copal, and ultimately can fossilize into amber.

Not for cooking. Probably. Or not much. Although retsina, and I can imagine the sharp medicinal flavour working well in some settings ... and deep in the subsequent pages of a google search, I found a few oddities: pine resin potatoes, and pine resin chocolate. And, oh happy day, these people after my own heart making all sorts of bitters and syrups and shipping them from Colorado.

Pitch can be incorporated into a balm or used alone as an incense. The pitch is also traditionally used in the southwest and Mexico to remove splinters, spines, or glochids. The balm is useful for small cuts or irritations, for soothing rashes, as a barrier cream, and generally for minor insults to the skin. It even makes a pretty reasonable emergency deodorant.

Gather the fresh resin with a stick, because wow it is sticky*. It's also almost overwhelmingly tempting to touch it, because the partly dried droplets are gummy, squishy, stretchy, and generally a source of tactile satisfaction.

So it's good to know that oil will unstick the stickiness - hand sanitiser/rubbing alcohol too, but not quite as well. Oil will also dissolve the resinous gum, making a strongly pine-scented maceration which can then be blended with other ingredients as usual to make various creams and potions. I use a lot of pine balm and I like the foresty smell of it, so when we saw quantities of pitch out in the wild recently, I thought I'd harvest some and figure out how to make my own ... luckily, the internet, and little figuring was required.

Currently I have a big jar of pine pitch oil sitting in the kitchen. With the greenish oil and lumps of pitch slowly dissolving, it looks like something that would be more at home in a potion master's dungeon-cum-office. But one day soon I will turn it into perfectly well-behaved and seemly balm. More to come ...

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*Q. What's brown and sticky? 

A. A stick. 


Cure light wounds specification.

A desert sage adventure

Desert hills, sage in foreground

In the Mojave National Preserve, desert sage is everywhere, acres of it, whole arroyos full of it, great gardens spread out lengthwise over hillsides. Its leaves smell recognisably like common sage, only stronger, spicier, and more like armpits (hmm, maybe I'm not overselling it here?) Some plants have an almost coyote-pee stink to them.

This is not the world-famous white sage, used for smudging. Nor is it the giant Mojave blue sage, whose flower spikes have huge magnificent spheres of blue rising up out of the grey-green foliage, one of the only Mojave flowering plants that you can buy in nurseries. This is the desert sage, salvia dorrii, also called Great Basin sage or purple sage. It grows all over the place around here, but in very specific kinds of terrain: not too high up, not too low (too hot in the desert valleys), usually on sloping ground, often in wide washes.

Caruthers Canyon

Towards the New York Mountains

A spring weekend morning, an unexplored road, and a 4x4 with new tyres is a sure recipe for happiness. The trusty 'Hiking in the Mojave Desert' won, yet again, with another spot-on recommendation. 

Caruthers Canyon reminds me of very old descriptions of canyons in the desert southwest - the isolation and unspoiled beauty, the trees, flowers and peacefulness. (Probably those 19th and early 20th century authors did not have the near-constant noise of planes overhead though.) 

She gets a bit bumpy aye.

We could camp here. Look! It has a table!

This haven of pine trees, granite, and wildflowers is just three hours from home. Two of those are over dirt roads, of which some are graded and not too washboardy, and some are tracks that would make you yelp. (Barreeeee!) 

We picnicked in the shade of an oak tree. These desert species are non-deciduous and have sturdy little leaves, almost like holly leaves. The warm sun on nearby junipers made a fragrant accompaniment.

Then we walked up the track to the camping - and immediately wished we had driven up there before lunch. The pines shelter a few primitive campsites, and the granite outcrops are all sorts of picturesque. There are grizzly-bear-prickly-pears sprawling low to the ground, and stony hills rising on three sides. 

We could buy it. Look! It has a wall!

On the way out from the canyon, we saw 20 acres for sale and had to be quite stern with each other. We already own an ample number of tumbledown out-of-the-way properties. (Surely just one more couldn't hurt?)

Our drive home took us along the Mojave Road, a 500-year old trail westwards through the desert. In many places it is sunken six feet or more below the level of the surrounding desert, and you have the feeling of being immersed, or of tunneling through sand. And my word, but the Mojave is astounding in bloom this year. Hillsides purple with sage or golden with - eh, IDK, yellow flowers, I guess. Lots of globe mallow making fields of orange, and splashes of day-glo cactus blooms and paintbrush.

There's something soul-cleansing about being out in the middle of that rich dense everything, all calmly going about its normal occasions. Sometimes it's even enough to last me all week.   

Lake Mead NRA

Sunday breakfast at the Lake Mead Marina, Lake Mead National Recreation Area 9 April 2017

One gull is enough ...

Dust storm

So I drove home a little early the other day. If they're going to have near-zero visibility on the freeway I'd prefer not to compound that with the regular rush-hour high jinks that keep my commute such a consistently thrilling adventure.

And because I was driving, I couldn't take photos. So I will try and paint you a picture.

There was sand drifting on the freeway in places, rippled where the wind was sculpting it into the embryonic beginnings of dunes. Squares of cardboard, palm leaves, drink cups: all sorts of light litter was airborne all around, caught high on chain-link fences or sailing overhead. Scraps of biodegrading plastic soared and twirled and generally haunted the road like unquiet spirits. Or sea creatures - I saw one piece of white, maybe five feet long and one wide, undulate across in front of me in disconcertingly eel-like fashion.

I could not see the hills, and little stones and bits of grit flicked against the windscreen. It seemed like more of them each moment. The air was greyish brown under a flat and murky sky. In higher and more exposed sections of the road, the wind caught the car and tugged it closer to the lane edges than I would like.

But I got home okay, obviously, and the next morning there was fresh snow on the mountains and the southwest hills were limned in light under lowering clouds.

Death Valley National Park

Mosaic Canyon, Death Valley National Park, 18 March 2017.

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Cheating, because actually we forgot the parks pass at home. 

Ozymandias and the Zzyzx dancing girls (Desert Studies Center, Mojave National Preserve)

I could only see them as plumptious dancers, green fan hands high and modestly wrapped to to the ankles. Try un-seeing that now. Eh, you're welcome.

Zzyzx dancing girls

Again, bobcat

Wow, what are the chances of seeing a second bobcat in the exact same place as the first one I saw? This one even had a friend.

I guess they're rebuilding the river bank at River Island State Park. Hope the local wildlife is not too inconvenienced!

Things that make you go brmmmm

So we have now been in the US of A for two years, and to celebrate by coincidence we bought a new car that day. It isn't new new, just new to us. It's 4WD for those lumpy roads, and craptastic enough that we won't care much about mud, sand, scratches, sun damage, and all the other ways that the Nevada desert likes to reclaim vehicles unto itself and generally return them to the dust whence they sprang.

There were several strikingly interesting things about the transaction. And yes, I will now proceed to list them. You may want to give it up as a bad job without reading further.

Kolob Canyons

Zion National Park Kolob Canyons 29 January

(Oh dear that was quite some time ago. Must try harder.)

There is a part of Zion that you can almost have to yourself. 

Zion National Park

Zion National Park 15 January

Bighorn sheep. The beautiful patina of wet sandstone.

The Inn at Halona (Zuni Pueblo NM)

Sunset view towards mesa at Zuni Pueblo

The Inn at Halona is a nest of a lodge in the midst of an ancient village. Of the couple of dozen pueblo communities in New Mexico, as far as I found, Zuni is the only one with guest accommodation in the village itself. (The proper name for Zuni people is Ashiwi but our guide explained that Zuni is still kinda their nickname and it's used extensively on their websites.)

A beautiful Zuni vessel at MNA

House of mirrors (Mary Colter and La Posada Hotel, Winslow AZ)

Arriving

When you walk into a place that is really loved, it's often evident from the very first moment. La Posada at Winslow is such a place.

And I would take Five Thousand Photos

#1, table lamp,
Amargosa
opera house

We bought a new camera in April 2016 - yeah it's an epoch in your relationship when you share a camera body.

It's a Sony α5000, so pretty much the bottom end of reasonably recent mirrorless digital cameras. We have been enjoying it a lot and acquired a few more lenses for it last month.

Here's a little retrospective of a few of our first 5000 shots.

I was going to start with pic #1 but - oh vanity! - it's a truly terrible photo of me so I'm just showing one corner of it.

Wait, Thursday is also wolf day (Meow Wolf, Santa Fe NM)

Detail of arch, Meow Wolf, Santa Fe NM

So, Meow Wolf. Wait what, right? Wolves don't ... Cats aren't ... Yup, true, true, so I took a deep breath and ignored the category violation error. It's an excellent name because it makes you ask, what on earth is that?

Ans.: No idea, sorry. Indoor theme park? Art gallery? Interactive installation? Immersive mockumentary?

Meow? 

Christmas lights by the palace (Santa Fe Plaza)

For actual rhinestone cowboys?

Santa Fe plaza gives very pleasant evening strolling in scarf-and-glove temperatures.

All the glittery things imaginable and a few that, frankly, I would never have thought of. Such historic. Very luxury.

Petrified Forest National Park

NPS 2017 posts will be - the place, the date, and just one photo. Since we often take over 200 shots in a day, to choose just one will not necessarily be straightforward. But discipline, right? And practice, grasshopper. And also additional posts as required.

Petrified Forest National Park 26 December 2016 (so okay, not really 2017 yet)

Pieces of petrified wood in a transient pool at Blue Mesa. 

Walnut Canyon National Monument

Walnut Canyon National Monument 2 January

Wednesday is wolf day (Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, NM)

Good idea.

Idly checking my phone in the cozy living room of the Inn at Halona in the middle of Zuni Pueblo. When I'm away from home, Google always likes to suggest cool things to do nearby. Creepy, yet convenient. (Huh, is that the internet privacy debate in a nutshell?)

If we'd known it was down more than five miles of dirt road we might have had second thoughts. But we did not, and the road was called Candy Kitchen Road, and so off we went. (NB there was no candy kitchen - we was robbed!)

The Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary rescues wolves and other canids, mostly from misguided attempts of private owners to keep them as pets or in personal collections. There are lots of levels of 'experience' available, but we just did the walking around tour, which came with free bonus squelching in thick, clayey, mud.

Wolf actual

While we waited for our tour guide, we were treated to a group howl. I recorded the tail end of it, as it were ...

What if I never find out who's a good boy?

All the photos are through wire fence - if you think about it this is probably a good idea, too. There was a variety of wolf species and wolf-dog mixes, all resplendent in their furriest winter coats.

I learned how to tell a wolf from a dog (eye colour, ear shape, tail, skull shape, hips, stride, and a few things that you'd need to actually get up really close to check, such as a pea-sized gland half-way down the tail!) What intrigued me the most was the guide's stories about wolves' behaviour, personalities and interactions - they sounded much more like cats than dogs.

Some of them were real attention-seekers, trotting out ready to be admired - our guide told us though that some residents are kept far away from visitors. A lot of these animals have been treated horribly, neglected or abused, before they're rescued, and some never psychologically recover well enough to feel okay around people.

we r not shibes, lol.

Not only adorbs but we can sing, too. 

They also have a few dingoes who had been smuggled out of Aussie (world's thickest customs officer apparently believed that they were Shiba Inu).

And most unusually, several New Guinea singing dogs. I had no idea these were even a thing.

Fox is so fluffy

And last of all, a dear round red fox was curled up in his corner.

Phone, you were right.

National parks pass it on

We are huge fans of National Parks spaces. The NPS administers so many amazing places. Their annual pass is astoundingly good value. We just started our second one, and I wanted to keep track of where and when we use it.

But there's a history too, to this particular instance of the American dream, that I don't want to gloss over. It's not the pastiche of feel-good anecdote and Manifest Destiny grand horn music crescendo you'll get from watching, say, Ken Burns's doco series (sigh, made my teeth hurt a bit.) Rather, a dark underbelly story. These amazing places - that give me so much enjoyment, tranquillity, wonder, and delight - came at a cost. As so often, it was marginalised peoples who paid disproportionately, as native peoples were in many instances bullied off their ancestral land to make room for tourists to have their weekend hikes and nature experiences. (For an overview, see this article).

Huh, I started his post only intending to note down every use of the new parks pass ... Guess I had something else to get off my chest too.

Christmas lights by trains (Flagstaff AZ)

red sky at morning ...

We drove into Flagstaff on December 23 with a big snowstorm hard on our heels - a foot of snow due, starting at 5 a.m. the next day.

red sky at night ... well, orange. 

Christmas Eve morning the sky was grey and threatening but the ground still bare. We went to the Museum of Northern Arizona and spent a happy couple of hours wandering through fossils, pottery, textiles, paintings, and jewellery. 

As we came out, little flurries were starting. A few hours later, snow plows were patrolling the streets and parking lots. The scrape and hum of them reminded me of winters in Ottawa back in the day ... weirdly soothing ...