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 ...