Antelope Slot Canyon

The last stop on our tour was Antelope Slot Canyon, a place of light and shadow I had long wished to visit.

This in on the Navajo Nation and can only be visited with a Navajo guide.  It's a place that cries for HDR processing so for the rest of these images I took my RAW file, made +2 and -2 images in the RAW converter and then used tone compressor in Photomatix.

Several Navajo companies have rights to lead tours here so it is very crowded.  You can get a longer tour that allows you to set up a tripod but that wasn't an option for us.  The companies each have other slot canyons they can visit which are less crowded but again, that wasn't an option for our group.

You could get an unobstructed view by looking up.

Our guide knew all the tricks, he showed us this heart shaped slot.

He threw sand on this ledge for a "sandfall".

Find more shadows at Shadow Shot Sunday, hosted for us by Tracy in Brisbane.

Rainbow Bridge National Monument

Day nine was cold and cloudy but this was the day we were scheduled to take a tour boat over 40 miles up what had once been Glen Canyon to view Rainbow Bridge, the largest known natural bridge.

 I can still remember the controversy in the 60's over the flooding of the canyon to form Lake Powell.  Proponents of the project said it would make it easier for people to see Rainbow Bridge.  David Brower of the Sierra Club responded, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?”

 Since it follows the line of the canyon, the lake is relatively narrow with many arms.  It is down one of these arms that the boat took us to access the bridge.

 A short hike from the dock took us to the bridge

 There it was!  Enlarge this shot and you can see not only the ranger in the foreground but some tourists at the base of the left leg of the bridge.  It is huge.  I can't describe the feeling of being in the presence of such an example of nature's grandeur.  I didn't want to leave.  But it was a long hike or swim if the boat left without me so I hiked back to the dock with the others.

On the ride back the skies started to clear and the wind came up.  As we had on the way out, Hubby and I braved the cold and stayed on the upper deck to better see the scenery.

You can find more watery sites at Watery Wednesday, hosted for us by 2sweetnsaxy.

Day Eight

On day eight we covered a lot of territory.

 The first stop was Edge of Cedars Museum.  This is a Utah State Park in danger of loosing its funding.  It has an amazing collection of artifacts, well curated.  I had wished we had more time.

 The ruins on the the site included a kiva that visitors can climb down into.

 It was a cloudy day, if it had been sunny I could have captured shadows from the cutouts in this sculpture.

 The many sculptures were an added bonus to the site.

 The Next stop was Gouldings Trading Post for Navajo Tacos.  They seemed more like tostados to me but by any name they were quite good.

 The sky was perfect for this iconic image of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.

 Our final stop of the day was a Navajo Culture Center in Page, AZ.  I had mixed feelings about this place.  It wasn't run by the Navajo Nation and the man who ran it seemed to have an agenda beyond teaching about his culture.  We did learn some interesting facts about weaving and tradition but I left feeling conflicted.

These dancers were very good but they were dressed in the tradition of plains tribes doing dances from plains tribes.  We were told that Navajo dances couldn't be performed because it wasn't the proper season.

I would have rather spent more time at Edge of Cedars, there was a lot I didn't have time to see and I think I would have learned a lot more.

You can find many view of this wonderful world of ours at That's My World, Tuesday, hosted by Klaus, Sandy, Wren and Sylvia.



Bridge or Arch?

While the terms "natural bridge" and "natural arch" are often used interchangeably, geologists usually make a distinction.

Rainbow Bridge

 The term "bridge" is usually used to indicate a span that has been eroded by a stream running through it.

Double Arch

Arches are also formed by water but by the freezing and thawing and chemical weathering of water.

Linked to Sunday Bridges, hosted for us by Louis at San Francisco Daily Photo.

The Parks of Moab

Our next stop was Moab, Utah where two National Parks and one State Park awaited us.

 Our first stop was Dead Horse Point State Park.  This afforded us a great view of Canyonlands and the Colorado River.

 We also had a view of some salt ponds where water saturated with potassium chloride and sodium chloride is left to evaporate and the salts are then harvested.  The mountains in the background are the "La Sal" mountains.  Fittingly, la sal means salt in Spanish.  The are sits atop a large deposit of Potassium and Sodium salts, the remnant of an ancient sea.

 This overlook was withing the boundaries of Canyonlands National Park.  We didn't go down into the canyons, it is rugged land and the roads are unpaved.

 The following day we headed to Arches National Park where the features are quite different.  We took several short hikes.

 On this hike our destination was landscape arch.  You can gage its size by the figure in the corner.

We didn't have the blue skies of earlier days but even on this gray, cloudy day the color of the rocks was spectacular.

You can find more scenes of the great outdoors at "Outdoor Wednesday" hosted for us by Susan at A Southern Daydreamer.

Capital Reef National Park

Capital Reef is one of the lesser known parks in the National Park System.  It is out of the way but well worth a visit

 Two features give this park its name.  The first is the white domes that resemble the dome of our nation's capital.

 The second is the cliffs or "reefs" forming a barrier that made travel difficult.

 Life was hard for the Mormon pioneers and they willingly sold their land to the Park Service.  There remain not only restored pioneer buildings but orchards with heirloom trees nurtured by the Park Service.  Visitors can eat what they like in the orchard or harvest some to take home for a fee.

 Evidence of earlier cultures still remains like this granary

 and these pictographs.

 An easy hike took us to a low natural bridge

and the more spectacular Hickman Bridge.

You can see more of our world by going to That's My World, Tuesday, hosted for us by Klaus, Sandy, Wren and Sylvia.

Frosting on the Hoodoos

The next stop was Bryce Canyon where a different type of formation awaited us.

 The hoodoos of Bryce and what a treat for the photographer.

Snow had started to fall while we were at breakfast but the skies were clearing by the time we got to the rim.

 The slippery trails kept us from our planned hike but it gave us some great photo-ops!

 It was cold and the wind was whipping up the snow but still, it was Bryce at its most beautiful.

Even better, someone else had to deal with the snow and wind while we traveled in comfort.  Our driver was a retired firefighter and knew how to handel large rigs in adverse conditions.

The sky that morning was so beautiful that I am linking to SkyWatch Friday and send my thanks to Klaus, Sandy, Wren and Sylvia for hosting this meme.

Visit to the Colorado Plateau

We've been on the road, this time to Utah and Arizona.  After a few days of camping in California we drove to St. George, Utah for a "Road Scholar" program about the geology and human history of the

Colorado Plateau.

Our instructor was Dan, (the one on the left) 83 years young, a retired geologist, he was determined to share his enthusiasm for the geology of his home state of Utah.

Patty, his wife, was our coordinator.  It was her job to keep Dan and the rest of us in line and everything running smoothly.

They were fun, funny and young at heart.

 After a morning of introduction to what we could expect they took us to Snow Canyon, named for a person, not the white stuff.  At Snow Canyon Dan showed us Navajo Sandstone, a feature we would see often all over the Colorado Plateau.

This sandstone is the remnant of ancient sand dunes, much like the Sahara of today.  You can see how the winds changed over time by the different direction in the patterns of the stone.  We learned that this is called cross bedding.  See the tiny people in the upper left?  These formations are huge. 

 While much of the sandstone is the red we associate with the southwest in other places it is almost white but it is all Navajo sandstone.

It is just one of many layers exposed by erosion in the Colorado Plateau, here it's covered by a lava cap, protecting the sandstone from erosion.

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to give you a course in geology but I did find it added something to the trip to know what those layers of rock are.

It was a ten day course and we visited Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Monument Valley, Arches, Canyonlands, Lake Powell and a few other places.  Then Hubby and I continued our camping trip and went to Canyon de Chelly and Petrified forest.  If you get tired of red rocks over the next few weeks, feel free to leave.  I hope you'll return later, to see what our next adventure will be.

More views of our amazing world can be found at That's My World, Tuesday, hosted for us by Klaus, Sandy, Wren and Sylvia.