Life update on the road

Wednesday, Oct 13


Update from Sedona, the red rock, vortex, mystic crystal center of central Arizona. The weather has been very nice the past week. Several of our walks this week have been across and along presently dry washes that obviously had large water flows last week when we got about 2 inches of rain in less than 2 days. It is back to ‘normal’ temperatures, in the mid 80s, which are tolerable if you have water, hats, sunscreen and hike early or late in the day.

I’m indoors listening to the whine of the leaf blowers as they do the constant grounds maintenance. I think it is to insure plenty of work. Today the leaves and dirt are blown off this property onto the surrounding ones and tomorrow it is blown back here. Also a lot of time is spent cleaning the red dust off of the red sidewalks. Sedona should outlaw white clothes and make all linen and towels red. The laundry soap usage would immediately drop by half.

On Sunday we will again be camping, this time in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California. We hope to be at 4400 feet so it will probably be ok temperature wise even though it is close to the Mojave Desert and Palm Springs. Night time lows should be mid 50s.

We are using our pictures from this trip as our screen saver for the laptop and enjoy seeing all the contrasts in the places we have visited since we left Anchorage on August 17th. The pictures change randomly every 4 seconds and we try to name the place where the picture was taken before it disappears. We accept the general location, such as Yellowstone, and don’t require which of the geyser fields or mud pools it is. After awhile you can actually distinguish the Alberta bison from the Yellowstone bison or the Rock Art Ranch bison. We still can’t distinguish the lizards by state. But we now have a skink picture from a Sedona walk! (Looks like a short snake on very short legs.)

This past Friday Travis and Bill stayed with us after their hike(s) in the Grand Canyon.  They survived but their cell phone was a casualty. It was a very interesting time for them! (Our hail in Sedona and tornadoes in Flagstaff post was during their hike.)  We had lots to talk about.

Yesterday I received an email from Anchorage asking several questions about my last contract project. It took awhile and several readings of the questions to remember what they were talking about. That happened only 10 weeks ago!? Seems a lot longer than that since I went into work…..

This time reminds me of when I first retired from ConocoPhillips and took 5 months to reorder/reevaluate/reprioritize how to set goals, use time, etc. Am I really retired? What does retired mean? Lots of questions and time to decide……

But for now it’s getting later in the day and time to think about going to the pool (the leaf blowers are moving to a distant part of the property).  I need to make use of the timeshare pluses as we finish up our leisurely four weeks in the 4 corners area. I have arranged our pictures taken so far, stitched together all the panorama shots, deleted the many duplicates, and we are now at 6000 pictures or 10 gigabytes for the trip.

So by for now and onto but not into the pool!  (I'm allergic to chlorine.)

Dean

PS  The question of the day:  Is the Chevy Volt an electric car or not????  And Google is getting into wind energy investment!

Rock Art Ranch: Holbrook, AZ

Tuesday Sept. 28

A very good place to see a valley full of petroglyphs, Chevelon Canyon, is on a private ranch just west of Holbrook and close to Winslow, AZ. It was mentioned in our Frommer’s guide to the American Southwest. It is part of the old Hashknife Ranch which was the largest ranch in the US in the late 1800s. You have to make a reservation and pay a fee to see the canyon, (928) 288-3260 available Monday through Saturday year round. We were debating this after our wonderful day in Petrified Forest National Park.

Incidentally, we met a couple at dinner that evening, Deb and Don, who had made a reservation to visit the Rock Art Ranch and invited us to join them. We met up with them at the Holbrook Safeway, where we picked up our lunch, and drove to the ranch, about 30 minutes southwest of Holbrook.

At the ranch we were met by Brantley Baird, the 75 year old owner and guide, if he isn’t out on his horse tending the cattle and bison herd with his ranch hand, the “old cowboy” (90 years old this month). He is a quiet-spoken gentleman with many years’ worth of stories of life in the Arizona ranch land. None of his sons is interested in living there and carrying on the ranching

or petroglyph preservation. First on his agenda is a look at the ranch’s history displayed around the sides of a large mess hall. But, for us, the best was the display of MANY museum quality ancestral Puebloan pots of all kinds, arrowheads, tools, and other household and hunting items, many of which he had found over the years on the property.

After the tour of ranch buildings, we were taken to see the bison herd and stopped at a Hopi Hogan on the short drive to the petroglyphs. At the Chevelon Canyon site there is an overlook with several roof covered picnic tables to get out of the sun for lunch. The stone stairs down to the canyon floor follow the same route used by the Ancestral Puebloans to access this water source from their mesa top houses and fields.

The thousands of petroglyphs are viewable from the stream bed at your leisure. It was a hot sunny day and we were melting until we offed our shoes and socks and soaked our feet in the cool, fast-running water of the stream. The only requirement is to lock the gate when leaving and drop the key into the lockbox on the gatepost. The four of us wandered around a short segment of the canyon, exclaiming over the extensive petroglyphs and marveling that they had remained intact with virtually no graffiti over many centuries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a great site to view petroglyphs up close and at your leisure. Take water and a lunch and have a full day to spend at the Rock Art Ranch. If you plan ahead you could arrange to tent at the site and have lots of time to view the petroglyphs. Go soon, because who knows what will happen to this fascinating site when Brantley Baird is no longer in charge.

Painted Desert (Part 2 of the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert NP)

Monday, Sept. 27

(Post 2) This whole area is part of the Painted Desert, but the exposures of the Late Jurassic Chinle Formation in the northern half of the national park are spectacular. Seeing this formation in low angle sunlight makes the rock colors brighter. This particular formation features two odd rock shades: one is a lovely sage green through grey, and the other is a dark aubergine. Very odd, very dramatic. The colors were vibrant and changing as clouds past overhead. In the park it is fun to see the petrified wood logs acting as the caprock for some of the exposures. The petrified pieces range through every shade of brown to red, gold, orange and white.

 

We knew we wouldn’t want to drive back to Flagstaff after a day of driving, hiking, and taki

ng pictures in the sun, so we stayed in Holbrook, close to the park entrance, for the evening. At dinner we met a couple from Carlisle, PA. and accompanied them the next day to the Rock Art Ranch outside of Holbrook. (see next posting on petroglyphs and Ancestral Puebloan artifacts.)

 

Sedona Arizona

Hi everyone,

We are in Sedona, AZ for the next 2 weeks. Luck for us the weather has broken and it is not 100 any more. But, there is a low pressure hanging around and there are spectacular thunderheads with associated thunder and lightening and today impressive rain...... We are expecting Travis and Bill on Friday after their Grand Canyon hiking extravaganza. They have requested some pool time while here so hopefully the weather will cooperate. We are having some hail now and Alison has ran outside for some samples.  Earlier Alison got a video of the rain.  "It's raining like stink."

Oh well....we had our camping grill to cook dinner so all's well.  We could stay in and avoid the mess on the roads.

Petrified Forest National Park

Monday, Sept. 27

Today we drove about 90 miles east of Flagstaff to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. The visit was FABULOUS!!! The guide books said take a half day to see the park so we planned ahead to have a full day there. We started at the south entrance about 9 AM, where most of the large accumulations of petrified wood are located, and progressed northward to see the best viewings of the Painted Desert in the late afternoon sun. (Seperate posting.)

The amount and color variations of the petrified wood were impressive. The landscape was literally littered with pieces of petrified wood from small fragments to pieces of trunk up to 100 feet long and 4 or 5 feet in diameter. We were good law abiding citizens and didn’t take any pieces with us. (This was VERY hard. On the way into the park we had to have the ranger mark all the rock pieces we had already collected along the trip so we wouldn’t be fined for these.)



Reminds me of a fallen column in Greece.



The ability of the petrifying process to create very life-like looking mineral replacements of the wood cells repeatedly caused us to try to scratch the wood surface to check if it really was not soft wood. It was always rock. The bark looked like bark, the broken off limb holes looked real, even the weathering process made the petrified logs look rotten! In some places, the petrified wood had broken into tiny wood “chips”, just as though someone had walked away from chopping firewood.

We found our next house, the Agate house, but have to negotiate with the Federal Government to relocate it to a more suitable climate. It probably weights a million pounds so I’m sure the move could be costly.

Our Agate House

Is this rotten?