Hello! Things are a bit slow and (dare I say) slightly boring around Norwich House the last couple of days. Definitely getting things done, but not exciting things!
Happily I have just about finished my post processing on the wedding photos, a few tail ends to tidy up before posting the files back to Texas, so I have made a little start on my actual holiday photos!!
The one request my husband made for me to bring home, was a piece of petrified wood! (ok, and alien bumper stickers from Roswell… haha).
Imagine my delight when, on the drive up to the Grand Canyon, Wendy and I stumbled across an entire petrified forest!!!!
Detour!
Because this was day two of driving (correction – Wendy driving, me being the moral support and entertainment division) we limited ourselves to 2 hours of exploring.
Four hours later we finally extracted ourselves from this spectacular and unexpected landscape.
It was so beautiful!
The road through was 42km (26 miles) with lots of viewing point stops and the opportunity for a walk or two.
Initially we were greeted with pallets of red, pinks, oranges with smatterings of green.
We made a brief stop off to see ‘Newspaper Rock’
There are around 650 petroglyphs covering a series of rock faces in a small area that you overlook from a viewing platform.
The markings were made by ancestral Puebloan people over a number of generations, between 650 – 2,000 years ago! Amazing!
So many little details cover the rocks.
I like this one – I think of an elderly person with a bad back and a walking stick…
I imagine this is a huge eye broken off from a large statue/painting. Well…actually I couldn’t find much about this so I am just making it up in my head! Its cool though.
So, from warm colours to artwork, then abruptly the landscape changed colour!
Incredible layers of blue, white and rust showing a timeline of events. The red layers (top) show where the rivers ran at that time. The blue and red layers were laid down in the rivers floodplain and the white ash layers record volcanic eruptions and are used to determine the rocks exact age!
We finally found some petrified wood, by the way!! I think in my head when I thought ‘petrified forest’ I had vague images of silently standing stone trees (upright of course)
Clearly that was not the case although I quite liked my romantic notions. (I watch too many fantasy/sci-fi programs!)
But it was fantastic to start seeing more of the ‘trunks’ and pieces of the petrified wood that would have been in river beds a ridiculously long time ago. (We are talking 255 million years ago that these trees were living, if you can wrap your brain around that!!)
We drove on a bit further, played tourist…
Met a crow…
And then took time for a walk down into the Blue Mesa – one mile down to get really among it all
We came across some track workers – would have been hot work but what an office to spend your day in!!
We started coming across various chunks of petrified wood along the pathway
Some were totally backpack sized!! haha (no, of course I didn’t but I did tell Wendy it was like walking through the valley of temptation!)
We really enjoyed our (hot hot hot) walk down here
Close up the surface of the hills are just a baked clay!
So easy to see an ancient waterway where the wood was washed down and buried… now exposed again for us to admire!
Anyway, I will throw some more images your way tomorrow!
Hope you enjoyed the look at this most beautiful place!
Cheers!
WOW! Absolutely beautiful photography Lisa. Thank you so much for sharing. Can’t wait for more!!
Thanks Teri! Its great to be finally getting into these images! Such a beautiful place!
If I’m not mistaken, removing any of the ‘wood’ is illegal….not sure if you can buy it. Don’t tell if you got any or not! lol ?
lol – you are not mistaken! Its the same in our national parks. You can’t remove any artifacts at all. Happily I found a fellow in Corpus Christi that collects from non-national parks areas so I was able to buy some and bring them home for Jeff (Who was thrilled!!)