Busy Busy

Besides the meteor crater and the skull, we had a busy day.

Our next stop was a place called "two guns." Not sure why. Our guidebook promised a day's worth of photo opportunities but Heather and I knew better. It was an abandoned/ruined site with a rocky dirt road and barbed wire fences leading up to it, plus a random UPS truck resting at the entrance. This set of circumstances led us to not venture far and not take longer than five minutes. The place used to be a motel, restaurant, zoo, and fake ruins park situated on a treeless landscape with a mini canyon running through it. One of the owners shot the other and things went downhill from there.

But really, once you've seen a hundred abandoned buildings, you've seen'em all. (I am still obligated to myself to take pictures of course.)

Next, "twin arrows." We turned the wrong way and thought the Native Americans had gone and built a casino on the site we wanted to see in the year since our book was published! - but the valet pointed us in the opposite direction, and once again we had to go off-road to photograph this ruined road stop (which I loved).  I walked the whole way around it and got pictures on each side, but the one we both came for was of two gigantic red and yellow arrows sticking into the ground. Fancy that!

Then we went to...another national park! Walnut Canyon. Lots of steps, lots of windy trees growing at strange angles, some Pueblo housing remnants, and real live prickly pear cactus!  There were lots of markers with explanations of plants and their usues.

Finally, in Flagstaff, we visited the Lowell university.  It is at Lowell that Pluto was discovered. This is special to me because I did a project on Pluto in third grade, and third grade was the big year when we started doing PROJECTS, so I remember each one I did.

Heather and I watched two lengthy presentations in their "planetarium." Folks, this was no ordinary planetarium. No comfy seats, no projection on the ceiling.  But there was a projection on a half-sphere in front of us and the two of us agreed that after the initial nonplussed-ness, we became fascinated with the format of the presentations and with the new information. We had no idea so much research is still being done in space! In a couple of years, someone plans to send something out to drill through the ice on one of Jupiter's moons. And this year, there's something flying by Pluto in July that will send us back data and better pictures!

And after two hours of that, we went to the Olive Garden instead of staying to look at stars, which is what an observatory is for. Oh, well. Other people can look at the stars and planets for us.

Yesterday we went to the Petrified Forest National Park. Can I cheat and get that in this post too? It feels like forever ago.

The clouds were all perfectly flat on the bottom and the sky was bright blue, until later when some of the clouds would bleed toward the ground in some form of precipitation. Overlook upon overlook showed us first a pink, green, and orange desertscape, then mountains horizontally striped with purple, then orange cliffs. I found that the park was more about the land than the wood. It was only on the last two little loop hikes did we see concentrations of petrified wood worth writing home about. The stone that formed in place of the wood took on many colors. Some of the logs even looked painted.

The park made a huge deal out of not leaving a mark, not leaving the paved trails, and not taking any wood with you. It was incredibly saddening to hear that the reason the wood we see today is all chopped-up-looking is because in the past people used dynamite to break the wood into saleable chunks.

That's a common theme in most of the National Park films we view: for many many years until anyone decided to do anything about it, people looted and destroyed the land, resources, and history of each new place they found, because, really, why not?

So after being saddened by the fact that I am seeing a fractured remnant (albeit still glorious) of what used to be, I exit the park and IMMEDIATELY see billboards on my right and left advertising petrified wood for sale. Sooo...I guess these people got it off their property? And to add it to the park would be cheating, so I guess it's fine, but you see the irony, right?

It was a good day. And I actually ate Mexican food at the end of the day. No red or green chile though.