Wednesday 6th Sept {I think}

The next morning, we followed the signs that directed us to the entrance for the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.  I wasn't sure what I expected, but I am pretty sure I was thinking "forest=greenery, a multitude of tall trees", instead of focusing on the "petrified=mineralized remains=takes lots of time=perhaps living forest no longer exists in this location".   So ya might see why I was a bit puzzled when we turned at the brown National Park sign and saw more desert looming ahead.

We covered a lot of desert, the high desert of the northwestern plains and the many deserts thru the southwest.  I must say that my vocabulary was sorely tested and found lacking.  Each desert is so very different.  The rocks, the minerals, the layers, the colors, the vegetation, the terrain, the animals, its all very distinct from every other desert.  But I could not fully capture how this brown rock was different from that brown rock; it was a richness, a hue, that indicated different elements, a different history, each with its own stories to tell.  I was hard pressed to adequately describe how this grass, waist height and densely thatched, was completely different from that sparsely bunched low grass.  I know that various life forms find each habitable, suitable; but I don't know this snake from that, or that lizard from this.  But please know that it is not enough to merely label the terrain as the "desert" and that that word means one uniform sort of thing.  The desert is as varied as the lushness of the Smoky Mountains and the Mississippi pines region.  The desert flows from one sort to another, but there are also abrupt geological shifts that reveal themselves in formations of rock that are completely unlike that surrounding rock, as much as the foothills are different than the bayous.  It would be easy to let this unfamiliar landscape seem to blend into a sameness, but it is none of it alike.

East of the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert stretches across the northern part of Arizona, the southern part of Utah, the northern part of New Mexico, and the southernwestern part of Colorado.  The Painted Desert itself is vast and embodies many distinguishable area.  The part of the Painted Desert that lies to the immediate north of the Petrified Forest is the Black Forest.

Jerry is standing next to an Agate Bridge, a petrified tree that formed a bridge.  The sandstone around it has eroded over time, leaving this mineralized tree trunk acting as a bridge over the gully under it.  The striated rock formations pictured to the right are called "The Tepees", part of the Blue Forest, within the Petrified Forest.  We did take other pictures of both the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert, but again, we felt that few of them did justice to the actual views we were looking at.

We did stop at Crystal Forest Museum & Gift Shop and had some very interesting conversations with the staff there.  A young woman showed me some of the various handmade jewelry that the area natives have made, Hopi, Navajo, Apache, Zuni, and Ute.  She talked about some of the stones, the symbols, and the methods.  I was very impressed and tho I don't often wear jewelry, I do have an appreciation of it, especially handcrafted pieces that show skill and have cultural significance.  In the end tho, I was so overwhelmed with the variety that I chose a simple orangish red Jasper necklace that reminded me of so many of the wildflowers that we'd seen along the roadside throughout the trip.  In the southwest, much of the reddish orange we'd seen were squash blossoms.

That afternoon, we drove down thru the Gila Mountains to Silver City, New Mexico.  We spent the night in what had been a convent and then a monastery, and is now Holy Trinity Anglican Church.  It sits in front of the Guadalupe Montessori School.  It was a wonderful evening and felt very peaceful and soothing.  Below is a screenshot of a part of the grounds.