Southwest Roadtrip: the big picture
Inside the cut, thirty pictures from my trip. This is my "big picture" version of the trip, and I'll put access to the full galleries (don't worry, not all 3000 pictures) in another post.
The towns along I-40 that have any association with old Route 66 really play it up. It's understandable, most of them don't have a lot else going for them. This is the U-Drop Inn, an old gas station and cafe in Shamrock, Texas that was recently the model for the garage in the Pixar film Cars.
One of the rocks at Petroglyph National Monument just west of Albuquerque. I was very attracted to the petroglyph style of art.
This might be Red Rock, it might just be some random freaking huge red rock formation pushing out of the ground above some reservation housing. This kind of thing was everywhere along the road in New Mexico and Arizona. So alien, and so beautiful.
There were also a lot of random rusty objects and deteriorating houses out in the middle of nowhere in the desert.
The Painted Desert. This is only one of the sets of colors and patterns on the hills and mesas all around.
Part of the Puerca Pueblo ruins on the Painted Desert drive, nearing the Petrified Forest.
Below the Puerca ruins was a small cliff on which the rocks were decorated with petroglyphs.
Petrified Forest: the giant chunks of stone-ified Triassic trees were just lying around everywhere. The landscape was very eerie, especially with the sun getting low. It felt like another planet... or a movie set for another planet, anyway.
The Grand Canyon from the south rim. There's really not much I can say. Pictures are nice but they really don't portray the vast sense of space adequately.
Bright Angel Trail, down which I hiked only an hour.
Sunset from the Grand View lookout.
Raptors at sunrise, the next day from the same place
The smoky light at sunrise
Desert View Watchtower
Paintings inside the Watchtower. (Yes, I had "All Along the Watchtower" in my head...)
View of the Colorado River from the Watchtower
Controlled burn inside the Grand Canyon park
Upstream side of the Hoover Dam. The other side is the one you see in pictures, with the humongous wall dropping to the river below, but I thought the color of the water up here was gorgeous.
As I said to elspethsheir, I was oddly encouraged to see that it's not just my students (or library patrons, jadesfire2808!) who can't follow instructions - tourists can't either.
View of the Colorado River below the Hoover Dam. Quite impressive was the construction of the support arch for a highway overpass that will make traveling through the Dam area much easier. There really were construction workers up there on the structure, and they were not tied to cables as I would have insisted on being.
A mountain of boulders! Nice, roundish boulders.
Dust devil! I was afraid it wouldn't be hot enough yet for us to see one of these, but we saw almost twenty on the drive from the Grand Canyon area up to the Las Vegas area and back.
Montezuma Castle National Monument. Nothing to do with Montezuma or a castle, of course, but a well-preserved ancestral pueblo cliff dwelling northeast of Prescott, Arizona in the Verde Valley.
We saw a lot of these older style windmills, and some were obviously still working.
(Incidentally, these two pictures also illustrate my tendency, discovered on this trip, to take pictures with the horizon slanting away to the right. My brain seems to feel more comfortable with it that way, so I have to consciously line up the horizon with the top of the camera frame. I was also interested to see that my dad's horizons slant to the left. Our vertical shots are also opposite directions. I am left-eye dominant and he is right-eye dominant, but I don't know if that makes a difference.)
...and the modern equivalent of the windmill. These turbines are HUGE. We saw a couple of turbine blades being transported on flatbed semi trucks, and normal sized trucks could not transport them. Also, each truck could only carry one or two blades. It was really astounding.
Objects left on the memorial fence at the Oklahoma City Memorial for the 1995 bombing. These are recently left objects; people still bring lots of things.
From desert and rocky mountains to... this green. Things smell different with humidity. It really does smell like home.
I think I need to do a separate post for animals and flowers.
The towns along I-40 that have any association with old Route 66 really play it up. It's understandable, most of them don't have a lot else going for them. This is the U-Drop Inn, an old gas station and cafe in Shamrock, Texas that was recently the model for the garage in the Pixar film Cars.
One of the rocks at Petroglyph National Monument just west of Albuquerque. I was very attracted to the petroglyph style of art.
This might be Red Rock, it might just be some random freaking huge red rock formation pushing out of the ground above some reservation housing. This kind of thing was everywhere along the road in New Mexico and Arizona. So alien, and so beautiful.
There were also a lot of random rusty objects and deteriorating houses out in the middle of nowhere in the desert.
The Painted Desert. This is only one of the sets of colors and patterns on the hills and mesas all around.
Part of the Puerca Pueblo ruins on the Painted Desert drive, nearing the Petrified Forest.
Below the Puerca ruins was a small cliff on which the rocks were decorated with petroglyphs.
Petrified Forest: the giant chunks of stone-ified Triassic trees were just lying around everywhere. The landscape was very eerie, especially with the sun getting low. It felt like another planet... or a movie set for another planet, anyway.
The Grand Canyon from the south rim. There's really not much I can say. Pictures are nice but they really don't portray the vast sense of space adequately.
Bright Angel Trail, down which I hiked only an hour.
Sunset from the Grand View lookout.
Raptors at sunrise, the next day from the same place
The smoky light at sunrise
Desert View Watchtower
Paintings inside the Watchtower. (Yes, I had "All Along the Watchtower" in my head...)
View of the Colorado River from the Watchtower
Controlled burn inside the Grand Canyon park
Upstream side of the Hoover Dam. The other side is the one you see in pictures, with the humongous wall dropping to the river below, but I thought the color of the water up here was gorgeous.
As I said to elspethsheir, I was oddly encouraged to see that it's not just my students (or library patrons, jadesfire2808!) who can't follow instructions - tourists can't either.
View of the Colorado River below the Hoover Dam. Quite impressive was the construction of the support arch for a highway overpass that will make traveling through the Dam area much easier. There really were construction workers up there on the structure, and they were not tied to cables as I would have insisted on being.
A mountain of boulders! Nice, roundish boulders.
Dust devil! I was afraid it wouldn't be hot enough yet for us to see one of these, but we saw almost twenty on the drive from the Grand Canyon area up to the Las Vegas area and back.
Montezuma Castle National Monument. Nothing to do with Montezuma or a castle, of course, but a well-preserved ancestral pueblo cliff dwelling northeast of Prescott, Arizona in the Verde Valley.
We saw a lot of these older style windmills, and some were obviously still working.
(Incidentally, these two pictures also illustrate my tendency, discovered on this trip, to take pictures with the horizon slanting away to the right. My brain seems to feel more comfortable with it that way, so I have to consciously line up the horizon with the top of the camera frame. I was also interested to see that my dad's horizons slant to the left. Our vertical shots are also opposite directions. I am left-eye dominant and he is right-eye dominant, but I don't know if that makes a difference.)
...and the modern equivalent of the windmill. These turbines are HUGE. We saw a couple of turbine blades being transported on flatbed semi trucks, and normal sized trucks could not transport them. Also, each truck could only carry one or two blades. It was really astounding.
Objects left on the memorial fence at the Oklahoma City Memorial for the 1995 bombing. These are recently left objects; people still bring lots of things.
From desert and rocky mountains to... this green. Things smell different with humidity. It really does smell like home.
I think I need to do a separate post for animals and flowers.