Painted Deserts and Petrified Forests

Friday, April 30 for Saturday, April 24, 2021

As I write this, six days afterwards, I am dealing with another slow Internet connection while in a National Park Lodge. We're finding that not so good an experience, but more on that another time.

We started out the morning in Gallup, New Mexico, and headed to a town called Houck, Arizona. This town's claim to fame was the mythical Fort Courage, which was the home to "F Troop," the old TV show. There were a few things to see along the way to get there.

The cowboy needs a bit of explanation. He was originally on the top of a muffler shop, and you can see he was supposed to be holding something. It was a muffler. I guess the muffler shop went bust, so another company bought the structure, and he is now on top of John's Used Cars in Gallup, NM -- but without his muffler.

Finally, we made it to Arizona, a little place called Lupton.

The trading post was fun, and there were a few things to see in the anteroom, before entering the shop.

Leaving the trading post, we continued on Historic Route 66 from Lupton.

Our ultimate goal for that Saturday was ...

National Parks are all a bit different. This one pretty much made the visitor stop at the Visitor Center, and we did our "payment" into the park further on. (We have the lifetime senior pass.)

Randy thought these two little guys looked like Pokemon, so we took the picture for the grandsons.

The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest share the same park -- it is huge. The way it is laid out, the first part is Painted Desert, followed by Petrified Forest. The "trail" we followed was 28 miles long, with many turnouts along the way. We tend to stop at every turnout! We got to the park just before noon, and left it just before they closed at 5 PM. We were exhausted (again). We took the most pictures for one day (to this point) in those two areas. Obviously we will not share all the pictures, especially because there was fun at the end of the day, too.

We were pretty happy with the quality of the pictures we took, considering they are from an iPhone 8 and iPhone SE 2020. But as people say, and we will agree, pictures cannot do justice to what we saw. You won't hear me say this about too many things, but my life was changed by this experience. I will look at God's Nature differently from now on.

The vastness was part of it, the differences in "texture" of the landscape caused by erosion and growth of plants, the richness of the colors, all were astounding.

The building above was a rest stop, museum, and some other functions, and it was still closed due to COVID. You have probably picked up this is a recurring theme, especially for anything that is Government-run and operated.

One of the aspects that intrigued Randy was how the landscape changed and rock formations varied almost every time we turned a corner. You will see below even more variation further into the park.

Above is the Painted Desert car, which veered off Route 66 back in the 1930's, and it became too much trouble to recover it, so here it sits, 80 - 90 years later.

Unless you've been to this park in recent memory, you won't know that I went a bit out-of-order, because there were some rocky/boulder areas in between some of the pictures above, but I saved them out for a reason. I can't remember ever seeing petroglyphs / rock carvings, except in a museum. We saw some here.

Of course there were more, and it became a game to try to find them. There were information boards with a lot of help. The rocks and boulders were quite a ways off the road and path, so zooming in digitally helps show them.

I kept saying, when are we going to see petrified wood? When we finally got to the part of the park, it could be overwhelming in a different way.

After visiting the small museum in the visitor center at the other end of the park, we departed for Holbrook, AZ and our lodging for the night, Tee Pee Wigwam Village.

We found dinner, looked for any neon we could find, stopped in the lobby of the motel to gab a bit with the lady on duty, and called it a night.

Thanks for coming on this journey with us. At this point, we were getting pretty bushed from long days and a different bed every night, but the next morning kept bringing a new adventure. More to come.