Hey, Dave, what are you doing?: Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau (Arizona day arba)

Just enough space between the bags to stretch comfortably, and I slept like a baby. A baby that was freezing his little baby nuts off. The problem was that my my big comfy sleeping bag is so big that it was essentially completely open, no matter how hard I tried to lie on its corners. Brrr.

I drove back into Flagstaff to get some tourist info. It was closed for Thanksgiving, but check out this El Dorado in the parking lot! Then it's out East, towards Meteor Crater and Petrified Forest.

The plateau just drove me wild. So flat. So BIG.

Just driving that perfectly straight road for miles and miles.

This one turned out nice.

Meteor Crater. It isn't a picture, it's a big hole in the wall. You can even see a bit of sky above the wall. Pretty cool, isn't it?

The Crater. 50,000 years ago, a small piece of rock slammed into this place at a rather high velocity. About 150 years ago, some white man passed by and said "mine". As far as I could understand, this place is actually private property. I've wanted to meet The Crater in person for a long time, and it was just as odd as I had hoped.

Not much to do on a cold day at MC (or on most other days), so let's stitch a few panoramas and hit the road. The stitching software the came with my camera is worth exactly what I paid for it, but these still came out nice. When you take these multiple-shot panoramas, you too concentrated on getting good overlap between shots etc. to see what's going on, and you sometimes find interesting stuff in there when you get home. Like this girl, who came out of nowhere and blocked my view of the crater rim. Is it spelled "hoe" or just "ho"? In other news, those pants really should be retired. They used to have a color.

These pictures aren't short, they're just wide as hell. Worth a click?

Time for the "hit the road" bit. The I-40 is officially my favorite road ever.

This was supposed to be a 360 panorama stitched from 15 pictures and show just how big and flat the landscape was, but the damn software, again. Click the left side to get an idea. Anyway: Wheeeee!

You can't take a sharp picture while driving, but you can park on the side and run to the middle for the picture. And nearly get squashed by a drunk tourist.

Petrified forest. It used to be all forest, but now it's all petrified. Get it? The story goes something like this: several millions of years ago, the forest that covering this area
was flattened by a (volcanic?) explosion and soon covered by (volcanic?) ash. A few million years of rain and pressure produced this amazing landscape that looks like wood, but is in fact pure stone.

B-I-Z-A-R-R-E.

It's not that petrified wood is so hard to comprehend, I mean, we've all woken up with - nevermind. But it's so tree-colored that your monkey brain insists on calling it "wood", and is quite surprised when you get closer, and see something like this.

But you know the old saying: He who gets to the big park after noon, has to rush through it.

That perfect blue in the sky. We wants it.

Every dark spot in the distance is a petrified log. It it weirder because they're stone, or because there isn't a live tree in 100 miles?

A crow! One of 6 animals I can recall seeing on this trip.

Fox footprints. Maybe not a fox, but certainly non-feline - see the nail prints?

The painted desert is not the most colorful I've seen, but definitely the most goes-on-forever I've seen.

That's my Jeep.

And that's me.

And that's crow number deux (make that 7 animals).

And maybe it is the prettiest ever.

In ancient times, vandalism was just as serious a problem as it was now. But since this Sinagua graffiti is almost 1,000 year old, it is now considered art. I thoroughly dug this. Click for more detail.

It's 5 o'clock. Do you you where you sunset madness is? I got mine right here.

There's an old car skeleton where Route 66 used to cross the park. Here are but a few of the million pictures I took there.

If you made it this far, you will be rewarded by seeing the best picture of this trip. I'm especially proud of it because I actually took time to compose it and knew exactly how I wanted it to come out.

Elements of a perfect camping night: Gas lantern, tea on the gas stove laptop for documenting the day's experiences, a bag of chocolate chips, and temperatures so low that I just turned everything off and jumped into the relative safety of my sleeping bag.