Installment #6 - Retirement Trip

3-8-06
Yes we’re back on the road again after a spot of illness (Tony) kept us in Quartzsite for a few days. We bimbled along the highways in a north westerly direction to Flagstaff, Arizona, to an altitude of 7500 ft. which lowered the temperature considerably and visited the Sunset Crater National Park – the raw leading edge of a massive lava flow which cooled and has been left alone for many, many years – spooky. This, like many other National Parks, is not a small isolated area but goes on for miles and miles with numerous volcanoes at the eastern end of the Grand Canyon.
Next we saw another wonder, the massive meteor crater near Winslow, Arizona. Wow, this thing is huge measuring nearly one mile diameter.
Today by stark contrast we visited the Petrified Forest also in Arizona. Again this covered a very large area, a 37 mile drive, where we saw weird and wonderful rock formations that were created 250 million years ago when this area was far closer to the equator, and hundreds and hundreds of petrified logs just lying there over acres and acres – the larger logs weigh several tens of tons each, because they’ve been slowly (this if for outlaw Jim) been impregnated with silica from overlying volcanic ash which has reacted with the cellulose in the wood tissues thus crystallising and producing a massive increase in weight and a dramatic colour spectrum.
Tomorrow we hope to see and photograph the world famous staircase in Sant Fe New Mexico, where the spiral stairway was cut, carved and built by a no-name carpenter many years ago without a central spine or datum axis.