Astonishing

Bear with me. I’ve returned from a dozen days in Arizona and Utah, birding and ogling the utterly spectacular scenery. I have over a thousand pictures to sort through. Here are a few to whet your appetite and set the stage for future posts (and be sure to open them up and let them bloom in all their pixilisciousness):
Sunset and Sunrise on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. “Grand” is a major understatement: the plunge into geological time here dwarfs human comprehension.
Remains of a tree just barely holding onto the edge of Bryce Canyon. The Canyon was in and out of fog while we were there, revealing and obscuring the hoodoos. Said Mr. Bryce about the place, “It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow.”Antelope Canyon: it started to rain while we were inside, and the rain began to pour down the narrow sides of this slot in the earth, illustrating how water has, and continues to, sculpt it, and showing how fast a real flash flood could fill the place to a depth well over our heads in very little time.Monument Valley, Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii to the Navajo, in the rain of twilight. The foreground is silvered with washes suddenly running with water. Rain God Mesa lived up to its name, with waterfalls pouring off its top. It rained a fair amount during the trip, considering it is the arid southwest, but we managed to miss all the flooding in southern Utah and northern Arizona and were always well to the west of the terrible situation in New Mexico and Colorado. (Signs warning about flash flooding and forest fires competed for our attention throughout.)Canyon de Chelly National Monument in the Navajo Nation, with the famous ancestral Puebloan “White House” ruins way down there, underneath a frozen waterfall of desert varnish. “Canyon de Chelly,” it turns out, basically means canyon of the canyon; Chelly is pronounced “shay.” People have been living in the canyon for five thousand years, and still do. Ted Henry, a silversmith/jewelry-maker we met in the Visitor Center here, showed us the portrait Ansel Adams took of his mother in 1942.
Big Lake, in the White Mountains of Arizona.