The Green Rover 's scrap book of pictures taken along the way

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In the four corners area September 2008. These pictures are from a 27 day trip of which I was accompanied by Linus Tremaine & Nikkie for 2 weeks.
I wrote a journal for this trip but there are a lot of pictures that didn't fit into the journal, several of which are being posted here.

Below are pictures taken in Nevada's Valley of Fire State Park in September 2008

This hill side like so many here is full of tiny caves and whimsical rock shapes. One could almost imagine a large fairy city

Someone got to see things in these rocks and name the rocks for the brochures.  I decided to name this one Tyrannosaurus Rex rock.  To me the darker one near the middle looks like a Tyrannosaurus standing facing to the left with his head turned to the right, looking over our right shoulder.

Light reflecting into a small cave

A cave with three openings.  It looks like the wind and those little stones are trying to carve a fourth.

As so we come to the end of my Valley of Fire pictures ... For this trip.  This park is definitely worth a revisit!

Zion National park September 2008

I tend to think of Zion as 2 parks.  The park shown above is a deep river canyon. You tour the bottom of the canyon in a tram, get a history from the tram driver, stop at designated places, take hikes along designated trails, camp or stay at the lodge.  The other Zion is the one shown below.  The park above the canyon with its stratified sandstone surface.  Personally I've always preferred the highlands of the park to the canyon.

As always, show me naked dark twisting branches against an interesting contrasting background and I HAVE to take a picture.

The sandstone cliffs of Zion have distinct strata some of which is more porous than others. Rain the falls on the tops of the cliffs and soaks into the sandstone slowly seeps down through the stone until it hits a boundary of less porous sandstone.  It flows along the top of the sandstone until it reaches the face of a cliff and weeps out of the rock.  This picture shows the trail of water weeping out of a sandstone barrier level.  This process takes several hundreds of years, so what is seeping out is rain that fell about a thousand years earlier.

The rain that falls here, becomes the weeping walls near the bottom of the Zion canyon about a thousand years later.

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