An Ode to the Painted Desert

Dazzled. I know what you're thinking: Another desert post?? Guys, I can't help it. The desert calls to me, it fascinates me, it makes my heart happy in a way nowhere else does. And it is different anywhere you go. You can have the soaring red and white cliffs of southern Utah, the golden sand dunes of central Colorado, the parched scrub-brush lands of Wyoming, and many other variations of desert, which is only a broad definition of a place that doesn't get a lot of moisture. And, of course, there's the Painted Desert.

The Painted Desert, a vast region stretching through central Arizona, is partially protected in various national parks, monuments, and state parks, such as Petrified Forest National Park and Wupatki National Monument. In these parks are prime examples of the exposed clay and sand that give the Painted Desert its name. Blues and purples in colors that seem to be from an artist's brush sweep across your field of vision, until you crest the next bluff and look down on mesas banded with corals and pinks. Deep burgundy hills give way to the green of oxidized copper, while whites and blacks wash through everything.

It's a toss up for me, whether I prefer to see the desert from among the hills and dunes or from above. Up high, on a bluff or plateau, you can see how the desert expands around you, the colors blending in to each other, bleeding from one shade to the next. Among the hills, though, along the canyon bottoms and the washes, you get the banding of the colors, the lines that separate one color from the next, and each individual grain has a unique shade to it. Oh, and the light! How the light plays on the desert can change its mood and colors from dawn until dusk. One hour you can have glowing golden walls, the next they are a flat orangish-tan, and then again they could be streaked dark with the moisture from a rare desert shower. You just can't get that anywhere else.

So yes, this is *another* desert post. And no, I'm not going to apologize for it. There's plenty more where that came from.