Not El Morro, part 2

Next up was supposed to be the second part of my trip to El Morro, the 1.5 mile hike over the top of the mesa and down the other side. It's glorious. I don't know how else to describe it. When I finished it I told the rangers at the visitor center it was the most beautiful hike I'd ever been on, but that observation may have been a function of my short memory. Today I have to say El Morro is as beautiful as any hike I've ever been on, because yesterday I hiked the Tepees to Blue Mesa trail at Petrified Forest again, my third time, and I don't think it was ever more breathtaking.

On Thursday afternoon a couple of friends came to visit from New York. One had been to the park far back in geologic time, and the other had never been here, so I gave them the nickel tour, all 27 miles from north to south. We stopped at the pullout at Tepees (Yes, that's how it's spelled. I keep wanting to correct it.) and headed down about a half-mile former road leading back to a parking area. It's long been closed but the old road is still visible and leads right back to the trail head.

If you follow the link above you'll see that it's recommended for experienced hikers only, so woo hoo!! I guess that makes me experienced. The first two times I took the hike was right after a group of teenagers had regraded, chopped steps, shored up crumbling areas, and generally made it a little easier to navigate. The weather has undone some of their work, though, and the trail was dicey in spots. I wished I had my hiking poles more than once.

The trail is a little longer than a mile with a 200-foot elevation gain and loss. There are a couple of sections that are knife-edged tracks no more than a foot wide, several areas covered in gravel as slippery as ice, and one or two where the edge of the trail has eroded down a steep ravine, leaving only inches to creep across. It was great!

The Civilian Conservation Corps had a significant presence here in the 1930s. They constructed buildings, bridges, roads, and a waterline about 13 miles long. I've seen a photo of one man after another, standing in a ditch, each with a shovel in hand. They were digging a trench for water to be pumped from the Puerco River to the Rainbow Forest at the south end of the park. The CCC also built the Tepees-Blue Mesa trail from 1933-1937 as a general-population trail but it was closed in 1955. Just last year it was reopened for adventurous hikers and it's so worth the effort.

Within the park, the layers of the Chinle Formation, from fluvial (river-related) deposits, include the Blue Mesa Member, the Sonsela Member, the Petrified Forest Member, and the Owl Rock Member.

The Blue Mesa Member consists of thick deposits of grey, blue, purple, and green mudstones and minor sandstone beds. This unit is best exposed in the Tepees area of the park. The Blue Mesa Member is approximately 220-225 million years old, making it the oldest exposed area here.

Think of it. The terrain I was crossing was once inhabited by pre-dinosaur amphibians, both herbivores and carnivores.

Probably the park's most famous fossil is Chindesaurus, coming from the Navajo word chindi, meaning ghost or evil spirit, and the Greek word sauros, meaning lizard. It was discovered in 1985, and just the other day I found a couple of photographs showing it being lifted out of the desert, jacketed in plaster and slung under a helicopter.

If you have a hard time remembering Chindesaurus, just call it Gertie. Everyone here will know what you mean. She dates back about 216 million years.

You get to the top of the mesa and think, it's all downhill from here! I have it made! Let me say, HA! The slipperier, steeper, and narrower part was yet to come. Let them smile; it will go away soon enough.

Baby hoodoos.

 Preadolescent  hoodoos.

 

It's hard to wrap my brain around geologic time: each of these layers could represent tens of millions of years.

Nearly the end of the trail. No compound fractures, no air evacuation needed.

Just under half a mile to go, a few steps away from the paved Blue Mesa loop trail, to get to our patiently waiting driver. Without him we'd have had to turn around and hike the trail back to our starting point. It's a good thing he always travels with his iPad and is a rare person in that he's never bored. 

Smiling once again. We all earned it.

One or two of my four readers have said they wish they could see the photos I post here in a larger format. I'm going to start tossing many of them up on Flickr as well, where you can magnify to your heart's content, and see all the flaws that you can't see here. It might take a day or so, but they'll show up there.

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Quote of the day:

You're off to great places.
Today is your day.
Your mountain is waiting,
So get on your way.
                                   (Dr. Seuss)

El Morro, part 1

As promised (threatened?), the photos from El Morro National Monument:

El Morro is a cuesta, a long formation gently sloping upward and dropping off abruptly at one end.

It lies on an ancient trade route between Albuquerque and Zuni, a journey of 150 miles that could take nine or ten days. It had one big attraction for travelers: a sizable pool of fresh water filled by rain runoff and snowmelt.

Sandwiched between the upward pressure from underground forces and the weight of newer rock above, since eroded, the sandstone has developed cracks that gradually weathered into long vertical joints like these. The rock is called Zuni Sandstone, about 170 million years old, and held together by clay between the sand grains  It was never buried so deeply that the sand grains were squeezed tightly, fusing them.

This magnificent Ponderosa Pine was a sentinel at the beginning of the trail to Inscription Rock.

The soft Zuni Sandstone proved to be the perfect medium for carving names and messages. Because the clay is the only thing holding the stone together, scratching easily dislodges the grains from the rock.

 There are more than 2000 inscriptions and petroglyphs here.

This elegant inscription was carved by E. Penn. Long of Baltimore,  Maryland, a member of a US Army expedition led by Lt. Edward F. Beale to find a wagon route from Fort Smith, Arkansas to the Colorado River. The group first passed this way in 1857 but they made their inscriptions in 1859.

Engle, below, was Beale's second-in-command. While the mission was exploring a new route, they were also testing the usefulness of camels, of all things, in crossing the deserts of the Southwest. I learned about the Camel Corps when I was in the area last year. The camels proved to be extremely well suited. They could carry 700-1000 pounds, go days without water, were even-tempered, and would eat anything, even cacti. They were much preferred over the mules that also made the trip, and Beale wrote highly of them. They may have been used instead of mules in further explorations, but the Civil War intruded into Western exploration and the project was abandoned. It's an interesting story.

P. (Peachy) Breckenridge was in charge of the 25 camels in Beale's 1857 expedition. He returned home to Virginia to fight in the Civil War and was killed in a skirmish in 1863.

Many Spaniards wrote pasó por aquí or passed through here. The inscription is translated as On the 25th of the month of June, of this year of 1709, Ramón García Jurado passed through here on the way to Zuni. From the time he moved to New Mexico as a colonist in 1693 until his death at the age of 80 in 1760, he was witness and participant in the Spanish settlement of New Mexico.

This one reads Pedro Romero passed though here on the 2nd of August, year of 1751. The darkening you see here is a misguided attempt at preservation work by early park managers. They darkened the inscriptions with graphite (#2 pencils) so they would be more legible and last longer. The practice continued into the 1930s.

Here are petroglyphs of bighorn sheep. The jagged line to the left makes me think of a river.

Not many women left their mark but here is one exception. Miss America Frances Baley and her sister Amelia were part of a wagon party headed from Missouri to California in 1858. The group followed the route newly surveyed by the US Army, at the time known as Beale's Wagon Road. Just east of the Colorado River, 800 Mojave Indians attacked the 60 Anglo travelers. The Mojave killed nine and injured 17 while suffering 87 casualties themselves. The caravan retreated to New Mexico to wait out the winter in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. The Baley sisters eventually made it to Fresno County, California.

R.H. Horton became adjutant-general of California after the Civil War. In the early years of the war, the California Column, as it was known, was sent to New Mexico to reinforce Federal troops expecting Confederate hostilities. He may have made his inscription as he returned to California.

These inscriptions were made by a crew sent to work on the Santa Fe rail line. Looks like a bunch of engineers, doesn't it?

There was no descriptive label for this carving and I can't make out what's carved inside what looks like a basket handle. Someone went to a lot of work. Were they interrupted, or did they just run out of steam partway through?

Lt. J.H. Simpson, an engineer for the army, and R.H. Kern, a Philadelphia artist employed by the Army as a topographer, were the first English-speaking people to make a record of Inscription Rock. They spent two days copying the inscriptions and petroglyphs and their report shows that not a single English inscription could be found on the rock. Despite their careful duplications of others' inscriptions, note they misspelled their own carving with the word "insciption."

After El Morro was designated a National Monument in 1906, early managers tried to preserve and protect the records in a variety of ways. One planted yuccas that still grow along the trail to keep visitors at a distance. In the 1920s the first Superintendent decided to erease any carvings that were added after 1906 because they were graffiti and illegal. Large smooth areas are visible where they were erased. This is one, close-up example.

I was nearing the end of the inscriptions as I approached this cliff. The photo looks like a painting to me, but that's really how it looked.

A short way on was this view of one of the vertical splits in the rock common at El Morro, and where I stop for today. Next time, a hike over the mesa.

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Thought of the day:

Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you. (Shannon L. Adler)

Los Gigantes

Yesterday a friend and I were making our way to El Morro National Monument in New Mexico, and avoided the interstate by taking secondary roads. (You'll note that the abbreviation for El Morro is ELMO, but no fuzzy little red Muppets there.) We passed through an intersection in Witch Well, Arizona with this building on the corner, the only structure anywhere around. It always makes me wonder what are they thinking?! to see a tavern/liquor store with a drive up window.

The road took us though the Zuni reservation and a couple of really small communities but it's mostly wide open country. Beautiful, wide open country, and when I spied hoodoos off to the north we made a u-turn and traveled down a brand-new dirt road that was smoother than many highways I've been on.

A little farther down the road was this sign. I don't know what 32 Los Gigantes means - are there 32 hoodoos (giants)? Is it an address on the road? I don't know and a quick Google didn't turn anything up other than to say they're in Cibola County, New Mexico, which I already knew. They're so close to the Zuni reservation I have to believe they have a religious or cultural significance, but the new road gives me a bad feeling the area is being developed. Or maybe they're just geologic formations and nothing more.

I'm including a near-duplicate of the first photo simply because I like the dip in the mountains in the background.

Hoodoos are also called tent rocks, fairy chimneys, and earth pyramids. They're tall, thin spires of rock that protrude from the bottom of an arid drainage basin or badland. They range from 5 to 150 feet tall and typically consist of relatively soft rock topped by  harder, less easily-eroded stone that protects each column from the elements. Thank you, Wikipedia.

I can see where the name Los Gigantes came from, especially when seeing the figure below. I think these formations would be spectacular in glowing, early-morning light.

The photos from El Morro are all processed and are coming up next. Wow. What a place.

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Quote of the day:
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (Sigmund Freud)

1/3 of the trifecta

In Lafayette, Louisiana which, incidentally, has worse drivers than Maryland and that's saying a lot, I hit the trifecta - a cathedral, cemetery, and museum all belonging to the parish of St. John the Evangelist. The cemetery and museum photos still await processing but I finished the Cathedral last night.

The Cathedral is the third church built on the site donated by Jean Mouton in 1821, when Lafayette was the town of Vermilionville. In fact, there is a sign in French and English outside the Cathedral that calls it St~ Jean du Vermilion. The cathedral was built in the style of Dutch Romanesque in 1916, and is on the National Registry of Historic Properties. (And another one bites the dust!)

The nave consists of a series of arches supported by columns, a blind story, and a clerestory.  Oil paintings of Christ the King and Apostles decorate the groin-vaulted ceiling. Flambeau stained glass, made in Munich, Germany, portrays the life of Saint John the Evangelist, the patron of the Cathedral. His red cloak usually identifies him.  As I worked on the stained glass photos I noticed a big difference in the processing effects from the other hundreds and hundreds of stained glass photos I've done. Increasing or decreasing highlights and shadows tended to act the same as if I was increasing or decreasing exposure; the entirety of the photo was affected, not just the highlights or shadows. It was difficult to get definition in faces, for example, or in the dove's wings, below. These windows don't feel like my best work, that's for sure. I tried looking up flambeau stained glass and found nothing other than a few references to it as a type of glass, but nothing as to the manufacture. Flambeau means torch and that might be a hint, but I found nothing. It looks like this window was donated by the Happy Death Society. You'd maybe have to be Catholic to understand. I worked a long time on this one, trying to correct the perspective - to get it to stand up straight and be even side to side, and this was the best I could do. It was taken from far below and off to one side and the original was really skewed. Believe it or not, this is an improvement. I include it so you can take a look at St. John, to Jesus' left. Have you seen The DaVinci Code? Sorry I can't make it bigger.  Another window with better luck on the face. There are many windows in the cathedral, but just one more. Dripping blood. Fourteen mosaic Stations of the Cross line the walls of the two side aisles. This is the only photo I took. The Italian marble main altar displays mosaic representations of wheat and grapes, symbolizing the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The center mosaic, a mother pelican feeding her young, is also a Eucharistic symbol. Additionally, four stone medallions, as revealed in Ezekiel 10:14, depict the four Evangelists: Matthew by a human head; Mark by the head of a lion; Luke by the head of an ox and John by the head of an eagle. The evangelists' symbols are also represented on the podium in the sanctuary. The eagle for John: Located to the left of the sanctuary, the Blessed Sacrament altar is one of the most sacred places in the Cathedral. The tabernacle has the Ciborium (a receptacle for holding the consecrated Eucharist) inside and has two gilt-wood angels as its guards. Above this altar, a wooden crucifix hangs between the alpha and the omega. Priests, during the Sacrament of Baptism, use the marble baptismal font. Above the altar, the Holy Spirit is symbolized by a gilt metal sculpture of a dove and sun rays. On the altar are the repositories for holy oils used in the Cathedral during Baptism, Confirmation, Ordinations, and Anointing of the Sick. Behind the altar, a marble chair is fashioned with columns, Corinthian capitals, and a miter motif. A multi-colored mosaic of the first bishop of the Diocese's coat of arms decorates the upper portion of the chair. The Latin name of this chair is cathedra, which is the origin of the English word Cathedral. Only the local Ordinary (Bishop) uses the chair when he celebrates or presides at Mass or a special liturgical event. The Casavant Frères, Limitée organ was installed in the l985 renovation.  The organist came in to play while I was there.  I liked the shooting star effect on the ceiling. The side aisles don't have the glory of the main, but they usually have their own subdued beauty. One final photo out of many more, the gate guarding the stairs to the choir loft.

Many thanks to the parish for the copy & paste, unauthorized use of the text on their website, the plagiarism of which gave me no end of problems formatting this post, and I still can't get it right.

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		Thought of the day:
Ain't no such thing as a free lunch. (Anon.)