A view into the badlands -- from the top of the hiking trail.
Another -- I'll hike to the bottom of this valley. It's not as far down as it looks.
This is the paved part of the hike - looking back up the trail from half-way down --
Further along the park tour, you come into an area populated with what the park people call The Tepees. I call 'em the Double Dees. The distinct white layers are sandstone and the cap of the Tepees is clay. Dark layers are caused by a high carbon content, the darker reds are iron-stained siltstone and the reddish clay bases are stained by iron oxide (hematite).
For you train buffs -- a passing load of freight. I'm on a bridge over the tracks (duh!). There is a LOT of freight movement done by train out here. Every town I've stayed in has had a rail line running through town. Most have many long freights passing through town every day - and night - when the engineers apparently enjoy blowing the whistles a little more than during the day!
The Painted Desert - actually, there is little or no physical differentiation between the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. From what I could see, the Petrified Forest occupies part of the Painted Desert - anyhow, this is a shot at the north end of the park.
Another --
A friend of mine - If I didn't know better, I'd have thought this was the same one following me from stop to stop - every time I pulled into a parking area, there he was right in front of me - eerie. This is a Common Raven, Corvus corax, uncommon in the east, but quite common out here. You distinguish the Raven from a Crow mainly by size - An American Crow is about 17" long and the Common Raven is about 24" long. You can also distinguish the two by their calls. The Crow's is the familiar caw caw while the Raven's is more of a single drawn out croak.
HTML
tutorial. Here, my page background starts to repeat. My background, the
spiral notebook, is 21 pixels high by 1390 pixels wide (11kb). When a
browser resolves the background, it "tiles" the image to cover the whole
page area. Normally, mine just tiles the image vertically, but because
I specified a table for this image (and this tutorial) that at 1840 pixels
wide is wider than my background image, it also tiled the image horizontally
as well. So you see the notebook spiral start again.