Day 23: Painted Desert

Thursday, April 04, 1996
3148 miles
35° 07' 20" N / 109° 47' 29" W

A single bird awakes us at sunrise. The sky is overcast. We decide to do some more exploring without the packs and head down the canyon. The wind picks up again and we are soon immersed in a stormy sky.

The landscape is so unique and interesting down to the smallest detail, that we could spend forever walking through washes with cracked clay, eroded multi-colored hills, canyons filled with petrified logs and bleached animal bones and much more.

	Pottery shards arranged on a petrified tree trunk

On our way back to our packs, we scramble up a hill when Rebecca suddenly finds a pottery shard, which makes her very happy. Having a second look, she finds another one and another and another and soon we have a whole collection of fragments from about three or four different styles of pottery. We thoroughly photograph them and then throw them back and scatter them across the area where we found them.

Then we grab our packs and make our way across the Painted Desert back to where we started. Only when we get close to the trailhead, we start seeing more footprints other than our own and loose the feeling of complete solitude. Sometimes I have the feeling like walking over a painting or a work of art, afraid to destroy it with my inappropriate footprints.

	Storm front over the Painted Desert

Back at the car we take a last look across the place of our wanderings, head straight for the visitor center for our National Park hot dog, and then hit the Interstate. The showers around us are getting more numerous and we pass through a number of them until we reach Gallup.

This town still has the old Route 66 flavor (as far as we are qualified to tell) and so we decide to stay there. We find a motel from where we can hear the Santa Fe railroad and then go out for some Southwestern fare. It's Thursday and so it's sitcom night again.