Blathr Wayne Lorentz

Any minute now Matt Damon is going to pop up and ask to be rescued.

You can tell this is a “dangerous area” and that “this is not a trail” by the five million bootprints going around the warning sign.

When I load photos of Valley of Fire into programs like Lightroom, they automatically crank the color down 15 notches because the programmers at Adobe in Seattle canʼt conceive of a place that isnʼt as humid and grey as where they live.

Seeing a cactus skeleton is a good way to understand how much water they store.

The large black things are hare droppings. The tiny black dots that cover everything is called cryptobiotic soil: “cyanobacteria that cement the soil together. It provides nutrients for plants and seeds, and increases the soil topography which allows greater moisture absorption. This crust is only a few millimeters thick and is easily destroyed when walked on. Recovery can take between 7 and 250 years. Please donʼt walk on it.”

Pay no attention to the 200-foot-tall rock monsters crawling out of the chasm.

“You got your limestone in my sandstone!”

“You got your sandstone in my limestone!”

Two great rocks that rock great together.

Ribbons of quartz separate the layers of sandstone.

Bighorn sheep tracks, followed by big-ass cat tracks. Lunch is served

This may be the only occasion when a tortoise has been described as having a wild life.

The speed limit is 25 MPH. Itʼll take a year to get over that mountain!

I took the Hasselblad out to the Valley of Fire today. My main lens is just about toast because so much sand gets into it on these trips.

Stag party at the Valley of Fire on a Saturday evening.

(Theyʼre actually rams, not stags, but I couldnʼt think of anything to say for “ram.”)

Darcie spent 20 minutes communing with Fred the Chuckwalla.