BlathrWayne Lorentz

A day in the Valley of Fire with Darcie.

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.

Darcie spent 20 minutes communing with Fred the Chuckwalla.

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.”)

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.

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

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

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

Ribbons of quartz separate the layers of sandstone.

“You got your limestone in my sandstone!”

“You got your sandstone in my limestone!”

Two great rocks that rock great together.

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

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.”

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.

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

One room of a 1,400 room Anasazi complex. Thereʼs another one a mile away thatʼs 1,100 rooms; but archaeologists re-buried that one after studying it to prevent it from being damaged.

The Anasazi had all kinds of minerals from copper to aluminum to uranium out the wazoo, but never learned to make metal tools, or even arrowheads.

Here we see Darcie holding a piece of pottery she found at an abandoned Anasazi city. A few days later we learned that the Navajo believe touching Anasazi pottery shards is super duper bad luck.

There really should be a sign or something.

Strange. They have the same sign at my lawyerʼs office.

The shard of pottery Darcie found was painted sometime between the Battle of Hastings and the Black Death.

That doesnʼt explain why sheʼs holding it like a diseased frog.

I wonder what a “Human” icon would look like, if snakes could make signs.

If the menʼs room has mood lighting, you might be in an Arizona state park. Or a Hungarian disco. One or the other.

Every ore has its cart.