Thursday, August 09, 2007

Keeper up Close



Blackbear Bosin created the Keeper back in 1974 and gave it to the city of Wichita. It sits at the confluence of the rivers on land connected to the Mid-America All Indian Center.
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Keeper of the Plains



The new Keeper of the Plains environment is just awesome. To give the Keeper scale in this picture, you can see that there's a human down to the right of the plinth. In the foreground (as it were) is the Arkansas River and behind the Keeper is the Little Arkansas. Off to the left you can see one of the two pedestrian bridges that lead from the walkways on either bank to the Keeper's park.
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Monday, August 06, 2007

Edge of the Flow



We think that this field of flowers is happy here because the water drains off the rock, giving the field both more water and maybe some additional nutrients. Pretty, anyway!
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La Ventana Arch



This puppy is about 18 miles south of I-40 on the east side of El Malpais National Monument, on the opposite side of the lava flows from El Morro. It has a 135' span, if I recall correctly, and is an arch rather than a bridge because it wasn't created by a stream. This is the first arch of the trip, but not the last.
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Long message...



The inscription is faint and the light was really bad when I took this one so I've tweaked it some. It's still mostly illegible, but at least you can see that someone took the time to carve out a whole paragraph. Way impressive.

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1692, 1858



Side by side and so far apart...
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Americans Passed By...



What a difference in the carving...
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Spanish Inscription



One of the earlier written inscriptions.
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Petroglyphs



El Morro's first human marks are petroglyphs.
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The Pool at El Morro



12' deep, 200,000 gallons of water when full.
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El Morro, Inscription Rock

El Morro is along the trail from Zuni to Acoma Pueblo. Coronado passed by here. The pool at the base of the rock was the only reliable water for 30 miles around, so it was a popular stop for survey parties, cavalry troops and anyone else passing through.
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Sunday, June 17, 2007

From the north side of the canyon

This looks south from a point almost to the rim of the canyon. Unfortunately, it doesn't show just how far down that water is, nor how precipitous the drop is underneath my feet. Both were "very".





This one shows the highways on the right, with some idea of how the highway on the north side particularly is pinned to the side of the canyon. The far distant part of the highway is actually on the south side. It just happens to more or less align in this picture.

Upstream from US-60

To the east, the Salt's canyon is even more impressive as it has cut deeply into the Mogollon Rim of the Colorado Plateau.
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The Grand Canyon of the Salt River

Other places this would be a National Park. Here, it's just another great feature of the state. The Salt River is about 2,000' below the rim here and US-60 crosses the river to go from Globe to Show Low. It's 9 miles by the highway from rim to rim, full of twisting descents and climbs. There are lots of pullouts to allow drivers to rubberneck, which is good, since the scenery demands it.
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Miami museum

This truck is sitting in the bed of another, larger version. Behind it is a mountain made of mine debris. It's altogether an impressive demonstration of what humans can do. It also begs the question of whether this is something we should be doing.

Miami, in this case, is between Mesa and Globe on US-60.
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