The Petrified Forest

Mom and my new car demanded that I take a road trip. I obeyed them last week.  The car got a bit more than 52 miles per gallon on the way to Los Alamos but only 51 mpg on the way home.

On the way to New Mexico, I stopped for the night at the Motel 6 in Holbrook, Arizona. I got up the next morning and headed over to the south entrance of the Petrified Forest National Park. The winter hours went into effect that day so I had to wait until 8:00 to get in.

I took pictures.

Here is an obligatory picture of petrified logs along the Long Logs Trail. I passed a man who had his very serious camera on a tripod set to take a picture of the end of a log. He was woking on his shot for a long time as I approached and was still working on it as I headed back to the car. I took artsy close-ups, too, but I won't bother you with those. Mine didn't take an hour each.

One of my favorite gadgets is Photoshop Elements' Photomerge^TM Panorama feature. You take many pictures that overlap a bit and it pastes them together into one, long picture.  I should have read the tutorial about how to use it most effectively.  I should have shot in portrait orientation rather than landscape. I sometimes used a tripod but didn't for this picture. It's a kind of amphitheater with petrified logs strewn around. Click on it to enlarge it. (Blogger limits the size of the pictures. The original is much larger.)

I drove up to the Crystal Forest. This is the view of a hill you see as you approach the Crystal Forest's parking lot. It struck me as pretty. (What in the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert isn't pretty?)

Here are petroglyphs on the Newspaper Rock. I wish doo-doo heads wouldn't add their scratchings to it.

I took some more panoramas in the Painted Desert part of the park. I used the tripod to keep the camera facing the same altitude for each shot so it worked better than the Long Logs shot. Here is the view from the Lacey Point overlook.

And here is the view from the Kachina Point overlook. I used an additional wide angle lens and aimed the camera into the valley rather than at the horizon. The wall at the bottom of the picture either is straight or curves around the parking lot. It doesn't really bow away from us.

The trip through the park is a great way to spend four hours and only ten dollars. Everybody should do it when they have the opportunity.