September 15, 2013

• Epic Road Trip, Day 8, part 5

  

  This is a laid back post that won’t require many words, considering it’s part 5 and we’re still in the Fiery Furnace taking pictures left and right.

  

  Although I will tell you what Ranger Kait is saying here at this juniper. She explained that junipers will self-amputate their limbs in order to keep another limb alive in times of low water supply. So the gnarly dead shrub she has her hand on actually has a core inside directing what water it can get to the sole remaining limb. Kinda cool, even if I hate junipers!

  

  

  Here’s the Kissing Turtles. See them?

  

  

  This is the close-up of that distance shot on the right, above.

  

  This is some wonderful examples of tafoni.

  

  

  Sometimes we could walk between the fins. Other times, we couldn’t.

  

  

  

  

  Here’s the tour group squishing themselves in a canyon.

  

  

  And here we are at Surprise Arch. As in, Surprise, we can’t go any further on this tour! Time to head back, but only after a long rest and Ranger Talk… and getting several shots as bast as we could from directly beneath it.

  

  

  

  See that silver of blue, the very, very thin one just to the left of the shadow, but before the sun hits the rock? This rock counts as an arch.

  

  This is how it looks more straight-on, the arch you see has that sliver of blue off to the right between the layers of rock. Weird, huh?

  

  

  The crack in the rock I’m straddling went very deep. We tossed some sand down it and we could here it falling for quite a while.

  

  

  

  

  More hoodoos! Aren’t they colorful?

  

  Then, sadly, we were back to the beginning, my kids said a sad farewell to their new best friend Ranger Kait, I got one last shot, this one of the info board at the entrance/exit to the Fiery Furnace, and then we photographed our way home….which is yet another post.

  

  • 9:13 pm
  • 1 Comment