Mar. 4, Friday, Valley of Fire

Today we went to Valley of Fire state park. It's about 10 miles NW of us.

Since we got there about noon we decided to have lunch.
These chipmunk-looking critters are called "Antelope Ground Squirrels".


This one is nibbling on some plant matter, but...

They seem well-acquainted with the custom of human picnicking!

Etched into the black surface on the red sandstone are indian Petroglyphs.

They're abundant throughout the park.

We did some off-trail exploring. It's pretty easy to climb around on this stuff.

The sandstone grips your shoes and makes good footing.

There are bowls in the rock where rainwater pools and can be there days after the last rain.

They're called "tanks".

Steven, taking a breather in the cool shade.

It's like a huge fantastic maze.

We had fun crawling through some of the holes!

Steven thought it would be a great place to play hide-and-seek!

We loved hiking through the narrows.

It was fun, even when we had to scramble over rocks!

In the middle of the picture, on the rock behind the branches, is a lizard!

They're very fast. Most of them are out of sight before I even have my camera up!

Looking through a cave-hole and out the other side!

Looking down some steps chiseled into the sandstone.

More petroglyhs. They're chiseled into the rock, as opposed to "Pictoglyphs" that are painted onto the rocks. You find the petroglyphs carved into the hard black substance on the sheer sandstone bluffs.

Some people think the petroglyphs were the way the indians communicated or left messages for each other, 4,000 years ago. I don't know how long ago they were made, but I've often wondered if it was mostly doodling while the people were camped in the area?

I can picture teenage boys hanging in daring positions on the walls of the canyons,

chipping these images into the rock!

Nearby would be girls pretending not to be impressed!
But I'm not saying I'm right and they're wrong!

In places like this you can see the swirls left by water over the years.

Headed down yet another canyon.

Cheaper to just blacktop over the knolls rather than grade them out when they built the road?

These rocks were about 5' high, jumbled in a pile.

This bush was hanging from the rock and blooming happily!

You can see it's stem going up and into the hole in the rock!

A close-up of the pretty blossoms.

The shadows were lengthening then, so we rode the motorcycle back to camp.

We cooked some dinner and watched a library DVD on our portable DVD player.

There are a lot of daily chores we don't document because it would be boring, such as the meals we make, often from scratch and usually from dehydrated food. We wash laundry a few times a week so we don't get overwhelmed by large amounts of clothes at one time to wring out by hand. But by the same token, we wear durable clothes and wear them more days than people in town would, so the laundry doesn't accumulate as fast. We take water-saving rinse-off showers using tepid water in the solar shower toward the end of most days. Occasionally we have to take the tank of the port-a-potty to the outhouse building a mile away and dispose of it's contents, something definitely NOT going to make it into the pictoral record of this blog! That's not to say that "business" is not attended to behind a bush sometimes, too! Dishes are washed a lot more than you see pictures of on here. We take our toothbrushes outside with a cup of water for brushing our teeth. The throw-rugs are shook out each day and the floor swept, since we track sand in and out all the time. We've started leaving the solar panel chained and locked to the trailer so we don't have to put it away every time we leave. Steven carries the deep-cycle battery (heavy!) outside each morning after we're done with lights and computers and hooks it to the solar panel. In the evening he carries it back in and hooks the inverter to it so we have power for lights, computers, and DVD player. The portable DVD player only uses 10 watts and has a 7" screen, which is great in the uhaul.

When we take off on the motorcycle, or bicycles when we'll be on the highway, the dog (Odie) is hooked to her leash by the back door inside the uhaul, so she can't climb up on the table or bed. We can't leave her tied up outside at the mercy of coyotes and who-knows-what. We can't leaver her loose when we leave because she would try to follow us. The cat has free range in the uhaul while we're gone, and that's worked out good so far.