Local Color

Another Washington Post article about a place I once called home:  Arizona's Painted Desert which covers much of northeast Arizona.  The article is a travel piece that also includes  nearby Petrified Forest National Park and Burro Creek, in west central Arizona, and Red Rock National Conservation Area in Nevada.  I traveled through the Painted Desert many times when I lived on the Navajo Nation.  Before that I visited the area with friends on one of my first excursions into northeast Arizona.  A few years later I hiked across Lithodendron Wash in the Painted Desert to camp atop Pilot Knob.  The photos and descriptions in the article are all very familiar.

The article captures the unique feel of fall in northeast Arizona.  The change of season there is palpable but the change is more in the light--the angle of the sun and its duration--than leaf color.  What little foliage does change color highlights rather than defines its surroundings.  The primary source of color are cottonwood trees along the various and by this time of years, mostly dry, water courses.  When the light is right, they blaze yellow against the desert reds, purples, blue-grays and tans.  The thick stand of cottonwoods that arch over the Canyon de Chelly National Monument campground glowed brightly under an early November full moon during my first visit there.