I’ve been reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire of late. It really is a fantastic book—my first experience with Abbey, who has long been on the intended reading list. It also is making me miss the Utah and Arizona desert landscapes. I have a soft spot for them in my heart, harkening back to the year I spent living in Arizona, from the summer of 1996 to 1997. I fell in love then and continue to love it today.
I thought I would be visiting Arizona again this year, at the beginning of April, but that plan has fallen through. Partly this is good, for a private reason, but it also partly is a shame, as my reading of Desert Solitaire has left me with a strong desire to see the desert again, even if it was to be a different part than the one Abbey is writing about.
I am a blessed person, though, and I have seen the areas that Abbey writes of, though certainly not as he saw them. Back in 2004, I took a long road trip through multiple National Parks, with the bulk of that trip spent in southern Utah, at Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon and Zion. Abbey has evoked memories of that trip multiple times.
In lieu of a visit to the desert—and in need of an update to this blog while I mull a lengthier post to be published, hopefully, by Monday—I place here for your enjoyment a few pictures from the Utah portion of that trip. These pictures don’t begin to do the landscape as much justice as Abbey’s words do, but they evoke my time actually there, within this landscape, amongst these rocks and cliffs and trees, and so they’ll work for now as a small echo of reality.
This is part one. Part two will come later.
The cliffs in Zion really are quite spectacular. I love the clouds in the sky that day, as well.
Mesa Arch in Canyonlands, the landscape stretched forever behind it.
A side shot of Navajo Arch. I find the erosion pattern reminiscent of musculature.
Some of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, looming against the sky. I love erosion.
Yet more hoodoos, extending off into the distance.
I just love this tree against the sky. I have a thing for cool trees framed against the sky.
Of The Hands 