Petrified Forest National Park

I’d been to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona several times over the last 40 years. This visit was different in at least two ways:

• It was colder. It does get chilly in January even in Arizona! The other visits were during the summer when it was blazing hot and I remember lizards being as fascinating as the petrified logs. This time it was too cold for lizards to be active.
• I was keen to take pictures. Until the past few years I’d left picture taking to others. Now it is one of my favorite activities when I travel.

The very large logs look like long toppled tree trunks. They are in sections - cleaved by the pressure of sediments over the many years they were buried rather than a chain saw. The one above looks like it carried part of its root ball into the water where it was ‘petrified’ along with the rest of the trunk. ‘Petrified’ means that minerals replaced the wood fibers of the trees to create colorful crystals we see today as agate.

On the outermost part of the logs - the rough texture looks like bark.

Sometimes the cross sections are a jumble of minerals. But there are still some remnants in places of the tree rings.

And sometimes a knot where a limb came out of the tree is obvious. I show a log section and then a close up of the knot below.

Some of the logs were rotting when they fell or were swept away. I hadn’t noticed before that there are some sections that have holes in the center which shows that they were already rotting before they fell.

Some of the crystals appear to have grown inside wood fibers - preserving some of that finer structure inside the trunk.

And - last but not least - I couldn’t resist some close ups of some big crystals.

All of these pictures were taken on a short hike from the Rainbow Forest Museum.  There is a lot to see in a small area.

Painted Desert (Petrified Forest National Park)

Painted Desert is part of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. I’m writing about it before the namesake area of the park because we entered the park at the Painted Desert Visitor Center on our visit a few weeks ago.

Remnants of snow was still on the ground from a few days earlier. The white was a nice contrast with the reds of the terrain at the beginning of the drive.

Newspaper Rock was move visible with the zoom on my camera. I almost stopped using binoculars when I travel since I would rather get a photograph as the same time I am seeing something.

Further along the drive - the layers of color become more distinctive. With the moisture from the snow melt, the colors were deeper than they appeared the last time I was in the area (during a summer).  Some of the slopes were ragged…some looked like melted ice cream.

There is an area there the petrified logs become more numerous. Some of them are in the place they’ve been for a very long time and some of toppled into the ravines - or on the Petrified Forest tomorrow.

For more information about this national park - take a look that the park’s brochures web page. Just about all the maps and informational pages available in the park have been made available.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - January 2015

Noticing something worth celebration each day is an easy thing for me to do. The habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. This month has been full of ‘little celebrations’ - as had been the usual for the past few months. Here are my top 10 for January 2015.

Winter

Snow in Tucson. The year started off with a pictures from my daughter of the snow they got --- on the palms and cactus near their apartment. It was a beautiful scene to celebrate the New Year.

Fox. A healthy looking red fox walked through our back yard then trotted behind several other houses before turning into the forest. I watched from the window of my office - celebrating the grace of the animal as it moved through the winter landscape.

Fog. The forest and our neighborhood filled with fog. The temperature was in the upper 30s. It seemed like the fog damped sound as effectively as it did sight - celebrating a warm house in the isolation of winter.

Snow. Snow that falls when I can simply stay at home until it melts or the streets are cleared by the plows is my favorite kind of day. It is the classic winter scene worth celebrating.

Other

Dishwasher. Our dishwasher became very loud so we arranged for servicing - anticipating that it would have to be replaced. Hurray! It was quickly fixed and our kitchen is a quieter place.

Zentangle® class. I saw a blurb about a Zentangle class offered at the local 50+ Community Center. It was a good incentive to investigate the place! I’ve been to the first of four class sessions and am enjoying daily ‘tangling’. I’ll post a slide show of my creations once I’ve accumulated a few more. I’m celebrating both the class and learning about the 50+ Community Center.

Arizona and Tucson

Bald Eagle. In recent years, the bald eagle population has increased on the east coast and we see them more often….but when I saw one as we drove into Grand Canyon National Park - settling into the top of a pine tree - it was a first sighting in the west for me. Hurray!

Grand Canyon. Awesome place. I’ve been there before --- it is worth celebrating again and again.

Painted Desert/Petrified Forest. The times I’d been before were in summer and late spring. This time it was decidedly cool/cold. The colors were deeper in Painted Desert because it had snowed/rained. The Petrified Forest glistened when the sun came from behind the clouds. Both places are special…and worth celebrating.

Tree Ring Lab. I’m celebrating that the place lived up to my expectations - interesting from scientific, architectural and historical perspectives. If I lived in Tucson - I’d sign up as a volunteer docent.

Tucson Sunrise

January is a great time of year to observe the sunrise in the US since it does not require getting up inordinately early. The added advantage in Tucson is that is it not overwhelmingly cold. We wore hoodies and headed out one morning last week - driving to the parking area in the eastern district of Saguaro National Park at the end of Speedway.

It was not a great place for sunrise because the mountains made for a tall horizon. But I liked the soft light on the desert scenes.

Then I started taking closer views of the plants. There were two kinds of Cholla

A prickly pear with colorful thorns

A wounded saguaro

And young saguaros with their Palo Verde nurse plant.

And finally - just as we were leaving - the rocks of the mountains caught the morning color.

Tucson Butterflies

It was warm enough for butterflies to be active on the lantana on the University of Arizona campus week before the last but the bigger butterfly treat was at the Tucson Botanical Garden’s Butterfly and Orchid Pavilion.

The pavilion is a warm, misty place where the butterflies are numerous enough to get some good photographs - after the camera acclimates to the steamy environment. The exhibit gets new additions each day a pupae in the building next door hatch and are brought into the pavilion. We saw a glass wing being released and then a very large moth - a cecropia. I included two pictures of it in the slideshow below.

The butterflies only live about 2 weeks. Some of them don’t eat in their adult phase - others are active on nectar plants. Caterpillars and their food plants are not part of the exhibit (all the pupae come from the native countries for the butterflies).

What a delight of warmth and color in January!

Touring the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

I enjoyed the docent led tour at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at University of Arizona last week. The Bannister Building, where the lab is located is quite distinctive - with a scrim of articulated metal tubes. The wind was not blowing on the morning of our tour so we didn’t hear the sound of the tubes in motion.

Inside we wondered around the lobby before the tour. I was looking for various ways the large tree cookies were labeled. I liked the simple white arrows that showed the semantics used: pith, early wood, late wood, branch trace, fire scar, cambium and bark.

Here is a closer look to understand what a tree ring is (the center of the tree cookie is to the lower left of the image). Note that the rings are not all the same…their width reflects the growth conditions for the year they were growing.

And some trees live for a very long time. The labeling on the tree cookie from the Giant Sequoia that lived 1704 years is labeled with more information.

When the docent arrived, we were invited upstairs into one of the labs to talk with one of the researchers who showed us how the sample cores from trees are collected and mounted. The tree-ring lab is multidisciplinary; many specialties are required to glean the information from the samples. I was intrigued by the cross section on one of the upper floors that was very different than concentric rings. This would take a lot of finesse to interpret!

I’ve included two close ups to show the dates labelled on the specimen.

One other tidbit I picked up from the docent: on the elementary school tours, the children are given a small tree cookie (~3 inches in diameter) and the children sand it to reveal the tree rings! That would certainly be a memorable learning experience!

Packing for Travel - the Layers Strategy

As I packed for my vacation to Tucson, I realized that the January weather there required more varied clothes that the majority of the year when it is simply hot, hotter, or hottest. Daily temperature swings of 25-30 degrees are not unusual. And Maryland would be cold both when we departed and returned. Packing layers of clothing is the only strategy that can work.

The innermost layer has to be comfortable in the mid-70s. A tunic over leggings was my outfit for the first travel day. I added a scarf as a first layer since it would help me feel warmer snugged around my neck if I got cold.

I wore two additional layers on the way to the airport in Maryland because it was in the low 30s and snowing: a hoodie and then my coat. Once we got into the airport, the coat went into a bag that I checked and the hoodie went into a tote bag that I carried onto the plane….congratulating myself on applying the layers strategy to my luggage too (lightening the carry-on) as I changed planes in Little Rock.

When I got to Tucson it was in the low 70s….and I loosened my scarf.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 10, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Birding in the National Parks: Return of the Snowy Owls - It looks like this winter will be another one for seeing Snowy Owls in the northern states of the US! There were some sightings in Maryland last winter so I am hoping…

Did Venus Once Have Oceans of Liquid Carbon Dioxide? - Maybe the geological features on Venus (rift valleys, river-like beds, and plains) were may be liquid carbon dioxide rather than water like they are on Earth.

From the Feature Well - This is the summary of 2014 special issues from The Scientist. Looking back at them provides a good review of Biology issues and progress for the year.

The "Rule of 50" Helps You Know When to Give Up on a Book - How do you know when to quit reading a book? Usually I decide via scanning before I every start reading rather than determining ahead of time a number of pages I’ll read before deciding. I can’t remember the last time my scanning failed.

Monarch Butterflies May Soon Be an Endangered Species - The population has declined by 90% since the 1990s. It’s very sad. The agricultural changes in the mid-90s killed the milkweed (food plant for the caterpillars) at the edges of fields. Now there needs to be a concerted effort to increase the availability of milkweed.

The Most Amazing Meteorological and Space Observatories Ever Built - Beautiful and functional architecture from around the world.

Top Planning Trends – 2014 - A look at traffic data on Planetizen…popular tags overall and popular posts for each state. The most popular post for Maryland was about high-rise, mixed-use suburban developments.

Significant link between daily physical activity, vascular health - These type of studies come out frequently…with some nuance defined a little better than before. Hopefully no one is waiting for another study to transition some sedentary to active time every day. Now that I think about it - do these studies prompt people to become more active?

A Look Back at Our Most Popular Photos of 2014 - From the National Wildlife Federation. The very first one (a snowy owl) caught my attention.

National Park Service Launches Website Honoring 22 World Heritage Sites in the United States - Did you know that there are 22 World Heritage Sites (a UN designation) are in the US?  Most of them are National Parks…but now all. The list can be found here.

First Day Hike

It was a cold January 1 in our area of Maryland and my husband was just getting over a cold --- he didn’t want to hike. So I took a very short hike from a two lane road near us down to the Little Patuxent River. I want to try out my new monopod/hiking pole. It turned out to be a good idea since I managed to unscrew the bottom section completely!

All the leaves were brown and brittle. The sycamore leaves were still largely intact and quite large from the trees growing along the river.

I was not fast enough to photograph the great blue heron that was evidently fishing in the river when I arrived.  There were some deer that were on the opposite bank - white tails flashing by the time I saw them.

The places where the water was still enough were still frozen from the previous night’s temperature drop into the 20s.

I looked for shelf fungus on the downed logs but only saw tiny ones but this moss with sporophytes add some color to the otherwise drab colors of winter.

On the way home I stopped at the storm water pond in our neighborhood.

The stumps from a visit from a beaver a few years ago were still visible near the short - and punctuated the ice at the pond’s edge.

And a surprise from my daughter in Tucson - they had snow on January 1! She sent the pictures below.

US Botanic Garden in December 2014 - Part II

We made our annual holiday trek down to the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC on the last Sunday of the year. I posted about the holiday display earlier here. This post is about the best of the rest.

It was too cold to enjoy sitting around outside the building but I did appreciate the artistry of the butterfly benches as we walked toward the building. As we were standing in line for the model lighthouse/train exhibit, I noticed the faces above the windows: serene and grotesque.

I also noticed the cornerstone for the building; the building was built in the year my parents were born!

Inside we enjoyed the steamy warmth of tropical rooms. The orchids are always beautiful…and fragrant.

I’ve started looking for cycads in every conservatory I visit and noticed three in the US Botanic Garden. They all looked very robust. Maybe sometimes we mistake them for palms…but not for long. A closer looks and it is obvious they are very different plants/trees.

We wander out of the steamy warmth to the dry room….and cactus. I love the patterns of these plants: the vertical  line of dots on the rib (1), the center ‘Spirograph’ pattern (2), the thorns spiking from the accordion pleats (3), the muted pink at the tips fading into the green at the base (4), and the grouping of small and slightly larger cushions in a snug crack (5).

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 3, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

2014 in Numbers: Huge Valuations, Shocking Security Stats, and a Big Climate Deal - Factoids for the year. The last one was the one that caught my attention the most 4.4 zettabytes = all digital information in the world….and it is growing by 40% per year!

2014: An amazing year in space exploration - Philae, Orion, SpaceX Falcon 9, and Mar Rover Opportunity setting off-Earth, off-road distance record.

2014 in Materials: Rhubarb Batteries, the Gigafactory, and Printing Body Parts - It’s hard to keep up with all the innovations. How fast can any of these really get to market and be affordable?

Researchers create method that recovers high value metals for industries while protecting the environment - A step in the right direction. Hopefully the metals recovered will be valuable enough to drive the technology from the lab to application.

The Year in Pathogens - Ebola tops this list from The Scientist.

2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence - Seeing the aggregate for the year….2014 was quite a year for AI in a number of areas.

2014 in Energy: The Year in Energy and Climate Change - Increased urgency of warnings….only slow progress. Frustrating.

Young entrepreneurs innovate in green energy with an in situ organic waste digester - Kudos to the young Mexican entrepreneurs….and the company that is implementing their innovation.

American cities are many times brighter at night than German counterparts - The US could learn from German….and help us all see more stars in the sky too.

Social Media Sites Offer a Nice Sampling of Winter Scenery in Parks - Winter brings a different perspective.