Little Wild Horse Canyon-only for the slender...

Little Wild Horse Canyon is a slot canyon somewhat like those in Page, Arizona and Kanab in Utah. Right off--if you are not slender, don't come here. These are REALLY narrow slots!

I protected my cameras and tripod at all costs, and staggered out with blood leaking from both arms and legs. I haven't gotten this beaten up since Havasupai! Still, it was worth every ding--I'm going to love processing hundreds of these subtly-hued pictures!

Eventually, one emerges from the slots into beautiful wide portions of the canyon: The Sun pours down and the rocky walls soar up into the sky above you.

Little Wild Horse Canyon is only five miles from Goblin Valley, so I went back to photograph a few formations, such as these giant chess men near the entrance:

This entire area is filled with large formations, some like these right by the side of the road near Hanksville.

.The long drive home is tomorrow. The pictures I've put on the blog these past few days are just a few I grabbed on first scanning through 40 gigabytes of material. Now I can sit happily in the airco during the Vegas Summer and play for hours and hours with goblins and ethereally-colored slots.

Goblins and geysers...

Goblin Valley is a delight. Walking amid the Goblin Army provides a new visual treat every minute. Looking down on the valley, it is very hard to pick out two school buses full of kids making their way among the formations.

Perhaps a video makes it easier to scale the scene:

Waling among the weird shapes, it is hard to accept that this is all from Nature's natural processes. First you create a vast ocean, let it deposit sand for a few hundred million years, then arrange for erosion to sculpt the various hardnesses of stone into a phantasmagoria of shapes.

 Whoa! Who put a Mummy among the goblins? Are we in he Valley of the Kings? No, but the desert here is similar to Egypt's.

After a morning wandering through Goblin Valley, I had the bright idea to spend the afternoon waiting for an eruption of Crystal Geyser.. After a couple of hours a couple arrived. He was a local who had once observed the geyser going off 60 feet into the air for more than a half hour.

"But that was before the local environmentalists sabotaged it," he said."They didn't like it pouring minerals into the river, so they put a lot of stone down the shaft and dynamited it."  Oh.

My perfect metaphor for green activism: The minerals still pour into the river and the tourist attraction is destroyed. "You have to judge us for our noble intentions, not by the disasters we leave behind."

And so I left this monument to morons and went off to find new adventures.
Still, it's hard not to imagine the thinking (or not thinking) that has reduced the great plume to this.