Panoramas of Canyon de Chelly

While my webmaster Patty struggles with a mountain of new material, I am enjoying the power of fitting enormous tracts of desert into single photographs. This first one is the colossal view from the Mummy Cave overlook.



And yet, the original image is so huge it retains the detail of the centuries-old ruin under the ledge. I just love this software!

This next one is the amazing vista one experiences from the Antelope House overlook. If you look very carefully to the lower right, there are three trucks and a gaggle of visitors crossing the bridge to walk by the ruin.

It is an astonishing retention of detail--which of course comes from using 18 shots stitched together to make the large image.

These will soon be in a gallery in the Desert Photography section of my web site--with a lot of other fascinating views!

They said it couldn't get worse--but it did...

Ah, lovely Canyon de Chelly! As I write this, the wind is ripping the leaves and bark off the trees outside my hotel window and blowing them to China.

Fortunately, I got to photograph Tsegi Point near the park entrance this morning (the image above) before the winds reached hurricane force.

Then, as things became dire around 10:00 A.M. , I raced over to Antelope House (named for a painting of an antelope on the wall). It is obvious why the Anasazi tucked their homes under the cliffs--this place has brutal heat in Summer, bone-cracking cold in Winter, and these dust typhoons in Spring. In this first shot, you can see the dust beginning to rise into the formerly-blue sky)



A couple of truckloads of tourists were visiting Antelope House, so I included them for scale. Everybody in the hotel looks windblown and bedraggled--probably from riding in those trucks. You can drive your own car up here on the rim roads, but to drive in the canyons and visit the ruins, the Navajos have the only permits.



I'm outta here early tomorrow for Sedona. Think of it as panic-stricken flight...

A dust storm with 55 mph winds...

It's a good thing I worked so hard yesterday and this morning, because by 2:00 P.M. today the sky was filled with blown sand, the sky turned dust-colored, and the scenic sites began to fade out in a haze of blowing sand. It got worse with each hour, and I had to retreat to the hotel. If one turned into the wind as I did for these, one got a mouth full of sand and eyes that needed a cleaning. Arrrgh. Supposed to be windy tomorrow as well. Sigh.

You can see by the video hy there are only scrubby bushes here--tall trees wouldn't last long up here atop the mesa where the wind howls.