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.

All things come to him who waits...

Even good weather! The airport is on top of a mountain between Route 179 (seen here as it passes the Chapel--it's on the right side of the nearest mountain-- and Bell Rock) and Route 89 behind me to the North. This took a hike of a mile or so around the side of the airport mountain with the planes landing over me, but it is a heckuva view and worth every agonized step!

Cathedral Rock (below) has o be the most photographed piece of stone in the valley. You see it from everywhere, and it is nicely photogenic. This is the morning side, seen from Back of Beyond.


Then there is the graceful Bell rock, seen below in the distance from the Chapel. It's the little cone in the distance..

But, of course, when you are standing on its flanks, it doesn't look as small!! There are great views from up here--I'm going to try it again at sunset if the parking lot isn't too full!