Day Eleven

All-you-can-eat pancakes for $1.99 at your campsite is a good way to start your day.

So is seeing dinosaurs on your way to the Petrified Forest.

Petrified Forest is a really cool place to look around. It formed because a lot of wood in flooded areas, sediment built up, and the mineral water in that sediment petrified the wood, leaving tons of colors and designs.

There was this pretty cool rock & cloud / jet stream formation, too.

We got to the Blue Badlands, within the Blue Mesa area of the park. This is a huge place; I can only imagine what THE Badlands are gonna look like.

You later get to Newspaper Rock, which has (I think) over 650 petroglyphs inscribed on the side.

After leaving Petrified, we headed to Canyon de Chelly. On the way, though, we stopped at the Hubbell Trading Post, where white men have traded with Native Americans for years and years and years.

Inside were some of the many hand-made Native American rugs available for purchase.

We made it to Canyon de Chelly, and even though it's considerably smaller than the Grand Canyon (and even though we just saw it yesterday, it was still breathtaking. The best view is from Spider Rock Overlook. Spider Rock is the big rock in the middle of the first picture, named after the Navajo deity Holy Spider Woman, who taught them how to weave.

For scale, these tiny little dots, seen at the base of the rock, are tents / campsites.

There are other cool overlooks, too, like the White House Overlook (named for the White House in Between, seen in the first picture), the Junction Overlook and the Tseyi Overlook. From some of these vistas, you can see ruins of where the Navajo used to live. (They still leave nearby, but in homes at the top of the Canyon.)

We saw some more wildlife today: a plateau-striped whiptail, a bull snake, another raven (captured in flight!) and some kind of sheep or goat.

Then we made it to Four Corners! We were there for maybe five minutes. There's not much to do except buy things (but since we got there late most of the vendors were gone) and take pictures.

I've been saying that I think Arizona is going to be my favorite state on this trip because of all the great things we saw (and the burger I ate), but Utah made an impression pretty early on.

Also, you know it's going to be another good day when you wake up and see these views from your tent.

Now we're off to Canyonlands and Arches, then camping somewhere between Arches and Capitol Reef.