vacation pictures #5: south coyote buttes

[ilanarama]

I...I'm going to have to punt, here. Because the South Coyote Buttes are so mind-blowingly magnificent - the colors, the shapes, the sheer abstract artistry - that I really don't have anything to say. I've uploaded thirty pictures to my Flickr site, and you can find them all here. Or do the slideshow thing. There's a sliver of moon over a butte, there's a weird tower with a window in it, there are stripes, there are squiggles, there's a couple pictures of me. Um, yeah. Ogg say: sandstone nifty, make pretty pictures.

Comments

[jeddy83.livejournal.com]

I feel so insignificant just looking at these photos; I can't imagine what it would be like to see them up close. The length of time it must have taken to first build up all those layers of sediment and then expose them. It's incredible.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's really a testament to time, I think. Layers of sand building up, and then the tiny effects of erosion accumulating, bit by bit. And what I think is really cool is that while driving on House Rock Road we noticed how different the landscape was on the left and the right sides of the road - the right had red sandy dirt, the left had whitish-yellow. So while looking at these buttes it occurred to me that what must have happened is that during regimes of wind from the west, white sand accumulated, and then during eastern winds, red sand accumulated. So you could read the rocks like tree rings, and infer what the climate was like during the periods they were forming.