Category: Road Trips

Eagle Crags Picture of the Week

Eagle Crags - Red-rock Vermilion Cliff outcrops covered in snow make a perfect Christmas greeting card.
Eagle Crags – Red-rock Vermilion Cliff outcrops covered in the snow make a perfect Christmas greeting card.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to resort to Plan B at the last moment—and in the end, Plan B was always the better choice? In a convoluted way, that’s what I did to bring you this week’s picture. Let me start at the beginning.

When I set up my December project, I already had four photos picked out. Three of them went up without a hitch, and the last was scheduled for today. I thought it was a doozy—a view of looking down the stairwell of the Hassayampa Inn. You know, one of those shots where the stairs wrap around the frame and seem to go on forever. In the photography world, if you see a shot like that and don’t snap the photo, they will revoke your Artist License.

When I looked at the file closely this week, it was too blurry. The stairwell was dark, and I didn’t hold the camera steady enough while the shutter was open. If you saw it from across a large room, you couldn’t tell, but on close inspection, it looked like something my Aunt Kay would take. I gave up and deleted the file like the professors told me.

Now I panicked and started looking through my files for an alternative. This is where I got distracted and began chasing squirrels. My RAW image files are only halfway organized. I started a system a couple of years ago where I keep them grouped by State-Location-Year (I have so many Arizona pictures that I include a county folder, State-County-Location-Year). Since we moved to Congress, I’ve used this system, but my older files haven’t yet been sorted. It’s one of those Round-To-It things. You’ve probably guessed that I picked this week to start organizing and forgot that I was looking for this week’s post.

I was working on a 12-year-old file from a trip that my friend Jeff and I made to Zion National Park. We’d driven there on the long Thanksgiving weekend and shared a motel room. One image mixed in among the others was a shot of a Vermillion Cliffs uplift called Eagle Crags. When I looked at this image, I wondered, “Why haven’t I ever shown this file?” The mystery was solved when I looked at the file data. The camera that I used had a limited file size and couldn’t be used to make decent prints, so I considered it a snapshot of the weekend.

As I looked at the broken snow-covered sandstone, I remembered that Adobe had added a Photoshop tool that added pixels to an image from thin air—using artificial intelligence. So, I dug around and processed my small file using the “Super-Rez” tool, and the results were impressive. The original file would comfortably fit on a 5”x4” photo, but if you visit my store, you can see what it would look like 5 feet wide. It’s good enough to include on my Web Pages. So while I’m stuck in the house recovering from the crud Queen Anne passed to me, I can wade through more files and discover other hidden gems.

You can see a larger version of Eagle Crags on its Webpage by clicking here. I hope you agree that it’s a lovely Christmas card from Queen Anne and me. Next week we begin a New Year, a new month, and a new project. Be sure to come back then and see where the road takes us.

Till next time
Jw

BTW:

From the Witkowski household to you, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Hassayampa Lobby Picture of the Week

Hassayampa Lobby - A warm fireplace keeps the Hassayampa Inn Lobby comfortable.
Hassayampa Lobby – A warm fireplace keeps the Hassayampa Inn Lobby comfortable.

I’m confident that my wife’s life goal is to make my life miserable. Like a rebellious teenager, she delights in making me suffer. She’ll ask me for an opinion and then do the opposite. I’m not the only one that’s noticed this about her. When she worked for Eastern Airlines, one of her co-workers actually told her, “Your husband must be a saint.”

Here’s the latest example. A couple of weeks ago, Queen Anne came home from one of her coven meetings, and the following day she woke up coughing and sniffling. Since we’ve both had our quota of shots, I figured she was coming down with a cold. I don’t believe either of us has had one since we moved to Congress, so we were overdue.

Because we’ve been well for so long, her cold was seeking revenge. I’ve never heard her convulse so often and violently. She ignored my advice to rest, eat chicken soup, and take something to exacerbate the symptoms. Instead, she went about her business as if nothing was wrong, leaving a trail of Kleenex behind her. I was surprised that she didn’t pass her germs off on me, and I silently thought, “If I keep my distance, I won’t get sick.” We slept in separate rooms so her coughing wouldn’t keep me awake, although our house is small and sounds carry. As days passed, she got worse, and I detected a resentment that she alone suffered. A subtle look in a woman’s eye is visible only to a husband.

We were doing fine until this week’s three-day road trip. She swore she was getting better and insisted on going. To shorten this story, we spent three days together in the car, where she sneezed and coughed the entire 500 miles. Every time I glanced at her, she was elbow-deep in dirty snot rags, asleep against the window with a runny nose. After two days of her hacking and wheezing, my right ear began to wilt.

By the third morning, my immune system couldn’t take it anymore. When I let out my first cough, a miracle happened. Anne suddenly turned into Mother Teresa. Now she could nurse someone back to health. She was even willing to make homemade chicken noodle soup—and even asked how many cans to open.

I’m writing this post with watery eyes, a scratchy throat, and a plugged nose. However, I got even. The first thing I did when we got home was to get out my stash of Alka-Seltzer Plus. Anne snatched the box out of my hands and wanted to know where I was hiding it. While I let the two tablets fizz, she read the package. “It has aspirin. I’m allergic, so I can’t take this.”

“It will help your congestion and achiness. What harm could one little tablet do?” I countered. She set up a dose and tossed it back like she was doing shots.

Yesterday morning, she stomped into my office with arms akimbo and scowled at me. I looked up at her face. She had a hive on her lower jaw, and everything below her nose was swollen. She looked like Homer Simpson—stubble and all. I successfully stifled my giggling, so don’t let her know that I told you.

This week’s photo comes from our Thanksgiving trip to Prescott. It’s a shot of the Hassayampa Inn’s Lobby. That holiday night was frosty, so we enjoyed a glass of after-dinner wine by the fire in the evening.

From the outside, I think the hotel is an unremarkable brick cube, so I wanted to capture some of the elegance on display inside. The coffered and ornate ceiling came out well in this photo. Even the painting over the fireplace showed up well, but I’m disappointed that the artist chose a scene not in Arizona. We have plenty of beauty they could have chosen.

You can see a larger version of Hassayampa Lobby on its Webpage by clicking here. Come back next week when our final orphan photo finishes up the month—and year.

Till next time
jw

BTW:

Thanks for helping me get through my Sunday chores this morning. Now I need a bowl of soup and a long nap (rinse and repeat) until I shake this dreaded affliction.

Dragon Backs Picture of the Week

Dragon Backs - A pair of peaks in the Dome Rock Mountains that look like spiny back dragons.
Dragon Backs – A pair of peaks in the Dome Rock Mountains that look like spiny back dragons.

The drive between Quartzsite and Yuma on Highway US 95 has two parts. Driving in either direction, it’s thirty miles of gentle uphill grade and then downhill for the other thirty. The mid-point is at Stone Cabin (now an empty building shell), where the Border Patrol checkpoint is.

From Quartzsite, the road is dead straight, and your line of sight is limited only by the whoop-de-woos (wash dips) and the earth’s curvature. The 800-foot climb is barely noticeable, and the road is flanked on the east by the KofA Mountains (named for the King of Arizona mine), and to the west are the Dome Rock Mountains (the dome you see west of downtown Quartzsite).

The south half of the trip has a steeper grade—most of which is in the first mile, where the highway drops off a hill. The scenery changes too. There’s a different mountain range far off to the east—the Castle Dome Mountains, but you’re surrounded by the Yuma Proving Grounds, where the military plays with its new toys. Instead of a pleasant drive through the wilderness, you begin searching for things like the down-looking radar dirigible, a Bradley tank using your car for target practice, or the C-130 that just took off and climbed to 10,000 feet before troopers shove something big out of the back—I sure hope that chute opens.

Whenever Queen Anne and I travel this road, I look for these landmarks to help pass the time. I’d rather have a stimulating conversation about physics with her, but she usually has her head pressed against the headrest, her eyes closed, and her mouth open. She stays that way until one of her snorts wakes her.

On the drive home, one of the landmarks I look for is a pair of unnamed mountains in the Dome Rock Range. When I pass them, we’re nearing the Quartzsite city limits. The twin peaks look like a pair of dragons sunning themselves on a rock. I’ve often thought I’d like to get their portrait, but no matter how much map scouring I do, I’m unable to find a way to get closer—short of hiking two and a half miles across the open Mohave Desert.

The spiny back of the dragons climbs from the desert to their west-facing heads—where they watch the Colorado River flow south. As with last week’s shot, we always drive by them right after lunch. That’s the absolute worst light in the desert. I keep swearing on a stack of Ansel Adams books that I will shoot them when the light is correct, but it’s yet to happen.

On our last drug run—when last week’s photo was taken—clouds were gathering over the Dome Rock Range, so instead of a uniform blue sky, there was texture over the mountains. After I took the KofA Thunderhead shot, I walked across the highway and pointed my camera at the dragons. This time I twisted the zoom to telephoto and framed the monsoon clouds. The result is this week’s featured image, which I call Dragon Backs.

You can see a larger version of Dragon Backs on its Webpage by clicking here. Next week, I have pictures to show from a different place for show-and-tell. I hope you can take a break from your Christmas shopping and take a look. We’ll see you then.

Till next time
jw

BTW:

Flagstaff Book - A collection of photographs and musings from our summer trip to Flagstaff.
Flagstaff Book – A collection of photographs and musings from our summer trip to Flagstaff.

Oops, I Did It Again (Britney Spears song written by Richard Thompson). I published another book. This one covers all of the places we visited in and around Flagstaff. As usual, it’s available in two versions. You can see and buy the hardback on Blurb.com—which you won’t do because it’s too expensive—and the free PDF version you can download, view, and print from your computer. There are additional photos in each of the four chapters, so I’m hoping you take a look. You can get to its Web Page by clicking here.

KofA Thunderhead Picture of the Week

KofA Thunderhead - An autumn thunderhead builds over the KofA Mountains in western Arizona.
KofA Thunderhead – An autumn thunderhead builds over the KofA Mountains in western Arizona.

Each time Queen Anne and I jump into the car; I pack a camera in the back seat. I don’t mean on local errands like a trip to the grocery store but on drives longer than an hour. Rarely do I stop to take a picture, but should one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments happens, I’m ready.

If I capture some unique photographs, they don’t fit our usual workflow. We usually pick a location as a month-long project and photograph enough shots for a month of articles (or even a book). My one-of-shots along the highway traditionally become forgotten orphans. No one gets to see them—until now.

For December, I decided to make this month’s project out of the non-project shots I collected this year. With these four pictures, a special moment made me pull over and stop the car. That’s pretty hard to do because once I have a destination set in my mind, I only stop for gas, a candy bar, and bladder relief.

Anne and I run to Mexico about four times a year. We go to Algodones to see our dentist and buy 90 days worth of prescriptions. We’re on Medicare, and we have a gap plan that pays for most of the pills we take, but some of the select drugs (hint: you see them advertised on TV) are so much cheaper in Mexico that it pays for the drive. If we don’t have to wait on the dentist, we can make a drug run in a day. We leave here at 8:00 am, walk two blocks across the border, stop at Mickey D’s for lunch, and get home by 5:00 pm.

That was our itinerary on September 22—the first fall day. As we drove home on Highway US 93, I watched a single thunderhead building thirty miles north over the KofA Mountains. I thought it unusual to have monsoon activity in autumn and a single storm cell develop so far west in Arizona. I spent the next half hour arguing with myself.

“That will be a great shot if the clouds hold together until we get there.”

“If we stop, we’ll get home after dark.”

“It’s an isolated cell, and it’s posing like a runway model.”

“It’s the wrong time of day, and the light is wrong.”

Just after passing the Border Patrol station that marks halfway between Yuma and Quartzsite, I noticed that the cloud was beginning to tear apart (the wispy part on the tower’s left side). It was time to stop the car. I reached back for my camera and hiked a few steps off the highway. I set the zoom-lens as wide as possible before framing and then snapping a couple of shots. I call this week’s featured image KofA Thunderhead.

The spot where I stopped was several miles away, and for perspective, the jagged KofA peaks rise a couple of thousand feet above the 500-foot high basin. That makes the billowing cumulus top nearly 40,000 feet in the air. Unfortunately, I didn’t capture any lightning strikes beneath the storm.

We returned to the road and continued the drive, watching the storm evolve. The upper winds blew the clouds apart by the time we were due east of it. That’s when we saw a funnel cloud drop below the ceiling. The tornado briefly touched the ground near Crystal Hill Road before it disappeared.

We weren’t done with it yet. After stopping for gas in Quartzsite, the storm ambushed us on the pass at Guadalupe Mountain. As it moved north over Interstate 10, it dumped rain so hard that the wipers couldn’t keep up, and traffic slowed to a crawl. We hoped we wouldn’t be surprised by a second tornado, but after a mile or so, we broke into the clear, and the deluge was only an image in the mirror.

You can see a larger version of KofA Thunderhead on its Webpage by clicking here. Next week, I’ll drag out another orphan photo for show and tell. We’ll see you then.

Till next time
jw

BTW:

Anne and I are negotiating next year’s schedule, so there will be a lot of yelling and screaming around here during the holidays. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtains.

Lomaki Crater Picture of the Week

Lomaki Crater - When viewed from the far side, Lomaki's tall walls appear like the craters that surround the national monument.
Lomaki Crater – When viewed from the far side, Lomaki’s tall walls appear like the craters surrounding the national monument.

How did your Turkey Day go? I can see your eyes struggling to read these words, so at least you’ve come out of the tryptophan coma and gotten off the couch. That’s good. At least you didn’t turn into that weird uncle that kids are complaining about these days—or did you?

Hassayampa Inn - The four story red-brick hotel was opened in 1927 and is one of the State's historic inns.
Hassayampa Inn – The four-story red-brick hotel was opened in 1927 and is one of the State’s historic inns.

Queen Anne and I skipped our usual Denney’s Thanksgiving Day dinner. Instead, we drove up to Prescott and spent the night at the Hassayampa Inn. Since I’m a history freak, we thought it would be cool to dine at the historic hotel and stay for the night. The red brick hotel is far more charming inside than its block exterior suggests. Art Deco, Spanish Revival, and Territorial styles are all mashed together. Except for the scruffy Romanian bartender, I don’t believe anyone on the staff is over 30. They were so bright-eyed, cheerful, and eager to help that it was depressing.

Dinner—well, lunch, really—was uninspired. The special was a half of a Cornish Game Hen oven-roasted turkey style on a plate with a round lump of stuffing, another lump of mashed potatoes, and green beans. My favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner is gravy. Everything else on the plate supports the gravy, so we had to ask for more on the side. For dessert, the chef managed to duplicate a childhood recipe. My first bite of his apple pie brought a flood of memories of eating a Hostess fruit pie at the Circle K. The biggest sin of dinner was the omission of cranberry sauce molded in the shape of a can. An order of Buffalo wings would have been more satisfying.

With that aside, we had a great time in Prescott. We drank wine beside the lobby fireplace, snuck into room 426—where Faith, the ghost lives, walked around the town square, and ended the night by closing a karaoke bar. It’s not what you think; we literally got the bar shut down. We were in the middle of our version of I Got You Babe, when the health inspector bust through the door. He was there because of multiple complaints of howling dogs as far as three miles away. “That singing is not fit for human consumption,” he yelled to the bouncer. Then he took our mikes and told us to return to the hotel and stay in our room. He then padlocked the place until they got more safety training. I was devastated because Anne does a great Sonny Bono when she gets near the right key.

Enough of that; let’s talk about what you came for; this week’s picture. I call the image Lomaki Crater; it’s the last in our series from Wupatki National Monument. I took it on the far side of the pueblo ruin photo from a couple of weeks ago. With a bit of imagination, the tall wall corner resembles a crater like the ones we shot on our visit. There’s even a puff of smoke coming out of the cauldron. The bare walls are a mix of local limestone and Coconino sandstone. When they were built around 1100, they were most likely covered with plaster like the ruins in Walnut Canyon.

You can see a larger version of Lomaki Crater on its Webpage by clicking here. Next week, we start our final project of the year, and even I don’t know what it will be. So, when you come back next week, we’ll both be surprised at what I come up with. I’ll see you then.

Till next time
Jw

BTW:

No dogs were hurt in the making of this article, just my feelings.

Ancient Door Picture of the Week

Ancient Door - A mysterious door between Lomaki rooms beckons you to see what's on the other side.
Ancient Door – A mysterious door between Lomaki rooms beckons you to see what’s on the other side.

When I photograph a place like Lomaki (the Hopi word meaning Beautiful House), I try to walk its perimeter, looking at how the light falls on it. Then I look at details that help fill in its story. As I move around, I’ll stop and take shots of things that intrigue me. My photos are more intuitive than systematic. I look for contrasts and shadow patterns that place the subject in a specific moment.

I was doing that when I entered the Lomaki ruin and came across the door in this week’s picture. I saw the door and thought, “This looks interesting.” I framed the shot and snapped the shutter. Typically, an image with a busy pattern in a uniform light doesn’t work because it looks like a Where’s-Waldo puzzle. However, the dagger of light on the room floor commands your eye to go through the opening. It’s a walk-towards-the-light moment.

As a younger man, I was six-foot tall, but gravity has taken its toll, and now my diminished stature is only 5 foot 11½ inches. Even in my current dwarf state, I had to do a full Asian bow to fit through the doorway. That means that the Pueblo people that built this structure were short. Otherwise, they would constantly bang their heads on the lentil when they came home Saturday nights drunk from the bar. Believe me, that gets old fast.

As I walked through the complex, I got to another room with a low window. Through it, I saw a creature with five legs. It gave me a fright. Was it a centaur with an extra appendage or a giant arachnid with three legs missing? On closer inspection, I saw three legs were carbon fiber, and the other pair wore shorts. The creature turned out to be a fellow photographer. She was a coed from ASU working on a YouTube video about Wupatki.

It’s funny how photographers behave when they bump into one another out in the field. After seeing another camera, they let down any guards. They stop being solitary wanderers and suddenly become highly social as they compare notes. “Did you see this?” You should go there.” In the age of digital photography, it’s gotten worse because now they can compare their shots on the back of their cameras and go into full chimpanzee mode, “Look at this one—ooh ooh ooh ah.”

After our pleasantry exchanges, we parted ways, and she returned to the parking lot. Of course, I didn’t ask for her name or YouTube channel. Queen Anne would kill me on the spot if she knew I talked to a college-aged woman in the field without her chaperoning. After I finished shooting, I hiked back to the parking lot, where Her Majesty was waiting in the car. If I was lucky, her nose was buried in her Kindle reader, and she didn’t notice anything. Before I could say a thing, she blurted out, “I asked that girl if I had to go rescue you.”

“What did she say?”

“She said you were happily wandering around snapping pictures, and you’d be there until you ran out of film.”

It was only then that I realized I was a bit hot, so I started the Jeep and guzzled some water in the cool air conditioning before driving back to Flagstaff. So far, there are no new YouTube Wupatki videos, but I’ll keep looking while I dream of mermaids.

You can see a larger version of Ancient Door on its Webpage by clicking here. Next week, I’ll show my last shot from Lomaki, so be sure to come back and see what we find.

Till next time
Jw

BTW:

It’s Thanksgiving week, so Queen Anne and I wish you a happy and safe turkey day.

Lomaki Picuter of the Week

Lomaki - The crooked walls look as if the fierce Northern Arizona winds will blow them over.
Lomaki – The crooked walls look like the fierce Northern Arizona winds will blow them over.

In the half-century that I’ve called Arizona home, I can’t count the times that I’ve traveled thru Flagstaff and then north on Highway U.S. 89. I travel that route to get to the Grand Canyon, Lee’s Ferry, Lake Powell, Monument Valley, Utah, or Colorado. My best guess would be once a year on average. Sometimes I even stop to take pictures along the way.

With that many trips, you’d think I’d pay no mind to the scenery, but that’s not true. There’s always something new. There’s one location that makes my jaw drop, no matter how many times I see it. I’m talking about the view at Sunset Crater Pass I wrote about last month. It’s an in-your-face example of something I learned in a college geography course: mountains affect climate.

The climate on the south side of the San Francisco Peaks is the polar opposite of that on the north. As you travel to Flagstaff from Phoenix, you climb into the pines, and the temperature can drop as much as 30° along the way. As fronts move north from the Gulf in the summer or west from the coast in winter, the mountains wring moisture from the air as it climbs the slopes. After passing over the mountains, the air is dry and picks up pressure on the way down. Dry air heats faster than humid air. The phenomenon creates a rain shadow on the mountain’s leeward side. The next time you travel north of Flagstaff, stop your car at the pass and take a look back—trees. Then turn to the north again—trees kept away.

Now that you know how mountains work, it’s easy to understand why the early Pueblo Tribes living at Wupatki lived in rock dwellings instead of log cabins. Amazingly, the Indians still used timbers to span the walls and hold up a roof. That means they had to drag lumber off the mountains by hand. They built their structures before the Spanish arrived, so they didn’t have horses.

This week we’re looking at one of the bigger pueblos in the National Monument—Lomaki. That’s a Hopi word that translates into English as “Beautiful House.” Anthropologists have partially restored its two-story walls. As you walk through the ruins, you begin to appreciate the ancient people’s masonry skills and tenacity. They must have had to rent scaffolding for walls that size at A-Z Rentals in town. It was either that or standing on one another’s shoulders. You’d do the same thing.

In this week’s picture, titled Lomaki, you get a good idea of the wall height. The windows are at eye level. A peculiar thing you notice in this shot is the walls are leaning. I’m not sure if the scientist put that feature in on purpose or if they weren’t as skilled as the original Pueblo builders. As a photographer, I have a thing about lines that aren’t level or square. Oceans don’t run downhill, so I wince whenever I see a seascape with a crooked horizon. On my first visit to Lomaki decades ago, its tilted walls jumped out at me. They look like a good wind will blow them over—and this area of Arizona is exceptionally windy. However, on this year’s visit, the walls were still standing and didn’t seem any worse, so maybe they’ll remain long after I’ve gone.

You can see a larger version of Lomaki on its Webpage by clicking here. Next week, we’ll walk around Lomaki and see its details. Come back then and see what we find.

Till next time
Jw

BTW:

The calendar cut-off day is Tuesday, so if you are interested, place your order.