Charleston to San Diego: Day 9
Today was the end of a very long trip through New Mexico. We found several more living ghost towns on our way through the mountains. I had hopes to work on more of my hexagon quilt but the winding roads prevented work on that for most of the day. In Glenwood we got very distracted by the park signs for Catwalk Trail, catwalks that take you up a canyon to the towns source of water. Finding the park was interesting. We followed the signs through the town and out past it for several winding miles. Thinking it might be just around the bend we kept going. Finally we arrived at a river ford, one of the many moments of this trip where I thought how awesome it would be to have a jeep. Anson jumped across because he couldn't wait to take photos of the remaining mill foundation uphill, so I drove across and parked.
The temperature was quite cool with some ice in spots along the creek. We had the place to ourselves for a little while.
Most of the catwalk was unfortunately closed because of a fire back in October. The bridge that took you to the other side of the creek was completely missing boards. Thankfully there was a second trail on our side.
Look at the interesting seeds I found. They were squished on the trail everywhere, a pokey outside, but once broken, they fell apart into soft dandelion-like seeds.
Out here in the desert we haven't seen much wildlife, a few birds but nothing else really. Anson spotted this little lizard first and we chased him around for a little while.
Once off the dirt path and onto the metal catwalk we ran into another cute little critter. We stood and watched each other for quite some time. He would look around and squint into the sun. A friend (@WeWanderers) identified it for me as a ringtail, in the same family as raccoons. I sadly didn't have my zoom lens on me otherwise I would have gotten a closer view for you.
Doesn't it remind you a little of the Myst games? (yes, I'm a nerd!) The catwalk continued but sadly we could not. The path was shut with a gate and we were very tempted to jump it but were running out of daylight to see the Petrified Forest, our next stop. If you want to read more about the catwalk and it's history you can read about it here.
We did make it to the Petrified Forest park entrance before it closed, with roughly an hour in the park to see everything. Since we drove up through New Mexico we entered the park at the south entrance off of 180. I'm glad we did as it allowed us to see one of the largest petrified logs first.
I found the detail of a petrified log quite interesting. Some of it still even looks like wood.
Some areas in the park had simple pull offs. Here is a field of hundreds of fallen logs strewn out over the desert. How they got here and what it must have looked like with a forest here really gets your imagination going.
Before the concrete was added this log spanned this little ravine which has now eroded even more.
Some of these shots I hope to turn into prints once I have the time to do a bit more editing on them.
And I will end with my favorite photo of the day... Anson photographing with the sun behind him.
