Skip to main content

Arizona Road Trip


I am currently on vacation in Arizona. It's really interesting here. For one, there are cool plants here that aren't where I live - like palm trees, and cacti taller than houses. For another, the weather is really nice; sunny  most of the time, and not too cold.


To get to the place we're staying, my family drove for two days, from Colorado through New Mexico to Arizona. Here are some of the photos I took along the way (just click to view):


Colorado




View looking up the side of a mountain

Mesa Verde
In these next pictures of Colorado, notice the "roots" of the mountain. They were likely carved by running rain-water.



The following picture is of a butte I saw. Pardon the poor quality; the car was shaking like an earthquake for much of the trip.


Arizona

This picture is of some mountains far in the distance. The mountains are likely in Utah, but I'm not sure whether everything else is in Arizona or New Mexico.


At first while we were in Arizona, we drove through a lot of flat, dry desert with occasional mesas in the distance.


In the following picture, you can see layers in the rock, that built up over time. Also notice the spiky rocks.


When I looked in the distance behind our van, I often saw a mirage in the road. It looks like water, but it's only an illusion. Now the danger is this: if you're used to the mirages, and get to a flooded area, you might just think it's another mirage; you might drive through the water going 75 mph, and if it's deep enough, you could get in a bad wreck.




Cacti. Lots of cacti. They might not look big, but they are. Some are taller than houses, even. This was north of Phoenix.

A gorge of the Little Colorado River. The Little Colorado River eventually joins with the Colorado River, which is the river that flows through the Grand Canyon. The photo was taken at dusk in a jerking car; otherwise, it would have a better quality.


For the next post in the Arizona Road Trip series, go to http://greatmst.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-grand-canyon.html
Labels:

Comments

  1. MaryAnne FinkelsteinFebruary 19, 2013 at 1:39 AM

    Wow, nice photos, Thomas! I suppose you can see the real thing so know if they don't look perfect, but to me the quality seems very good.

    Would it be possible to include some photos with people in them?

    -Mary Anne

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ThomasFebruary 19, 2013 at 3:30 PM

      Unfortunately, I didn't get very many chances to take photos of people until the driving part of the trip was over.

      After the driving was over, I took some photos of my siblings and myself standing next to giant saguaro cacti; I'll put some of those in one of my next posts.

      Delete
  2. MaryAnne FinkelsteinMarch 5, 2013 at 11:21 AM

    That makes sense! I look forward to your further posts.

    I grew some saguaro from seed once; they got to about an inch high and then I had to go away for a while and they died through lack of care. I read a very funny blog about doing genetic experiments with saguaro (funny because of how slowly they mature).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the others. I HAD to
6 comments
Read more

Pluto No Longer on the Horizon

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After  (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man
2 comments
Read more

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c
6 comments
Read more