At long last the rain has come to the central coast of California coloring the hills with green.

From the Painted Desert we drove to Chinle to see Canyon de Chelly. There is a paved road that follows the north side of the canyon with several turn outs allowing opportunities to shoot from above. This was late in the afternoon and the sun and clouds created wonderful shadows. The photos do a very good job of representing how majestic it is but one still needs to see it first hand to fully appreciate the beauty.
I spent one and half days shooting in the Painted Desert east of Tuba City, AZ. Other than the natural beauty of the area one of the most remarkable things is that I never saw another person; I don’t mean just photographers but anyone. These locations were reachable on dirt roads off the main highways, and I did hike a little once I parked, but not a sole was there. Pretty rare these days.
Ubehebe Crater is located at the north tip of the Cottonwood Mountains. The crater is half a mile (one kilometer) wide and 500 to 777 feet (150 to 237 m) deep. The age of the crater is estimated from 2,000 to 7,000 years old.”Ubehebe” (pronounced YOU-bee-HEE-bee) is a Timbisha Native American word meaning “Big basket in the rock.”
Zabriskie Point is four miles East of Furnace Creek Lodge on Highway 190. There is a parking lot and the hike is up hill but only 1/4 of a mile. These badlands are developed on a mud-stone foundation. Fine-grained sediments of silt and clay were deposited in one of Death Valley’s prehistoric lakes, then were buried by still more sediment, and finally compressed and weakly cemented to form the soft rock called mud stone.