Sunday, August 19, 2007

A Dry and Crunchy Lazy Sunday

Ohio is like the rest of the country when it comes to receiving rain--it's feast or famine. The area where we're staying seems to be in a "no rain" zone, while Cincinnati to the south of us and north Ohio have at times been inundated with rain storms.

The grass now crunches when I walk on it in my rambles with Patches. The thicket that separates our campground from the mobile home park up the hill has lost enough vegetation and leaves that I can now see the trailers up there. The creek bed is so full of dead leaves that I'll never get a chance to take a picture of the deer since they will hear us coming long before we come into view.

Therefore today's Lazy Sunday pictures are of dry,dried or dusty things.


The orange mound is a formation of calcified hot springs water that has built up over the millennium. The mound gets its colors from the various minerals and chemicals in the surrounding rock and in the sun it shines with a thin glaze of water. This was in Yellowstone National Park.


Dry mud beds and built up mineral deposits create a terraced effect on this hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.


This male roadrunner was attempting to avoid having his picture taken, running into the dry brush of the Arizona desert. He didn't know about zoom lens.


Can you even begin to imagine what the early pioneers had to go through to cross the western deserts of the U.S. in an attempt to get to "a better land" west of the Rockies? This old ferry sits in the dust near Three Island Crossing in Idaho near the Oregon Trail.


It was fun to walk the Oregon Trail, knowing that we could go back to the comfort of our air conditioned truck and trailer. The folks who walked this route on foot and by covered wagon had a miserable time of it.


Rocks, cactus, more rock, more cactus. It is dry enough here for the landscape of Silly Mountain in Apache Junction to be at home here in Ohio. How can everything be so dry when the air is so humid?


I needed some relief, so I've included a picture of the beach at St. Augustine. Ahh, feel the ocean spray!

3 comments:

Jim Macdonald said...

Interesting you put Mammoth Hot Springs in the dry and crusty - crusty certainly! Dry...the colors you saw aren't just chemicals; they are living algae that live in different temperatures of water. The temperature of the water determines the color. Without water, you don't have color (as you probably saw from the hot springs that didn't have colors). The springs change their location frequently over time; water and volcanism (the sun isn't the prime heater here; though of course, without sun, there is no heat anywhere!)

Anyhow, thought your readers might enjoy knowing more about some of the very unusual features in Yellowstone.

Cheers,
Jim

Nancy said...

I don't know what's worse... dry and crunchy or soft and squishy. Even after several days of no rain, the ground's still wet here.

Anonymous said...

Just about an hour ago we had a gentle thunderstorm (sounds a bit like an oxymoron) pass through. The air is now so fresh. Loved the photos. Would you believe I have never experienced a true desert.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...