Just got back from an excursion to the Black River on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. 2 day camping trip up toward the Point of Pines Lake. Beautiful country up there, and nice and remote so you don't get the weekend-warrior crowds out of Phoenix glutting the place with loud music and expensive motor homes. The road to where we camped is about 20 mi of primitive jeep trail, and includes 5 fairly deep water crossings, so 4x4 is a must. [grin] We saw maybe 5 other vehicles the entire weekend, and 2 were tribal rangers. Anyway, I took a boatload of photos but noticed that there were a bunch of photos still on my memory card from a couple months ago, so I grabbed them all. There are a couple I was going to post back in February, when it actually honest-to-God snowed here in the valley. That's something you don't see very often.

Snow on the cactus:



These were taken about 30 mi. from my house, just a bit off the highway towards Globe. So, almost not in the valley anymore. You don't really get true snow like this in the heart of the valley. Downtown Phoenix, for example, won't get it. But in the slightly higher elevations toward the edges, and on the long climbs out, you can get it occasionally.

These next photos were taken on the Navajo Indian reservation up north, between Flagstaff and the Utah border. Up in that area there is a range of cliffs many miles long, red sandstone and very tall. They form a sort of corner or nexus, and near the apex of that nexus is the Navajo Bridge crossing Marble Canyon. (Follow Marble Canyon west and it turns into the Grand Canyon. Follow it east and it turns into Glen Canyon and Lake Powell, over by Page.) I had occasion to drive home to Wyoming in May, and that is when I took these (as well as over a hundred others, of course. Digital cameras are fun.)





And finally, these are a few shots from Black River, taken yesterday morning around 7:00 AM. My camera is not fancy, so it can not capture the fantastic, ethereal quality of the lighting very accurately, but rest assured it was amazing. [grin]





Wait. Game programming? What's that?