PETFO AIR, The road out.

Rain and windmills near Amarillo.

   We took our normal run out West- Up through Texas to I40 in the Panhandle, over into New Mexico for a stop at Santa Rosa.  Up early for breakfast at Josephs and then on into Albuquerque (through thick fog until we came over the pass), lunch at the Old Double Rainbow on Central, then hit Whole Foods for bits and pieces.  Katie and I went north on 550 toward Cuba to visit Pueblo Pintado under rainy skies and then over to Kin Ya'a, both Chaco outliers.  Roads were pretty good though it was windy.  A nine-rainbow day as the storms blew through in the afternoon.  We dropped back to I-40 at Crownpoint and headed West for Petrified Forest in the early evening.

Pueblo Pintado

Pueblo Pintado.  There were some OK shots but I didn't shake out my 5X7 in the wind, instead spending time looking and being in the West for our first day.

Some terrific corners and fascades though....

By the time we left I was beginning to regret not putting the Hasselblad to hand, though it turned out I would need every bit of 12 rolls of film for my other project at the park.

It must have been a magnificent place when it was up and running.

Terrific site for a great house.

Two of these spots are reviewed in this excellent piece with work by Kirk Gittings.

We rainbowed our way over to Kin Ya'a to the West, just South of Crownpoint.

Handling the Kin Ya'a gate.

Not much left at Kin Ya'a, and that's a shame.  This is the vestige of a four-story kiva/tower.

The natives are represented at Gallup.

It's a slow transition from inside the deep forest and rolling hills of Smith County to the West.  Takes several hours to get past the DFW metroplex, then up through the North Texas plains to Lubbock, then across the Cholla/Raven line just before the New Mexican border, then past Tucumcari and into Santa Rosa.  You go to sleep in a landscape much different than where you woke up.  Higher, dryer, dramatically different in light and ecology.  It requires a different photo esthetic as well.  The volume of space and quality of light as well as the physical forms of the geology must be accounted for.  I had to learn to adjust from being inside a forest- basically shooting room interiors with no horizon like and a ceiling on them, to being a marble on a pane of glass.