This photo was taken late in the afternoon – a family was out herding the cattle to another area – by horse and 4-wheeler.

Grass is growing in our yard. It is lovely and hopefully will keep the Roxie mudtracks down to a minimum.

Yesterday we traveled to El Morro, a huge rock formation with a pool of water at it’s base. Used to take 9 or 10 days for the explorers and early settlers to travel from Albuquerque to Gallup and this was a stop because it had this great water. Some early explorers carved inscriptions on the rocks and of course they are still there. We enjoyed reading about the inscriptors!

Later we traveled over to El Malpais with I believe means bad country. Well it was certainly beautiful country. There is a huge valley covered in black lava  just huge. There were as many as 30 volcanoes in the area and the lava flowed to the same valley. We took about three hikes (could not have done that before my weight loss) and enjoyed climbing on some high cliffs – you could actually drive right to the top of them. There were also some lava tubes, some collapsed and some not – but we needed a 4-wheel drive vehicle with high clearance to get there. Maybe later.

We felt very alone in El Malpais – saw no more than 10 folks in the entire park. We did pass maybe 20 cars on the road. Seemed to be a really remote area.

I am posting a few photos. 

The tall rock formations of El Morro.

El Malpais - on the top of the rocks. I was almost dizzy.

I aksed Tom to hold tight to Roxy - cause it was a long way down.

Here's me and Tom. That is the lava field in the valley behind us.

This is La Ventura Natural Arch - eroded from sandstsone from the era of dinosaurs