[You may view a map of Petrified Forest National Park in PDF format.]

We got up early enough to make it into Petrified Forest National Park when the gates opened at 8:00. There was a really low cloud layer and there was frost on the ground. I had my normal breakfast. We left at 8:00 in the Jeep and ...

Entered Petrified Forest National Park. (You may view a map of Petrified Forest National Park in PDF format.) We stopped near Mile 24 to photograph some interesting erosion patterns near the road with frost at the top of each ridge. Then we stopped a mile or so down the road to photograph some frost-covered rocks (far left). I had a blast shooting various compositions with my 90 TS and 24 TS. The image to the left was taken with the 90 Tilt-Shift, and I used the tilt motion to align the plane of focus along the rocks and sagebrush.

Then we went to Blue Mesa and stopped on the north side of the loop. There was still frost on the sagebrush, and the light was better than yesterday. The image near left is looking down from the edge of the mesa into the drainage of the badlands.

We went to Puerco Pueblo ruins in the park to photograph the petroglyphs. There's a large collection of them, including the iconic bird petroglyph (left).

We headed back towards the southern entrance of the park and stopped at the gift shop to look around. They had some very nice t-shirts and hippy-chick tops.

We returned to the RV around 1:00! I downloaded the images I took this morning while having lunch of ham and Swiss on rye followed by a banana and an apple. I downselected the images from this morning in Capture One (C1). I left by myself in the Jeep around 3:20 and ...

Returned to Petrified Forest National Park. I spent the whole afternoon photographing the badlands just north of the museum. The blue sky with white puffy clouds was spectacular!

I returned to the RV at 5:15 and downloaded the images I took this afternoon. We turned on the generator around 6:25 for an hour.

I had dinner around 6:35 of leftover mole chicken. J wasn't hungry and just wanted to have popcorn later.

After dinner, I selected and processed images for the blog. I had some O.P. Anderson Aquavit while working up a blog entry. I helped J select images to submit to the Nature's Best Photography competition.