Bisti moonrise at dusk.
Bisti moonrise.
Lisa at Bisti.
Lisa towering over a hoodoo at Bisti.
I have to catch a cold once in a while. This is true despite my frequent use of hand sanitizers and my inherent Iowaness. It happened on 12/29/09. I felt it coming on in the afternoon, but fought it down until after swimming 3000 yards that evening. It was all downhill from there. I shambled into work on 12/30/09, but not too determined to be get much done. I had a single memo to write, and then I packed it in for a long day of sitting by the fire alternately dozing or reading the book my parents gave me for Christmas, "Winter in Madrid." I have not blasted through a book in a very long time--not since I started trying to learn Spanish. Back in the old days, it was not uncommon for me to plow through many books each year. As I approached the end of each book, I became more and more withdrawn and somewhat surly if asked to do something simple like answering a question about what I'd like to eat for dinner. This has mostly disappeared since I switched to reading in Spanish, because it takes me months to crawl through a book.
I enjoyed "Winter in Madrid" partly on account of my interest in Madrid, but also because it includes a lot of history about the Spanish Civil War and the years afterwards. This bit of European history has always been a bit brushed over in the US, but it is extremely fascinating. Franco's victory in the Civil War led to Spain existing in a sort of time capsule up until the late 70's. I now wish I could've seen that Spain, because modern Spain has turned its back on the Franco era with remarkable speed. In just the ten years between my initial and most recent visits, I can see old traditions fading fast. It appears to me that "pure" Spanish culture is now rapidly modernizing and globalizing so fast that it will not be recognizable in another twenty years. The iron-fisted effect of the Franco years led to what seems to me to be a sort of museum country as I read about it and hear about it from those who were there. I'm not saying this is a good thing, since so many people were so profoundly oppressed for so long.
Back to my point: After I came down with this cold, I took a day off, December 30th. The next day, New Year's Eve, I was already scheduled to be off so that Lisa and I could run up north for a long weekend. Our hopes were to leave town early on the 31st to visit Chaco Canyon followed by the Bisti Badlands at moonrise to watch the blue moon rise on the last day of the year. My cold interfered, delaying departure arrangements, as did Lisa's job, but we managed to get away in time to get up to arrive at Bisti before sunset.
Bisti is about a remote a location as you can get to in the Lower 48 states. Despite this, it has some notoriety among photographers and desert rats. Despite a first glance that might lead you to believe it is a barren wasteland, a closer look will prove you right but with the caveat that it is also really cool, highly-photogenic barren wasteland. It makes mediocre photographers seem great, especially if you're there at sunset (I wouldn't know about sunrise, but it's probably a good time to be there too). Because of it's notoriety, we ran into a young woman and her presumed father visiting while we were there. My guess is that they were Japanese, but if not, then from some other Asian country. I'm going to pretend that they were Japanese only because they met the stereotype: highly goal-oriented and gadget-happy. It was the first time I heard Japanese spoken out there in the middle of nowhere.
The girl was very friendly. She was very interested in seeing the "cracked eggs" formation. She seemed quite surprised that we'd never heard of them. She said they were a "very famous" formation at Bisti. She seemed quite disappointed that she couldn't find them and that they had only seen a lot of rocks that look like mushrooms (aka "hoodoos"). It is this disappointment that leads to me to label her as a "goal-oriented," because to me, Bisti is all about wandering around on your own without a map to see what you see. In this way, it is all a surprise, and each strange thing you find is all your own. Part of the pleasure is the lack of trails, guidebooks, signs, and maps. She offered us GPS coordinates to the cracked eggs as we headed out into the wilderness, but we were short on time. I didn't want to spend the time fighting a GPS when we had a blue moon to scope out. I'm not sure why she couldn't find them, having the coordinates and all. Maybe her batteries died.
Naturally, I was curious about the cracked eggs. I'm goal-oriented too. I may or may not have seen them on one of my visits to Bisti, but I can't say for sure. Fortunately, I am also gadget-happy too, and so I was able to put internet to its intended use (i.e. answering trivial questions). Here is a link to a picture of the cracked eggs: http://www.naturescapes.net/012008/tv0108.htm
As for us, we didn't get any super-magnificent photos this time around, but we got a few which were interesting. They're up above somewhere waiting for you to click on them to see the full-sized photo. We also got to see a fine blue moonrise.
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