Church Rock and Wilson Arch
We followed US 191 north on October 7th to get to Moab, Utah. Pre-trip research had made me aware the route would take us past Church Rock, and sure enough, it hadn’t moved. What my research didn’t turn up anything about was Wilson Arch, 14 miles further north. Call it a prelude to Arches National Park, one of the scenic destinations we were going to Moab for.
Between Church Rock and Wilson Arch we’d made a detour to Newspaper Rock, where
the shaded autumn vegetation was so pretty I can’t resist showing you another picture of it.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
More foliar red
This latest look at fiery fall foliage is from December 26th along Adelphi Dr., where a flameleaf sumac (Rhus lanceolata) put on a backlit performance. Soft clouds in a blue sky didn’t hurt. I also experimented with a closer, darker, moodier, and more abstract approach sans clouds and sky.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park
After spending some time on scenic Potash Rd. outside Moab, Utah, on October 8th, we doubled back and swung around to go to Canyonlands National Park. In addition to canyons galore, the park also features Mesa Arch. Here’s a view off to the side:
And below’s a view from Mesa Arch showing some of the many canyons that give the national park its name.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Another small but still bright red
In addition to the supercharged red that the overhead leaves on two Texas oak trees in Great Hills Park offered up on December 20th, down close to the earth the inherently smaller leaflets of a southern dewberry vine (Rubus trivialis) were busy putting on their own little show for anyone willing to lie on the ground and look up to see the backlit huefulness. (A couple of dictionaries offer hueful, so huefulness is a natural extension.)
And why not throw in another take on the nearby oaks?
For that matter, why not still another?
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Monument Valley’s “Totem Pole”
You know how people love to name geological formations. This one that we saw at far northern Arizona’s Monument Valley on October 6th has come to be known as the Totem Pole. According to AI:
The Totem Pole is one of the most distinctive geological landmarks in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, straddling the border of Arizona and Utah. Unlike the broad buttes the valley is famous for, this formation is an extremely slender sandstone spire, representing the final stage of erosion for what was once a massive butte.
Key Facts & Features
- Dimensions: It is the tallest and skinniest spire of its kind, standing approximately 381 feet (116 meters) tall with a total elevation of roughly 5,620 feet above sea level.
- Composition: Formed primarily from De Chelly Sandstone, these layers are the remnants of ancient sand dunes from the Permian period, roughly 260 million years ago.
- Cultural Significance: Located on Navajo Nation land, it is part of a cluster of formations that include the Yei Bi Chei (a group of spires named after Navajo spiritual beings).
The strong shadow makes me think we could also cast the spire as the gnomon of a sundial.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
A small but welcomingly bright red
The native holly called agarita (Mahonia trifoliolata) offered up some welcomingly red
(but as menacingly needled as ever) leaflets in Great Hills Park on December 20th.
I’d say that the central leaflet shown here was a little over an inch long.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Back to the Talimena National Scenic Byway
On the morning of November 10th we returned to the Talimena National Scenic Byway on a second quest for colorful fall foliage after the cold and overcast late afternoon of the previous day. This time sunshine and a clear blue sky made a difference.
In several places trees and other plants not only blocked the view of colorful foliage but also kept me from walking through to it, so I did something different by letting the brightest leaves stay in the background and occupy a relatively small portion of the photograph that the shadowed trees in the foreground dominated.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Oh, that red!
In response to the question “How did red become a Christmas color,” AI gave this answer: “Red became a Christmas color through ancient pagan winter solstice traditions using holly (red berries, green leaves), medieval Christian symbolism (blood of Christ, St. Nicholas’ robes, paradise plays’ apples), and was cemented in modern culture by 1930s Coca-Cola ads featuring a jolly Santa in red, all combining historical, religious, and commercial influences.”
I can tell you with assurance, more assurance than AI offers, that long before Coca-Cola, even long before millennia-old pagan winter solstice traditions, Texas oaks were doing their red thing at this time of year. Four days ago I went down to Great Hills Park and ended up taking 200 pictures split between two red oaks a minute or two apart by foot that I’d photographed on and off in other Decembers.
As on those earlier picture-taking forays, I took advantage of backlighting from
a mostly clear sky to intensify the red and adjacent warm colors in the oaks’ leaves.
I experimented a fair amount, often playing up the contrast
between light and dark, and going for abstractions of various types.
Hail, translucence!
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Less-traditional views of giant saguaros
On October 22nd along Arizona’s Highway 88 east of Phoenix I stopped for many a giant saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea). The damaged one above made me think I was looking at a variant of a giant Easter Island stone head. Note all the cholla cactus around it. An hour earlier I’d seen a saguaro with a rainbow low in the sky over the nearby mountains.
And here from the following sunny day in Phoenix is a disintegrating saguaro.
With a little or more likely a lot of imagination you might see the top of it as an eagle.
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“The United States of America, arguably the least racist country on the planet, continues to draw would-be immigrants of all backgrounds from all over the world. Unfortunately the U.S. may now be turning away too many of them, but new research affirms that the aspiring entrants are not crazy—this really is a land where your ethnicity does not dictate your success.”
Keep reading James Freeman’s article to learn about the results of extensive research conducted by economists Oded Galor of Brown University and Daniel Wainstock of Oxford University. The two examined economic inequality across ethnic groups and compared it to inequality within each of various ethnic groups. Despite the seemingly endless prattling from some quarters that the United States this far into the 21st century is a “systemically racist” or “structurally racist” country, the economists’ research disproved that:
“Within-group inequality accounts for a staggering 96% of total income variation, while between-group inequality contributes only 4%. This striking and robust finding upends the prevailing view that cultural, historical, or institutional differences between ethnic groups are the primary forces behind U.S. inequality. Instead, it highlights the central and overlooked role of factors that differentiate individuals within ethnic groups—such as unequal opportunities and heterogeneity in productive attributes—as the principal drivers of contemporary disparities.”
Astonishing!
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
On the way to Canyonlands National Park
After spending some time on scenic Potash Rd. on October 8th, we doubled back to the northern fringe of Moab. From there, as we closed the distance to Canyonlands National Park, whose entrance lay 28 miles away along US 191 and then UT 313, scenic things kept coming our way.
You can imagine some of them, like the two above, as the ruins of once mighty fortresses.
Without any context, the tight framing in the third picture might lead you to think you’re looking at a close view of a heavily weathered tombstone in an old cemetery. In fact I’ve seen broken-down and no-longer-decipherable ones like that from the 1800s in Austin. In the last view I zoomed way out to provide the context, where the size of the vegetation clues you in to how massive the stone domes really are.
© 2025 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
