Heading Southwest

On Friday, we took our friends, Bob and Molly, to Inscription Rock and El Malpais National Monuments.

Inscription Rock, also called El Morro (Spanish for bluff), is a landmark in this dry Southwest high desert. Travelers from early Indian tribes, to Spanish explorers, to wagon train settlers heading West, to Army Calvary and to government surveyors have stopped at El Morro.

The reason they stopped is there is a pool in a crevice of the bluff that always has water. It is not fed by a natural spring, but rather by rainfall and runoff from melting snow on the top of El Morro. This area gets a fair amount of snow in the winter. The pool is in a secluded, shady place so not much of the water ever evaporates.

The reason it is called Inscription Rock is everyone who travelled through here left their mark on the soft sandstone of El Morro - everything from Indian petroglyphs etched into the rock to elaborate script testaments to the glory of the traveler.

El Malpais (Spanish for The Bad/Evil Country) is a unique mixture of sandstone bluffs, one beautiful arch called La Ventana in the picture to the left (Spanish for window), and black lava beds - some only about 3,000 years old.

We had been to Inscription Rock before, but El Malpais was new to us.

We were surprised when we went there. We knew there would be lava beds - the maps indicated that. We didn't expect the beautiful bluffs and the arch that we saw.

Following are some more pictures from our trip and a video recap.

Pictures from Inscription Rock...

Pictures from El Malpais...