Painted Desert, Arizona

Painted Desert, Arizona

Big Disappointment

Wednesday, June 13, 2018 – Painted Desert

Windy, 95°

“Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” 

I will have to say that driving the several hundred miles through “The Painted Desert” was a total disappointment.  Leaving the Grand Canyon National Park you descend onto the Colorado Plateau which is a high plain covered with scrub brush, mounds of sandy like dirt (thousands of them), and the occasional road runner scurrying about.  Looking at a map it basically shows that once you leave the Park driving east, you are in “The Painted Desert” for several hundred miles.

Not sure I would call this The Painted Desert but only thing of color found

False advertising, I believe, as driving across the Navajo Nation land there was only one place that had any color to the rock or mesa formations. That was as you entered the area around Yuba City but there was only one “painted” hillside. 

Painted Hillside

Driving for several hundred miles across the “plains” there were a few farms, some old cows and horses that looked very much like they needed a meal or too.  No hay or grass to be found anywhere mostly sandy, gravelly dirt with some sagebrush or cactus mixed in.  The road was extremely bumpy making for an uncomfortable ride.

Road to Nowhere (See bumps in the road) AZ

The intent was to spend the day driving through the Painted Desert with a stop at the Petrified Forest and then on to Winslow to the “Standing on the Corner” Park where there are now two statues of Jackson Browne & Glen Frey, a Red Flat Bed Ford, and a large Route 66 emblem painted on the street intersection.

Needless to say, after a couple hundred miles of bumps and watching a thunderstorm in the distance grow larger, it was time to turn toward the storm and head to Winslow.  No Painted Desert and No Petrified Forest today.