Santa Fe, New Mexico November 2001 In November, 2001, we drove across the southwest to spend a week in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This trip took us across three states (California, Arizona and New Mexico) and through the Mojave Desert We passed many Joshua Trees as we drove through reaches of California. It is a tree that lives a very long time... The desert begins at the eastern side of the California coastal range of mountains, about 100 miles from where we live near the coast of the pacific Ocean. It stretches across the three states and gains in altitude from about 2500 feet to 6000 feet above sea level. After two days of driving through the desert and over the mountains that punctuate the desert plains we arrived in Santa Fe. It is the capital of New Mexico and is a major center of art. So much art! We have never seen such a concentration of really good sculptures, painted works, collages, folk art, jewelry and we enjoyed wandering through some of the many galleries. The city is built in the southwest adobe style which creates a warm, welcoming feeling because of the low-lying buildings and the many earth tones used as colors... At night the city is lit up with "lumineria" placed on walls and roof edges... The artwork in Santa Fe is truly wonderful. Not only are there galleries located in all parts of the downtown area but many sculptures are placed outside for all to enjoy... Jon's brother, Howie, and his friend Kathryn drove down from Denver to visit... Near Santa Fe is Bandolier National Monument, a canyon where ruins of the ancient pueblo peoples are preserved. We spent a day driving in the mountains, visiting Los Alamos (the site of the atomic bomb research and, today, a major U.S. research center)... and at the monument. Native Americans lived in cave homes and in adobe homes built on the floor of the canyon. The homes were abandoned almost 700 years ago and the people moved into what are today's pueblos... Returning to California, driving westward along I-40, with occasional side trips onto old Route 66 which parallels the interstate, we stopped to visit the painted Desert and petrified Forest in Arizona. The desert does look as if someone had taken a giant paint brush and swept it across the land- actually we were looking at millions of years of geologic time and the colors represent the various deposits left in the ancient waters that covered what is now desert... Directly next to the painted Desert is the petrified Forest. It is an area where trees grew beside the ancient lake and where rivers washed fallen trees into the lake. Over the millennia the trees were buried in silt and slowly the silica of the dirt replaced the cells of the trees turning the wood into agate rock. Erosion over time is exposing the tree-rocks so that we could see thousands of petrified trees... We made one more stop at the Meteor Crater- the most well preserved impact crater formed by a meteorite in the world... Then back to Ojai. To return to the LambertLand home page click on "LambertLand" at the top of this page Copyright (c) 2000 Eric Lambert.  All rights reserved. Site design by Eric Lambert.