Precariously Perched But Holding

Chiricahua National Monument

Travel opens the heart, invites one to take photos and write a travelogue. So recently we loaded up the motorhome and drove to the Chiricahua National Monument. It's supposed to be a wonderland of rocks and I had never been there. Surely this novel landscape would inspire me to write something interesting.

Well, the Chiricahua Mountains are indeed a wonderland of rocks, but I found myself staring, wondering what to say about a static, rocky landscape so hot that even the insects were silent. It didn't inspire me the way lakes and rivers do; it didn't steal my heart and invite me in as the ocean does. So what could I write about this forbidding, ancient place?

Yes, once there was movement and great upheaval – a volcano so hot it created rhyolite tuff, a fine-grained rock composed of quartz and potassium feldspar, lava flung up from a twelve-mile caldera in a vast pyroclastic eruption. Even today, Hollywood with all its special effects could not begin to re-imagine the magnificence of that cataclysm. 

The lava hardened as it cooled and twenty-seven million years later, the stone has weathered and fissured. Water, wind and time have sculpted a land of spectacular towers. Massive and angular, undoubtedly holy, they are so completely themselves that I have nothing to add.

This is slot canyon country, with slumps and a natural bridge that no human can cross. The mountains are fancifully adorned with pinnacles and spires and perfectly balanced rocks that someday must fall to the power of water and wind and time.

If elements of this landscape were to move real-time, I would not want to see it. I need those rocks to stay there, balanced just so on their impossibly tiny bases, believing that if I were to come back in another twenty-seven million years, there'd still be something to see.