The Kaibab Plateau

North Rim, Grand Canyon, Arizona

Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?

Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day

The sun is up, the sky is blue

It's beautiful and so are you

 Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?

-The Beatles

 

The Kaibab Plateau on the North Rim  is at an elevation of about 9,000 feet....it gets as much as 200 inches of snowfall and twice the annual precipitation of the South Rim.

I saw dozens of mule deer and a few coyotes on my dawn walk this morning....the I-pod was playing "Dear  Prudence" (the Grateful Dead version) and the sky was blue and the dawn sunbeams were making chiaroscuro in the tall pines.

 The Federal Government decided to make this area a deer preserve about 100 years ago and killed off all the predators (coyotes, wolves, bobcats, etc.)....the deer population exploded to about 100,000 and began a process of mass starvation....the ecosystem was badly damaged by overgrazing....not good to mess with mother nature...

We took a couple of hundred Pix at the North Rim yesterday....just close your eyes and click...you can't get a bad picture....

We had dinner and watched the sunset at the Lodge....

We got out of the car on the drive home and turned off the headlights....the Milky Way was a broad, bright swath in the summer sky....light pollution is almost non-existent here....

Somehow we have TV on satellite though the pines in our campground....I'm pulling for Andy Murray....

Bottomless Lake

Bottomless Lake State Park, New Mexico 

The New Mexico high plains: a mile high, no atmospheric moisture, no moon yet, no human lights for twenty miles, no cities for 200 miles and no visible air pollution. The Southwest offers the best star-gazing in the US.

Outside, at 8.00PM local time with no night vision, the things you can see from any city jump out. There's Venus high in the evening sky, the Navigator's Triangle overhead, Sagittarius the Teapot, the Chair of Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper and Polaris.

Night vision slowly fills in and the background clouds with so many stars that it becomes difficult to find these constellations. A wide cloudy swath of millions of faint stars glows from tens of thousands of light years distant.

Then the moon rises and its bright light dims the Milky Way once again. This is my first time to see it. How small we are. How transitory.

At 5.00am, Orion is up and the fire of Aniliam glows like a diamond to the brain from the center of the belt. It looks like Jupiter or Saturn is near the moon. My companion wanted to pack my telescope. I should listen to her more.