...we woke up to a sprinkling of rain in the back yard...and they're calling for a whole day of rain tomorrow...so that will be neat to see...it only rains here about 20 days per year...so I feel lucky that I got to be here for one of them...
...with the rain in mind...we're going to have two sightseeing trips today...
...so we headed out under the lovely cloud cover...
...back to the Valley of Fire State Park...
...the now familiar red rock outcroppings...
...then we turned off the main road onto a dirt track...
...to reach the town of St. Thomas...which had been under Lake Mead...but has now resurfaced during the long drought...
...we started our hike...
...beautiful cloudy desert views...
...as we headed down the trail...
...the trail starts out rocky and rough...
...with underwater evidence everywhere...
...and you come down the hill to the lake bed and it's flat...
...from the dried droplets in the sand it looks like they got just a sprinkling of rain here too...
...all of the ruins had little plaques telling about the owner/history...
...one of the 'streets'...
...we were happy for the intermittent cloud cover as it was quite warm...and the trail is a 2 1/2 mile loop...
...more ruins with weeds growing inside...
...every dwelling had a cistern like this...
...not very deep now...but it may have just filled in with mud while it was underwater...
...evidence of the tree lined avenues...
...someone left an old car here...
...another tree lined street...
...these noisy burros followed us around...
...so I took a little video so you could hear them...
...Our Airman and the Man on the school steps...
...the parched earth...
...a view from the furthest point of the loop...
...there was once a hotel...
...made of brick...
...the last of the ruins...
...and the burros got quite close...they are so curious and funny...then they ran away...
...a warning as we head back up the trail not to take anything from the site...
...back to our car...
...and now for our second sightseeing stop of the day...
...we had seen the sign for this museum when we stopped at the little cafe in Overton...and wanted to do the tour...
...what the archeologists found back in the 1930s...
...reconstructed to what it might have actually looked like...
...they found so much intact pottery that was over 1000 years old...
...and some very not-intact pottery that they pieced back together...
...an archeological dig in progress...
...petroglyphs...
...and the life sized pueblo reconstructed outside...
...pretty amazing...
...just sand and clay and straw and a few timbers...
...some dwellings didn't have a door and were entered by a ladder to an opening on the roof...
...which is like this earlier model of a pit home...
...you walked up onto the roof and climbed down this pole ladder...
...the sky over the mountains really does look like it might rain...
...back home and we cooked tofu on the grill...Our Airman made us some delicious roasted Brussels sprouts...and we completed the meal with baked potato and a salad...
~Have a lovely evening/night...
Do you want submerge? Town seems a little sad and creepy. The museum was fascinating, I had never heard of any of that. Love, K.
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