Painted Desert

The Painted Desert of Arizona is one of the most beautiful, most fearful deserts on earth. It is full of distance and deep mystery; it is alive with color, glowingly alive with brilliant changing colors; yet its silence is oppressive and heavy, like that of a tomb. This desert is a moody, temperamental enchantress, showing a new grace, a new side of a many-sided personality with the changing days and the changing seasons.

All the moods and whims of the Arizona sky are shown in this desert; like a great, huge carbon faithfully reproducing an original masterpiece. Clouds are flecks of shadow; dark night is a black desert mantle; and under the angry storm raging in the heavens the desert tosses and growls like an angry sea.

"LAND OF SHADOW"

When the high winds blow, the dust from red plateaus settles on the Painted Desert dimming its colors, giving it a drab, sombre appearance. When the rains come in the summer and spring, the dust is washed off and the desert shows her prettiest gowns, her loveliest shadings, and in the bright, clear light of a sunny day the desert gleams with freshness and youth. Arizona's Painted Desert is a large, trackless waste extending through eastern and northern Arizona. Travelers on U. S. 66 and U. S. 89 skirt its edges and at vantage points along these routes great chunks of the desert are laid out in fantastic view like a strange, exotic carpet.As you look out over the desert, it seems endless, without limit. But there are roads cut through it. You will encounter Hopis and Navajos in it as you travel and east of Winslow the high mesas of the Hopi people rise from the desert floor. High upon these mesas are the Hopi villages, whose inhabitants look out over their desert, the one below defiant and challenging, the one above inscrutable and serene.

In the center of this lifeless, barren land the Hopis have always lived, and their desert must have a curious fascination for them for that is their home and they will never leave. To make a living out of their desert is a Herculean task, yet somehow the Hopis do it.

The captains of Coronado wandered through it to find the Hopi villages and the Grand Canyon. It was a hiding place for desperadoes in early territorial days. Today, it is said, herds of wild horses roam its inner recesses and travelers have gone into it never to return. It is no place for the idler or day-dreamer. It is no place for the weak. The Painted Desert will lure the artist and will tantalize him with its elusive charm. Its sunrises are sparkling affairs, daily miracles of light and colored sand. Its sunsets are extravaganzas, incomparable creations of flame and fire, as if the sun gods in one grand splurge attempted to paint all the world in coppers and golds, and reds, so that even black night could not erase the richness of their creation... R. C.