Today we did a short back road drive to Painted Canyon. The road turned up a wash and headed to the hills.
Maybe this is why it’s called the Painted Canyon.
Or this.
In any case, as we headed into the canyon the rocks were getting interesting.
It’s a jumble here of rock types…
and layers. That may be because this area lies directly on the San Andreas Fault, the meeting place of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.
Oh, wait…
maybe that’s why they call it Painted Canyon.
In any case, it was beautiful.
We stopped at the end of the road…
and poked up the canyons a bit.
We met this desert iguana on the way back to the truck.
Then we drove back out,
down from the hills…
and into the basin,
where the water from the Colorado River irrigates fields and
orchards (these are date palms) before it ends up putting more salts into the Salton Sea.
On the Roam Again 
Thanks, I enjoy all these blogs.
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You’re welcome. It’s nice to know folks read them!
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I just love all those various types of rock- painted and otherwise! What a difference in vegetation from up among the rocks to down in the basin! (I realize a lot of those things were planted in the basin, but they wouldn’t have grown at the higher elevations.)
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Well, it’s not so much the elevation as the irrigation. Everything in the basin is irrigated, including the palms in the park.
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Ohhh. OK – makes sense.
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