I'm not afraid (I'm not afraid) to take a stand (to take a stand)
Everybody (everybody) come take my hand (come take my hand)
We'll walk this road together, through the storm
Whatever weather, cold or warm
Just let'n you know that, you're not alone
Holla if you feel that you've been down the same road

Yeah, it's been a ride...
I guess I had to go to that place to get to this one
Now some of you might still be in that place
If you're trying to get out, just follow me
I'll get you there
—Eminem "I'm Not Afraid"

The summer I was seven, we went to Disney World, back in the day of coupon books. I saved two coupons for the most important things I could think of. One was for Space Mountain, the other was for the Hall of Presidents. Yes, I have always been that much of a nerd. I wanted to see the robotic Abraham Lincoln, the man I thought was the coolest president the U.S. had ever seen.

No one else, not Grandma, not Grandpa, not Mom, not baby sister, wanted to waste a ticket on the Hall of Presidents and after much pestering, my extremely overprotective mother told handed me a map of the park, showed me where it was and sent me off alone.

I admit I was somewhat terrified to be going alone through this big park. It was the height of Stranger DANGER! and my mother was always going on about how we had to be careful to not get kidnapped.

But hey. Sometimes you have to take a stand and just decide not to be afraid. After all, Abraham Lincoln did it. He stood up and was not afraid and he freed the slaves. All I had to do was walk across Disney World by myself. Piece of cake.

I found the pavilion with robotic presidents and slid out of the Florida heat into the air conditioning. I was stunned that hardly anyone was there. I took a seat in the back half of the theatre, but close enough that I could get a good look at these robots.

And I waited.

It was kind of scary being there all alone. I had too much time to think. But I was tough. No one would bother me. I sat up a little straighter.

A rustling behind me. I slumped down, scared all over again. Looked behind me. It was a 20-something young couple. Black. I froze.

You see, my father is a horrible bigot, a terrible racist. Big proponent of the Klan.
And my mother was always terrified of anyone who was different. Well-known for locking her car door when a black man stood across the street as she drove.

And both the young man and the young woman smiled at me. That's all. They didn't say a word. They didn't make a motion. They smiled.

And I relaxed completely. I was here to see President Lincoln, after all. The man who freed the slaves. The man who told all of the U.S. that people are people regardless of colour. I was not afraid of a young couple just because their skin was dark and mine so white it practically glows in the dark.

I smiled back at them. We all settled in to watch the show.

They were gone by the time the show was over. I never did have an opportunity to speak to them.

And all this week, I've been thinking about Trayvon Martin. And I desperately want the chance to smile at him. To tell him he has nothing to fear from people whose skin is different than his any more than I did.

Except we all know that's not true.

I want to tell Trayvon Martin that wearing a hoodie shouldn't be a scary thing to anyone. It's a fucking lightweight jacket, for crying out loud. Where's the harm in a piece of clothing?

I am sick that anyone thinks they can kill someone else for wearing the wrong clothes. I don't care if that's a yarmulke, a hijab, a hoodie, a short skirt, or a Notre Dame jacket.

I am sick that any 250lb man in Florida can claim that he was so scared of the threat posed by a 140lb lanky boy just because he wore a hoodie and had darker skin that he thought he was within his rights to pull a gun and kill the boy.

I am sick that he might not be put in jail for this murder.

I am sick that people defend George Zimmerman's actions. There is no defense for that even if the stand your ground law might protect him from jail time.

I am sick when I think if a 17 year old black boy had pulled a gun on a 28 year old possibly Hispanic dude with a rather anglo last name, he'd have been tossed in jail regardless of what reasons he had for pulling the gun, up to and including self-defense. It would have been beat and arrest first, prove your innocence or extenuating circumstances later.

This whole damn mess makes me sick.

And the jackasses who claim there's no racial component to any of this? Pull your head out of the sand and look around.

Really look at what the Tea Party is proclaiming. Really look at what the FOX News drones are doing with their language and have been for years.

Really look at the mess we are in.

Really open yourself to what H. Samy Alim has to say.

It shouldn't be this way. It just shouldn't.

.

I'm really sorry the comments are still off. Still haven't been able to find a non-captcha way of dealing with the spam. I'll keep looking. (Seriously, over 500 spam comments in less than 8 hours was bad. Was 14 hours before I realized it and could get them turned off and I had to delete well over 1500 comments from the database.)

And one day maybe I'll publish one of the several post I have brewing.

Introduced December 11, 2009, the app seems a ridiculously simple concept, and on the face of it, it doesn't sound like much. Some green pigs have stolen the eggs of a variety of birds (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?). You control the birds and you fling those birds via a stationary slingshot at structures of stone, glass and wood that the pigs have built around them. The birds either strike the pigs directly and destroy them or they knock down bits of the structures on top of the pigs and destroy them that way. A level can be completed (or failed) in well under a minute.

That's it.

The game has succeeded because while the characters and visual design are not the greatest, they are cute and reasonably well rendered and displayed. The extreme number of levels (and Rovio is constantly adding more levels at no additional cost to the player) and speed at which levels can be played are key points to its repeat playability. In addition, Rovio taps into the competitive players and the completionist players by including levels of winning. You can go on to the next screen if you kill all the piggies, but ... to unlock certain levels you have to have gotten a score high enough to earn you three stars. But, that's not all. Many levels have golden eggs hidden in them. Some are easily visible, some are not. You can play the game and succeed without ever hitting a golden egg, but to be competitive or completionist, you have to go back through and hunt down the golden eggs as well. For most people, new levels come out before they can complete all levels, including golden eggs and the three star level.

The game is constantly enticing players back with new levels or by social media (hearing about a golden egg for example).

Another level of engagement is the game physics. Honestly, the game seems to personify the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. The game physics are reasonably reliable, although if you talk to anyone who plays the game regularly you'll inevitably hear frustration that "there is NO WAY a damn pig would survive having four stone blocks on top of it" or "there is no way in HELL that piece of wood would not fall down in real life. Don't the game makers understand basic physics?"

The game physics, I have grown to believe despite my occasional frustrations, are this way very much on purpose. Players become convinced that they are "almost there" and if they "just do this a little bit differently" it will work. In addition, adding some random element to the physics means that no two players are getting precisely the exact same results on levels. I know I have attempted to count pixels before releasing my bird - expecting that if the physics are completely consistent, I could expect that bird to land in the same spot every time. That doesn't happen. It might be close, but it's never exactly the same. I suppose we could chalk up this random element as the air speed we can't see or feel, but it's become one of the elements I believe makes the game most addicting because you can do the same thing over and over again and it's not insanity - you don't get exactly the same results. It's not so far as to be inconsistent - it's small variances. I find this important to note since inconsistency will frustrate players and cause them to reject the game.

Combining the game physics with the rapid level plays, the plethora of levels and the various goals, the "addiction" level of the game tends to be quite high.

There are only a handful of games I continuously go back to and Angry Birds (in all its permutations) is one. The two other favourites are Iconfactory's Ramp Champ (developed very much prior to the release of the retina displays) and Tiny Wings by Andreas Illiger.

Both of these games are essentially designer-driven and as such are drop-dead gorgeous. The design certainly caught my eye, but the game play on both are also quite well thought-out. Ramp Champ is essentially either Skee-Ball or a target gallery game, depending on the level you play. You roll the balls up the ramp, hit targets or holes and get points. The points earn you tickets, just like in physical Skee-Ball and you exchange them for virtual prizes. There's a set of shelves for you to display (and interact) with your goodies and there's also 3 goals for you to hit per level with trophies received (and displayed in your trophy shelves) as well. You have fast play and lots of incentives to keep coming back to the game. After all, you have to save up to get some of those nifty prizes!

At first blush, this game should have gone just as viral as Angry Birds, but it didn't. It was certainly attractive enough to catch the eyes and attentions of people. Game play was fast and it was a variation on a well-loved and established game.

I believe it didn't achieve the same popularity for an extremely frustrating reason. In Angry Birds, the graphics are reasonable and cute, but they're not drop-dead gorgeous. The backgrounds from major "chapter" to major "chapter" change, but the individual levels within a "chapter" don't change much. The game pieces don't really change much either, other than the occasional addition of a new bird or new complication. Development time for Angry Birds is primarily devoted to level design, not visual design.

Ramp Champ's development time focused both on level design and drop-dead gorgeous, intense-focus-on-the-little-details visual design as well. The result was far fewer levels. They added in-app purchase of additional levels and did seasonal levels before Rovio added Angry Birds Seasons to the mix, but it was one level per season whereas Rovio had one "chapter" per season with 15, 30 or more levels to it.

Ramp Champ has a loyal and devout following and when the retina display iPhones came out and especially when the iPad came out, players begged for an update to the game. Several of the Iconfactory designers said it would never happen. The graphics would have to be recreated at the different resolutions in order to maintain the standards they'd already set in the visual design of the levels. The ROI for the update, which many users would insist should be free, was just not worth the time. The same went for the additional ramp packs – it wasn't worth the time and effort to produce more levels if the purchases weren't forthcoming. Without continuing support for the ever-changing world of iOS and without adding more levels, the game essentially flat-lined.

Similarly, Tiny Wings also had fast game play with multiple goals per level and also had gorgeous graphics. It got quite a bit of buzz in the design community when it first came out, but I rarely hear about it now. The basic gameplay for this game is you have a bird with tiny wings - he can't fly far, but if you land him just right in the valleys, you essentially slingshot him high up in the sky and give him a speed and distance boost. You have various basic goals, gathering coins, getting to a further island before night overtakes you and more specific goals to each level.

I eventually lost interest in the game because despite the fact that the colour, textures and arrangement of the hills and valleys differed (along with the goals), the basic background was essentially the same. Combining that with the increasing difficulty of the levels and I eventually got bored. (Granted, I have a low threshold of boredom, but I can also be quite obsessive about completing all goals.) It became the same look and the same goals in my mind as the game progressed. There was not enough change to keep my interest. I'm sure that Andreas Illiger kept the backgrounds relatively similar in order to cut down on development needs, but that trade-off is a portion of what finally made the game boring to me. I understand that Tiny Wings was voted iPhone game of the year for 2011 and even landed a top spot in the App Store until Angry Birds Rio was released. Still, despite its success, the buzz around it has not reached the viral levels and penetrated popular culture in the way that Angry Birds has.

Angry Birds is not a brilliant game in and of itself. It is a brilliant understanding of why we play games. It fits a need for us to have something to do whilst we wait in line at the store, wait for a plane or unwind before bed. We don't have to make much of a time commitment to the game in order to succeed at it. It's constantly introducing new things - environments, characters, complications. Its random elements ensure the game is never exactly the same and its incredible wealth of levels ensures that even if you replay a level you've not only beaten, but three-starred, you'll most likely have forgotten just how you did it last time. It understands our need for constantly challenging ourselves, our propensity for boredom and our desire to compare our achievements to others.

It also understands the fine balance between design and business practicality.

It's not a choice I would prefer to make. As a designer, I want stunning graphics all the way through my game. But I have to admit that what truly keeps me coming back is both the challenge of "almost getting it" and new levels. If Angry Birds had stopped releasing new levels and challenges both, I'd have deleted it long ago.

Coronado State Monument is very interesting, but the pictures I would most love to have taken are not allowed. It's quite interesting to go through the museum and the ruins, but there's little left there and most of what is still visible is actually a restoration by the WPA built back in the '30s - and there's actually precious little of that left now. (Let me put it this way, I had to ask if one section was original Kuaua - it was not. Even though it was barely 6 inches above the ground and looked like melted adobe, it was actually the remains from the '30s!)

They have a kiva there, but with only one ranger on duty, he couldn't take us out there. We'll have to go back later to visit that on a day they're doing tours. (No photography is allowed inside any kiva ... perfectly understandable! I'm just glad we can even go inside.)

They also were able to save some of the murals from inside the original kiva and they have those mounted in a museum room - but no photography is allowed of that either. I'm going to have to go back with a sketchbook if that's allowed.

After visiting Coronado, we headed northwest to Jemez Pueblo and had a wonderful lunch at Dave's Burgers and More. It's a little roadside kitchen right on Highway 4 and the frybread was REALLY good. We drove through the reservation and deeper into the Jemez mountains and finally landed at Jemez State Monument. If I read the guidebook correctly, most of the ruins here are actually of the church complex, kind of sandwiched into the then-existing pueblo. Here's the church itself:

Then there's a couple of shots I couldn't quite resist taking ... windows....

And then there was the baptismal font area - this is actually in the wall on the outside of the church space. I guess it was a small chapel next to the church?

After we finished walking the trails and reading the guidebook for Jemez State Monument, we just continued driving north - just to see what was out there. It was really hard for me to concentrate on driving because I wanted to just take a million pictures of the mountains. They were just stunning - the colours in the rocks was just absolutely amazing.

And then we happened onto Soda Dam, a unique geologic feature - it almost looks like a cave somehow landed out in the open. It's made largely of calcium carbonate (kind of like hard water stains on plumbing if you have hard water). If you're curious about it, here's a bit more of an article. You can click on the second image below for a desktop wallpaper version of that picture.

And then @AMP2 saw someone on top of the Soda Dam feature and well ... we decided to head up there as well. The only problem is, after my bone marrow transplant for Hodgkin's back in 2001, I've had a very, very mild form of vertigo ever since. I can climb, but I can no longer get near the edge of a feature, particularly if it's very windy. I constantly feel like I'm tilting in the direction of falling off of whatever it is I've climbed. Most of the time it doesn't affect me very much, but it's really frustrating. I used to be able to climb all over just about anything and really wanted to go mountain climbing. Today, I'm lucky if I can just be a scrambler. I had a hard time taking pictures inside of the little cavelet, because I kept feeling like I was going to fall out of it. There was not that much of a slope to the outside ... it was just this stupid vertigo. So, while I did get up to the top of the Soda Dam feature, I couldn't really walk the very narrow path that would have let me walk out to the top of that waterfall and cavelet spot. Had I been able to get over there, the area was wide enough that I would have been all right, but ... well, *sigh* ... it just wasn't going to happen today. Maybe I'll try again a day when the winds aren't too high. But @AMP2 did manage to get up there!

And, as we turned around to head back to the car, I saw one of my favourite things ... graffiti!

On the way back home, I swung into Big Chief gas station ... a defunct little market and gas station across the highway from Zia Pueblo. It had the look of a 50s shop, something you'd expect to see along old Route 66 (we were on NM 550, I think, though).

I like the landscape someone's painted on the front. I'm not sure if the owners had done that (probably not) or if a graffiti wannabe started something and perhaps got caught. But if you look to the left of that shot, or the close-up here below, you can see they've helpfully labelled the landline. Is that where the telephone landline goes into the building? Or is it the horizon line for the line art that continues out to the right?

And then there was my favourite piece of graffiti in a long time on the side of the building. I love the commentary here, especially considering the horrendously 50s tacky "big chief" painted on the sign above the gas station. This is another image that you can click for a desktop wallpaper version.

It was a great day, but man are we beat now despite not having gotten to do much hiking. I think we spent longer driving than hiking today.

And on the way home from work the same day I shot the sunrise, I saw this beautiful rain touching the Sandias.

But this shot is one of my favourites. Click it for a desktop wallpaper sized image.

Thursday morning we got up at 4a.m. so we could get to the Balloon Fiesta nice and early to see the Special Shapes inflate, possibly glow and then launch.

Unfortunately, the winds did not behave and the balloons were not allowed to launch. In fact, not only were they not allowed to fly ... they didn't even stay inflated for a full hour. I was crushed. I was really looking forward to possibly getting a couple of glow shots (I got one that's okay) and a LOT of shots of the balloons in the air. What I got was some nice shots of various balloons on the ground.

Click through for the four slideshows of balloons (some from flat to fully inflated, which was interesting).

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

We went to the opening morning of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta this year and there were some stunning balloons out there. I think my favourites, besides the Darth Vader head, were the stage coaches and the alien head. And just in terms of patterns, there were some gorgeous black balloons with various bright colours - the contrast was stunning.

Click through for a few of the 200+pix I took.

But I'm back now and getting used to the move from laptop to desktop.

And ... I've been hiking almost every weekend. It's been so wonderful. I just can't even say just how much I've missed all this. The weather, the landscape, being active ... actually DOING things again.

Yesterday was particularly fun. We started out to Piedras Marcadas, but before we could get all the way to the end of the trail, we had a visitor...

It was a glorious storm with some beautiful thunder. I'm surprised we didn't get soaked, but it was a great hike. Beautiful.

To me, the cloud is the most aptly named new "tech" that we've created: it's insubstantial, it's not always easily accessible and at the same time, as many are finding out to their detriment, like the clouds in the sky, it can be easily seen by many.

I understand the allure. Not being tied to one specific machine is an enticing one. It's hard to know you have something you need at home, but not work. And particularly if you travel a lot, you can't always take your workhorse machine with you, so you have to hope you've transferred everything you'll need to a travel-machine – or that you'll have access to that workhorse in some way and can download what you need, when you need it.

But I'm seeing more and more people beginning to move to the cloud, to trust the cloud. Maybe I'm just a suspicious bastard, but I find this to be a mistake.

1) Not every location has reliable internet service.
2) Not every location has reasonably fast internet service.
3) The more popular the platform/service, the more likely it will be hacked or compromised.
4) Not every service has acceptable Terms of Service - many, in fact, do not protect you, your account or your data.
5) What happens if/when that service you rely upon goes out of business? Or, in some ways, worse, their servers are seized in an unrelated investigation?

I think number 1 and 2 are relatively self-explanatory. Folks with a reliable connection seem to forget that there are huge areas where either the reliability or the speed are simply not up to par. I've seen presenters at conferences burned when the upload/download speed of the hotel internet was simply not up to the task. Areas where storms take out the internet on a regular basis. Areas where throttling is practiced, even when the ISP claims they don't throttle. Even when going to a tech conference in a large city, you simply cannot rely on the reliability and speeds of the local internet support the cloud.

3) The more popular the platform/service, the more likely it will be hacked or compromised. This one is just a given of the computer age. It's not a deal-breaker on its own as of yet, but it's something that every computer user, cloud-based or not, should keep in mind. Most people who know me know that I'm an avid Apple fan ... for now. One benefit has always been that my machine and software have always just worked. Another is there have been almost no worries about virus or hacking issues. That's not so true now that Apple is starting to gain more and more market share. I'm still an Apple person.

But, as Apple's popularity is on the rise, so are Apple-specific attacks. I try not to be complacent any more. And it's the same with any cloud service. Using the cloud to store your data without any other backup, is, in my opinion, a serious mistake. Between connectivity issues and the likelihood that hackers will target a popular service increase, I'm leery of leaving any data in the cloud for very long. The longer information is there, the more popular the service, the more likely my data will become compromised.

And then we come down to numbers four and five, which for me, tend to be deal-breakers.

4) Terms of Service. Here's where there are real issues. Even the ones which attempt to write in "plain English" often don't come across well enough for the average person to really feel comfortable with. The plain and simple fact right now is that the law has not caught up with the speed of the internet. Twitpic, YFrog, Google+ have all been hit by this, as have other services. The problem is that these services need permission to store and to transmit your data and the legal phrasing makes it sound to the average person, as if that service is claiming the rights to your data for their own nefarious purposes. Most services have been quick to jump in on public outcry and insist that's not what they meant.

The problem here is that the law has just not caught up to the realities of the digital age. There's a lot of leeway in how thing are phrased and what they mean. We don't have good, reliable precedents set up yet. There's a lot of security holes here and a lot of uncertainties.

On the other hand, what is on my hard drive or thumb drive is on my control. If I'm paranoid about what's on there, I can create or use a program to hard-erase it in an emergency. I can't be sure that a like program would irrevocably erase all data from any given service. The service and their servers are not under my control - and neither is my data.

In addition to who owns or controls the data, there are also issues with your account in general. Right now, Google + is coming under fire for closing out accounts of people where they think the name is not "real." Leaving the "real" name definition alone for now, think about this for a moment. How many people have gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and more all tied into one account? And what happens when that account is closed unexpectedly? What happens when you do not have access to your email or other data?

There have been numerous accounts lately of people discovering their account has been closed WITHOUT ANY NOTICE TO THE USER. In many cases, without evidence as well. In other words, just some troll or angry acquaintance can, in many services, get your account shut down. Meanwhile you lose days of productivity and in the case of email services, perhaps time-sensitive, vital data and work offers. You're left trying to prove a negative to a large entity which really doesn't care about getting your account back to you, much less your data.

It's a scary thought that my email account could be hijacked by a service at any time with little or no warning even if I've done nothing wrong.

And then there's reason 5: what if the service disappears? They go out of business. Close down. How do you get your data now? Yes, you should always back up your data, but we all know there's a time gap between the most conscientious back-up plan and what you've recently worked on. And we all know that most of us are not diligent enough about backing up our data.

In addition, if the service goes out of business, how are they disposing of their servers? Your data is on there. Auctioning off the servers might mean that your data was not sufficiently cleaned off the drives.

For me, there are too many variables for me to trust the cloud. I've too often lived in places where my connection is not great, not reliable. I've seen multiple services either go under or be bought by other companies that I do not trust. I've known many people who've had part if not all of their online identity hacked - often causing "real world" issues.

In all, I don't think that every use of the cloud is a bad thing. I simply feel that a lot of people - both the working joes and the bleeding edge technophiles - are not always thinking this through before committing everything to the cloud. And that concerns me most. Not that the cloud exists or is used ... but that too many people are not necessarily thinking this all the way through.

The cloud, to me, is just a cloud. It's nice to lay on my back in the summer time, looking at the sky and dreaming of all of the thing the cloud could be ... but I'm far too practical to believe that the cloud is anything but a dream or something more than fleeting.

The concept is nice. It's utopian.

But I no longer believe in utopias. They are certainly thing to strive for - otherwise what is the point in life? But they are fraught with issues that we've not yet considered.

I guess I am just an old, suspicious bastard now.

The owner, in another state, insists it was done right. We'll see what FHA and the bank say. But it's just dragging things out more.

I hate the hotel.

And I'm so introverted that in times of stress, like this, needing to stay in someone else's home temporarily should be a good idea - but in fact is even more draining for me than the hotel. Times like this it really sucks to ride that edge of introvert, geek and possible aspie. Just not dealing well with the uncertainty and the stress.

Really would like that fast-forward button so I can just jump ahead a little bit.

When I got back, there was this kind of quiet, low-pitched alarm going off in the building. Was an odd kind of wooooooo sound. It stopped when I opened my room door. Apparently Tieg must have been not-quite-howling for the whole hour and a half I was gone! He's so out of sorts with it being just the two of us in one room instead of my partner and I, three dogs and four cats in the house. With no Scraps to wrestle with and no Scout to snug, he's been glued to me whenever I'm home.

I'm such an organization nerd, I'm actually mostly looking forward to unpacking, sorting and getting things placed. Not looking forward to the half hour drive down to the storage unit and back up to the house, though.

But what really spoke to me was Ellie's My Adventure Book with its page "ripped right out of a library book!" As I was re-watching it a few months ago, I thought ... that book would make a great desktop wallpaper. So I took a couple of screenshots and waited until I had some free time.

In the meantime, I planned it out in my head which led to my designing it a little differently from the screenshots. Despite the fact that the letters look like Ellie cut them out, I kept seeing them as stitched onto the leather cover. And almost every crazy little homemade or scrapbook I had as a kid had a kind of canvas-y looking material that created the binding. So ... that's what I went with.

Click the small image for a 2560x1600 1.8MB desktop wallpaper version:

Let me know what you think!

The offer was accepted, but we're not out of the woods yet. The current owner still has to finish the re-shingling project he started and then we have the inspections and appraisal hurdles to get over. I am sad that the gorgeous wagon wheels in the backyard are apparently going to be hauled off along with the unsightly pile of lumber. At least I got one good shot:

I've gone out to Rinconada Canyon several times now. The first time was when I was here to interview. I had to catch my flight, so I had to cut my hike short and never made it to the end of the petroglyphs. I went out twice more with Tieg, the fraidy-dog, and he would NOT walk into that park. He'll walk OUT, but I had to carry him in the second time we went.

Don't know what changed ...

He needed a little encouragement, but he walked in this time. Of course, he also knew how to stay in the shade ....

I had to be on the lookout for wildlife that might be dangerous because Tieg is oblivious. Can you find the lizard in this picture? Tieg couldn't even when it ran two foot in front of him. He also missed a rabbit.

Luckily the only one of these we ran into was carved into the stone instead of sunning itself on the stone.

Honestly, the rock is so dark and most of the petroglyphs are not carved very deeply, I was initially disappointed with Rinconada Canyon. We'd seen some more striking petroglyphs in Crow Canyon near Farmington. But then I finally made it to the end of the looping trail at Rinconada...

They just started jumping out - much more clear and easy to spot ... more detailed and crafted than some of the earlier ones.

I thought that one looked a bit like a family of anteaters. Of course, I'm pretty sure I'm WRONG, but that's what they looked like. They're probably antelope, I would guess. Anteater, antelope.

And then there's this dude doing the funky chicken:

And then I turned and saw this one. Now, when I snapped the shot, I could only see the center lightning figure with the head on it. You have to remember the sun is REALLY bright on the LCD screen and I'm also distracted by trying to look out for rattlers and such and make sure the tiny dog is all right.

Click this one to see it larger and more detail - there was a lot more going on in this drawing than I could see from the ground! In fact, it wasn't until I was choosing shots for this post that I realized just how much. Oh, and yes, those are freaking bullet holes in the petroglyphs here. :(

There were others that I couldn't really tell if they were yei, graffiti or monsters.

And while I'm of fair certainty that this is probably a coyote story ... it sure looks like a local dachshund petroglyph to me!

After that, Tieg let me know it was time to leave. We still had to hike a mile out of the canyon. I guess once he saw the petrodoxie, he was done for the day. The hike out goes through the center of the canyon so there's less small bits of climbing (less climbing and more a few rocks in the way and going up and down small hillish features). But, there was more underbrush to scan for snakes, so it was still a bit of a long walk.