Google (blog search) Sonnet 8: Painted Desert

If You Are Impressed With Colors, The Painted Desert Is A Must See

We crossed another time zone and reached the Painted Desert.
Unfortunately, the climate in the Painted Desert is extremely dry.
“This is the Painted Desert,” she said. Abby admired the jeweled
     canvas. “Who painted it?” Her host smiled, and the smile
     altered the landscape of her face. “We did.”
As you go on further in this park you start to get glimpses
     of the Painted Desert: pink and peach rocks and sands and,
     in the misty distance, strange cone shaped rock formations.
Lying as they fell millions of years ago, petrified trees rest
     in the sands of the Painted Desert.
It’s not necessarily the geology of Northern Arizona that steals
     my breath, nor the process of how the Navajo Sandstone
     was formed, or how the Moenkopi formation came to be, or
     how the Painted Desert could’ve once been a tropical beach:
the Painted Desert suffers neither of these fates.
I’d been through the Painted Desert and past the Petrified Forest
     and all I’d seen was white snow.

It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee
     named Rachel sits on the living room floor of a remote ranch
     house on the edge of the Painted Desert.
My big brother and I drove through the Painted Desert in 2002
     listening to “Bullet, the Blue Sky” as I returned from three
     years living in Los Angeles.
The area of the Painted Desert we got to see has similarities
     and differences from the Badlands which started out this
     trip for us.
We saw the observatory where they discovered Pluto and
     the Painted Desert.
Two giant crosses (no gold chains), one enormous teepee,
     a Painted Desert, and countless tumbleweeds later, we
     made it to Vegas.
It makes the Painted Desert look like a backyard rock garden.

~Dig Chase 2006