Desert Photos

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

My wife and I got tired of it snowing so we went down to New Mexico for some rock collecting. At times this area was a body of water then a tropical swamp. There were T-rex, strange duck billed dinosaurs, gators, and the land was covered in palm trees and huge conifers. Nearby volcanic eruptions covered the whole area with ash and debris and destroyed everything, leaving much of it fossilized. Later glaciers came through and cleared away the ash exposing the fossils and old landscape. In some areas the petrified trees are still standing, there are stumps surrounding what must have been small lakes and streams. Some of the petrified logs are up to 100 feet long. No vertibrate fossils or artifacts can be collected but we go and look for rare jasper and agatized petrified wood in a few areas where it is legal to collect. The wood has a smokey black to clear color with occasional plumes, rare red, green and blue wood can found as well as loads of other nice specimens and cutting materials.

pics left to right

panorama from where we park, this is the collecting area
old cedar tree
littered with petrified wood
4' partially decayed petrified log with knots, you don't see these as often
what is this plant? I've been out in the desert a lot and haven't seen this one before.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

Photos left to right:

Horned Toad
my truck is in the middle of this pic
more views
odd rocks
This last pic shows a nice rock anvil and the source of them, it must have been a stone age blacksmiths shop, lol.

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

The landscape in this area is just surreal.

 

[sloth357]

Perhaps this post should be in the photography section.. not really knife talk just messing (or not, a mod. will be the one to get on ya)!

Looks great, I see blue skies.. perfect! I want to see the horn!#$#@$ :E

So you have any petrified wood scales ready?

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

Perhaps this post should be in the photography section.. not really knife talk just messing (or not, a mod. will be the one to get on ya)!

Looks great, I see blue skies.. perfect! I want to see the horn!#$#@$ :E

So you have any petrified wood scales ready?

There's a photography section? Lol I need to explore this site a bit more. I figured since I was supposed to be making knives instead of doing this it qualified, lmao...

If it needs to get moved I understand, Bladeforums is great because of the way it is ran, that's why I'm here.

No horn, I lost track of that guy and the horn is in a museum, he was doing some work on it; he's one of a few people qualified to work on it.

I have a bucket of scale shaped wood with the bark still on it. It will still be tough finding some that works well but when I do it will be cool.

 

[Burton Harruff]

Awesome photos! Thanks for sharing with us. I love the Southwest and wish I could get out there more often. So did you find any cool rocks?

 

[Daniel Fairly Knives]

Awesome photos! Thanks for sharing with us. I love the Southwest and wish I could get out there more often. So did you find any cool rocks?

Thanks, I found some nice agatized wood with plumes in it, smokey black to clear with tan bark. We also found some nice red wood, nice red jasper, and some black and white striped agate, yellow and clear wood too. It was mostly really small stuff besides one nice piece of jasper. There are tons of big wood specimens, some I have seen are the size of a small truck but I leave the big stuff for others. I used to get really excited about all the wood but now I'm looking for rainbow jasper, it looks like a desert sunset, is solid and takes a great polish.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Nice photos.

This is the right forum for knifemakers to chit-chat about what they do when not in the shop.