Lava beds

Today we took a short drive out toward Arco to a trail that goes out through the lava beds. It's a BLM site and they marked the trail with sticks stuck where ever they could stick them and painted blue ends on them. Quite an interesting way to mark a trail. I say "trail" but there was really no trail at all since the lava is not forgiving enough to make any kind of trail in. As long as you followed the blue sticks, you could navigate but there was no other indication of where to walk.

One of the cool things we found out there which neither of us expected was that there were little fern gardens in some of the cracks in the lava flows. There must be enough moisture down there for them to grow because they were doing very well as you can see in the pictures. The temperature today was in the high 80's to low 90's and it is dry out there so seeing ferns growing so well was a stark contrast to the cactus and bare rock.

We had taken our bikes out there but that country is not made for bike riding so we left them at my truck while we took this walk through the rocks. Some of the cracks in the lava flows are really deep and we had to be careful with the dogs since they could have gotten hurt if they had fallen into any of them.

All in all it was a nice day and there were some nice wildflowers still blooming out on the lava which really contrasted with the rock. I didn't take any wildflower pictures But I did take one of the cactus which looks like prickly pear or beavertail. Junipers were the only trees we found there along with some brush species I recognized and some I didn't.