Window Rock

Window Rock

Oil on canvas, 30x30

One of the most beautiful places near Fort Defiance is Window Rock - the actual rock. The town is OK, a quite typical reservation town, from what I've seen - but the actual rock that is Window Rock is amazing. 

The town of Window Rock is the capital and administrative center of the Navajo Nation. The council building, Navajo Nation Museum, tribal zoo and all sorts of other government and quasi-government buildings cluster at the base of the formation that contains Window Rock. 

The Navajo Nation covers 27,425 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. As of 2011, there were 300,048 enrolled tribal members. 

I decide to tackle Window Rock on Saturday. The government offices are closed, and so there's plenty of room for me to park, set up and paint. 

After I've gotten the painting started, Mike Sanderson and his dog Houdini

come along to see what I'm doing. 

Mike is a painter, and the great-grandson of Ira Hayes, a Navajo who is one of the Marines depicted in Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima. Mike doesn't have much time to paint, but he enjoys it, and has had great success at it. 

Here's my painting in the landscape

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Scenes from the Road

Greenery along the road into the Salt River Canyon.

Above and below are some of the amazing rock walls of the Salt River Canyon a 32-101-acre wilderness area in the Tonto National Forest. It is sort of like a small Grand Canyon, on the eastern side of Arizona. The road through is interesting, to say the least. The hills are steep and winding, the falls potentially precipitous, the scenery gorgeous. 

I don't often turn back to take photos, especially of signs, but this one was worth it. 

A store in the town of Snowflake, AZ. If it had been opened, I'd have gone in. How could you not? 

A thing I notice in Arizona is that families have adopted stretches of highway in memory of family members who have died. By the crosses left on or near these signs, it seems to me that the people who are being remembered died in crashes on or near the stretch of adopted roadway. 

Past Fort Defiance, there's a stretch of land where the ground in the hills is green! 

Our house has apparently been torn down, but it was very much like this one, according to my dad. 

 

The old Fort Defiance Hospital is empty and abandoned. 

A shiny new one has been built on the north side of town. 

 Here's Window Rock. One afternoon I came along and there were people up there, under the arch. 

Sunset, Holbrook, AZ

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Dog of the Day

 

There are a lot of homeless, hungry dogs around Fort Defiance, and I will write more about them soon. I fed this one, on the day I made the Window Rock painting.