Day 5: From the Earth to Mars

There is something truly surreal about the barren, red sandstone deserts of western Utah and northeastern Arizona. I suppose to a person who grew up around here, the fierce blazing sun and the ubiquitous red earth and stone would be completely unremarkable, just as the sight of a deciduous forest is to our own accustomed eyes. Nevertheless, to us, this landscape brings to mind the surface of an alien planet.

In some respects, Utah is an alien planet. Michael has this theory that living in a desert environment for long periods of time makes a culture grow conservative in certain principled ways. Islam and the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints may well have more in common than they realize, from a purely dogmatic perspective.

One thing we both agree on, in any case, is that the practise of numbering interstate exits according to the mile marker they are closest to makes a hell of a lot more sense than what we do back home in New England.

Morning in Moab. If we could find the person responsible for placing a town like this against a backdrop like that, we'd give him a good sound drubbing, the git. Waste of grand scenery, if you ask us.

Nevertheless, we only had to stay in town one night, and we got some great video footage out of the whole thing (stay tuned for more information about this, as we get further along)

Caught in the act! This is how we actually make up the pages you are reading. Still images are extracted from the moving footage we take as we travel, and converted to an appropriate format for webification. That is mostly David's baileywick.

Once that's done, Michael takes over and puts together the HTML files, writes these comments, and uploads the whole kit and kaboodle to the web server (which we do whenever we get to a place where we can get a reasonable connexion)

For no particular reason, here's another shot of Michael doing the web pages for Day 3 and Day 4. Harry Potter is playing on the tape deck. It's really beautiful all around us. Too bad I'm looking at it through an LCD panel.

Early in the afternoon, we realized that we had taken a wrong turn, and had landed on the surface of Mars. Much to our surprise, Mars does sport a breathable atmosphere, and even some rudimentary plant life.

Undaunted by the forbidding landscape, our intrepid adventurers set out in search of interesting things to climb on.

Whether it's because of the contrast with the lurid redness of the earth, or simply because there's some kind of strange metal ore in the ground, these plants are a shade of green I've never seen before. It's one of those kind of weird bluish-green colours that men and women can never agree on a name for.

Our leading suspicion is that they have a healthy dose of copper in their diet, leading to the startling hue these plants sport. Or maybe that's just how they express themselves.

Looking around across the weird but wonderful shapes of the Martian surface, we were taken with the desire to go in search of some of more complex life forms.

To give you a slightly better appreciation for the terrain, here is a panoramic image David carefully pieced together from a series of images we captured.

Click on this image (or, indeed, any of the images on this page) to get a bigger view of it.

As you can see here, some of the plant life is actually quite highly evolved. This particular specimen is wearing a black T-shirt and green shorts (a combination which is actually kind of dumb for an environment where the sun beats down a lot), and a cool pair of shades.

Attempts to engage this particular plant in conversation were successful, but Utah law prevents us from repeating most of what it had to say.

Just having climbed down a short dropoff, Michael prepares to give David some advice about how to negotiate the climb, and to help deal with the video camera.

(Since someone asked, Michael would like to clear up a nasty rumour that has been going around, suggesting that he wears the same shirt every day. This is patently false. He has at least five black T-shirts with him, and wears a different one each day)

Here, David is climbing down the same dropoff Michael was just seen looking up from, in the previous picture.

Unfortunately, David broke off part of the cliff in his attempt not to fall to his death, and is seen here getting ready to hurl it down upon the rocks below. Maybe he is trying to see if you really can get blood from a stone.

Further evidence of life on Mars. These columns appear to be in the "Glxuqvrrjazxpft" style, one of the popular forms used during the Second Renaissance after the Martian Middle Ages. Sadly, the great temple they once held up has fallen into disrepair and ruin.

At long last, we found the right road again, and left the Martian surface for the more familiar terrain of Arizona.

Despite appearances, this is not a snapshot of the lunar surface, but just a clever matte painting of some pretty stone formations near Tuba City, Arizona.

Yes, I really did say "Tuba City". I'm not sure why they call it that, but that's probably for the best.