Sunrise brings fiery skies, not the subtle shades of watercolor but the vivid palette of a flamboyant master in oil. Using the imagination of an artist, read the stories told in stone. Las Animas, a tiny islet silhouetted in the eastern sky could become a whale of sorts. The guardian of Isla Santa Catalina is unmistakably an elephant of grandiose proportions.
Or read these same stories through the eyes of a geologist. An archipelago torn from its moorings on the North American plate, fragmented and left scattered, tilted and tipped in a newly formed sea. Each component contains clues to the origin. Walking the shores and arroyos we touch the ancient batholithic core or trace our fingers along colorful cooling patterns in extruded volcanic ash. Drifting silently in the water we follow these contours into the depths where colorful creatures hide. Sunrise brings too the promise of a new day, a day to explore the life in the seas and on the desert shores here in the Gulf of California.
