Take the only road out of the Chisos Mountains and turn west. Drive another 13 miles or so and turn south onto the Scenic Maxwell Drive. Within another 20 miles or so you’ll see a little rusted roadside sign that you are near the Chimneys. From there, about an hour’s walk west into the desert are a group of house-sized boulders and ridges.
These are the Chimneys. Scattered about the ground in some places are innumerable rocks bearing testimony to having been spewed forth as molten lava. I did not see any Obsidian (black, glass-like rock) and so the material in the area must have cooled slowly (rapid cooling of igneous rock results in a glassy texture). The area is otherwise flat. There are, reportedly, a few instances of Indian rock art, but to find it you have to pay attention—some of it looks just like weathering.
The photograph above is the first boulder along the Chimneys Trail.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
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Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
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