Spring Rain

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Monument valley is normally a hot, dry, dusty place. A desert. You need to carry water as you trek across it lest they find your poor coyote chewed bones spread across the dunes. But in the Spring things can change dramatically as you see here. Storms come rolling in out of the Baja and dump a huge amount of water on land that is ill-equipped to hold it.

As the rain hits it begins to run off the land filling the arroyos and washes to capacity, picking up sand and small rocks, tearing along in a ferocious torrent until it begins to move the larger boulders and other debris along with it. A short distance away there is a famous slot canyon called Antelope canyon where you can see full-sized tree trunks lodged 50′ up in the crevices of the canyon walls, placed there by water from a storm just like this one raging through it.

This day the storm was one of the milder ones. There was rain but it didn’t last that long. There was runoff but it was manageable. Fog and low-lying clouds obscured the buttes and towers giving the observer a  very different picture of Monument Valley. No stagecoaches tearing along the road in front of the Mittens and Mitchell butte today. And if there was you wouldn’t have been able to see it as the visibility was practically zero down at ground level.

This was a day of looking at the valley from a distance. There was no admittance into the valley as the roads inside are made up of sand and clay and turn into a quagmire as soon as water touches them. Driving on them without four-wheel drive was next to impossible and pretty close to impossible with it, as the muck sticks to your tires and will soon fill up your wheel wells with a solid granite-like mixture you have to dig out with a small spade.

This condition doesn’t last very long because as soon as the sun comes out it dries everything up and the road returns to its near concrete-like state. This is a strangely beautiful time to view the valley, one not seen all that often. The mammoth rock formations appear out of the fog like huge ships passing by in the strange muted light, soundlessly, leaving no wake. Every sound carries across great distances. You can hear the final streams of water falling down the stream beds, rocks striking each other until they come to a new resting place. There seems to be a dearth of bird calls, the ravens quiet until the fog begins to thin and drift away. Then they call out in single note if you can call a ravens call a note, it’s more like a raspy croak, checking on each other to see how they fared through the storm.

The weather is changing despite the denials of some of our leaders and it is uncertain what the future will bring. There is a drought going on out on the west coast and since many of these desert storms begin there the question is will we see rain in the desert in the spring. I believe I’m just going to go and see for myself. Come on along if you want.

Colors, Patterns and Textures in the Southwest

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One of the incredible perks in having a job like mine is you get to see things like this on a regular basis. Sure there are many times where you don’t have the extraordinary light or the stupendous subject matter but then a lot of the time you do. And all you have to do is look at it and take it’s picture. How cool is that? Pretty damn cool actually. This is a shot of Navajo mountain from the Bryce area. What you don’t see in that picture is that it is a little after 6 in the morning early in the spring and it is very cold, like wearing two down jackets cold. At the time I took this it seemed much less glamorous than it does now looking at the end result. Now if that sounds like whining I don’t mean it to, there are just some facts of life about this job that aren’t apparent by looking at the photograph. Frozen fingers and numb toes aside this is a great job and I don’t ever want to stop doing it. I may wear three down coats next time however. And some gloves.

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Colors, Patterns and Textures is the name for this post and it has been the hardest to put together because of the difficulty in choosing images for it. This presentation could easily be several thousand pictures, if not more, long. The reason it isn’t is because I know that as much as you like looking at gorgeous images I’d lose you at about six hundred so I’ve decided to abbreviate this post and repeat it with different images every so often. This is a wall at Aztec Ruins National Monument built by the inhabitants when this place was occupied. Now whoever designed and built this wall knew what beauty was about. There is no architectural reason to use a row of the most beautiful blue colored rocks here but after seeing it could you have used anything else?

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The color of the sand, the texture, the play of shadows on the ripples of this small section of the dunes in Monument Valley is every bit as intriguing as the buttes, towers and monolithic rock formations that make up this world Heritage place.

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Simple patterns can be visually satisfying. This tree against an unadorned wall in Santa Fe has a zen-like attraction. The intense colors, while arresting in their contrast, can have a soothing effect and show that a small piece of the total view can be more rewarding than showing the whole picture (so to speak).

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While similar in composition to the image above, this scene also taken in Santa Fe, shows a more muted color palette. Same type of view but different light and time of day. You could stand in front of a composition like this for days and never take the same image twice.

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While walking through the dunes in Monument Valley after watching the sunrise you see all the details and patterns of this spectacular country begin to emerge. A desert newspaper recording the comings and goings of the creatures of the night. The tracks of a small mammal are crisscrossed with trails of insects and the morning light turns the color of the sand to a deep rich red. I take a lot of pictures but I think I take more of them here than any other place.

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You can begin to understand why artists like Georgia O’Keefe painted the subjects she did when you come across a pattern like this one momentarily displayed in the sand. I say momentarily because the next breeze to blow through here will erase this work of art in a heartbeat. That is unless you take a picture of it.

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Other patterns are created by man and will last for centuries. These petroglyphs are on a cliffside in Capitol Reef National Park.

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Texture plays a large part in my selection of things to shoot. Here the frozen sand has been turned to rock and although it looks like momentary waves in a sand dune it is here to stay. This is Antelope Canyon in Arizona and this dune is nearly a hundred feet under ground. The light comes from an opening in it’s ceiling that runs the length of the canyon.

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Waves of stone. How were they frozen in time? It certainly looks like that was what happened but this scene was slowly created over eons by the water that occasionally pours through this canyon. It is mind numbing to think of how long this must have taken. The result however is etched forever in my memory.