A Reason

Hopeless.
Giving hope,
Remembers how to dream.
Lonely.
Reaching out,
Finds solace in friendship.
Broken.
Stained.
Beyond pardon.
Clings to another
where emptiness is most profound.
And there finds Life enough
To recall
A reason for living.

3x5, Zig, Sharpie, & Prismacolor pencil

Many Moods

One thing I love about being a Ranger is that I get to see this one beautiful place go through so many moods and changes. We're lost in the clouds today--intensifying the colors and turning the hoodoos into an eerie maze. Standing at Sunrise Point I heard little cracks, pops, and rocky trickles as weathering loosened material out in the amphitheater somewhere and gravity pulled it down. 

Geological time is now!

Moonlight Shadows

In the discussion about "dark sky" protection, most people only focus on the ability to see the really faint stuff: dim stars, deep sky objects, and the texture of the Milky Way. Those aspects are surely important, but I feel that moonlight--because it also interferes with seeing faint astronomical objects--is all too often overlooked. I love walking in the bright light cast by the moon as much as I love resolving a distant galaxy or star cluster, and the pure experience of moonlight is as threatened by glare from artificial light as our ability to see the faint stuff is. Next week I lead my first Bryce Canyon Full Moon Walk, and I look forward to guiding people though an experience of moonlight unlike anything that's possible in most of our urban/suburban communities. Wherever you are, as the moon is waxing this week, I invite you to find a dark sky nearby and enjoy the natural light cast by our nearest cosmic neighbor. You might be surprised by how it alters your perspective, and transforms the familiar into the sublime.

3x5, Zig & Sharpie.
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Star Stuff

3x5, sharpie

Thinking about falling water

3x5, pen & sharpie. 

A new resolution

A few days after the New Year, I started thinking that I wanted to make some kind of creative resolution for 2016. I love drawing, but I haven't done much lately. I think this is mostly due to my tendency to imagine these huge detailed mega-drawings, then get lost somewhere in the planning stage before even putting pen to paper.

I dug through my art supplies and found a pack of clean white 3x5 cards. Close by was my usual stash of sharpies. I found myself wondering if I could fill one little card per day with some sort of sketch. And there it was.

I've decided to forgive myself if I miss a day or two here and there. Whether I complete 365 doodles or 150, it's still a lot of drawing. Certainly more than I had been doing. And hopefully enough to bust through my creative blockages. If--somewhere along the way--I start to formulate something bigger, I'll put the little drawings on hold and post each day's progress on the larger project.

I've been sharing these on Facebook since I started, but for those of you who aren't on Facebook, I'll start posting them here as well.

All are for sale at $25 each.

Enjoy:)

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What do you see? 

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Inspired by "surface hoar" crystals I observed on a winter hike at Bandelier National Monument

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Based on a scene from the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Coma Berenices: my favorite constellation

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Self Portrait

Inspired by an ice waterfall I discovered at Bandelier National Monument

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Landscape inspired by Canyonlands National Park, Island in the Sky

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"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place?
Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.
There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one has seen higher up.
when one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
--Rene Daumal, from "Dream: the Art of Ascent," by Jeremy Collins

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A real tree on Bandelier's Main Loop Trail, sketched from life

Sunrise and "Nike swoosh" clouds at Bandelier

Dream Big

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Sunset over the San Miguels

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Crane migration

Canyonlands Mega-Hike #2

I went on another mega-hike yesterday, this time to Lathrop Canyon: a 13.6 mile out-and-back trip to the White Rim...which means, of course that there are also 1,400 feet of elevation involved...it's a given. If there'd been a few more hours in the day, I might have tacked on a quick round trip to the Colorado River as well. There's a mountain bike trail that takes off from the bottom of Lathrop and would've added 8 miles and 600 feet. I had an abundance of energy yesterday and was itching to go, but sun sets at 5:00 these days, and the thought of searching for cairns in the dark brought me back to my senses. The hike I took was enough. Challenging, ever so slightly terrifying (I've still got occasional issues with steep drop offs...especially when descending), and stunningly gorgeous. Treasures for the eyes on a large scale...

...and on a small one. 

Here I stopped to BEG that these precarious sandstone pillars would stay standing for...at least a few more hours. (Check out the waning moon at bottom left)

I'm starting to become acquainted with the pacing of these hikes below the rim. Every rock layer has a character. There's a particular feel to descending the imposing Wingate cliffs by picking my way down a boulder field of Wingate, and Kayenta, and maybe a little Navajo Sandstone thrown in for good measure.  

There's the trail...see it? Yeah...me neither. It descends from the upper right of this photo and eventually straight down the middle in a tight series of switchbacks. I moved very slowly in this section. Cairn to cairn. Lots of sliding on my butt. 

Then there's the slightly more gentle Chinle, and (maybe my favorite) the chocolate-peanut-butter-ice-cream-layer cake of the Moenkopi.

And then I'm at the bottom--and its smooth sailing and lovely views all the way to the White Rim. 

Here's where the mountain bike trail continues on to the Colorado...a journey for another day. 

For now, there's lunch! 

And then it's back up those cliffs. 

I love how much things are different on the way back. Even though it's the very same trail--I can even follow my own footprints--by the time I head up after an all-day hike, the light has changed, the shadows have changed, I approach little nooks and crannies from a new angle and find old mining equipment...

The hoofprints I followed on the way down...

...reveal their creators on the way up. (Woo hoo! The first time I've EVER seen bighorns in the wild:)

And the evening light falling over this maze of canyons--there's just no good way to describe it. 

Check out the reflections on that bend in the Colorado...

Up...and up...and up...

And then looking down on my lunch spot. Right at that tip of that little canyon so far below. 

The colors of the Navajo Sandstone come alive in the evening light. And check out this crazy bush! It's angled perfectly to collect the most light it can in that one spot--roots and branches totally bare on the back side--flat as a pancake. 

Here comes Peter Cottontail...

Hoppin' down the bunny trail...looks like bunnies follow cairns too. 

And to cap it all off, the last mile of the trail crosses a big open grassland, punctuated by little bluffs and buttes, and just as I was coming up on my car, I heard the trilling wails of a flock of migrating cranes. A little V of them circled around a bit--maybe catching their bearings, maybe gaining altitude--and then they took off to the south east--straight toward New Mexico.