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Earth Day, a celebration of our Earth. We all live here so let’s honor it with an acknowledgement of it’s beauty and grandeur and like the guy said, a picture is worth 1000 words. So let’s start counting then, 1. Cool. 2. Great. 3. Awesome. 4. Wowser. 5.Spectacular. You can fill in the rest I’ve got to go out and look around at what we got.
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If any of you have ever read any of Frank Herbert’s work you will remember Arrakis, the Dune planet. It was covered in sand so deeply that huge worms, the size of a train, could live and move freely in it like whales in the sea. Science fiction at it’s best, it won a Hugo award and many other accolades. Some truly horrible movies have been made of it that you should miss if you have any control over what goes into your head visually. Also it is why you should read the book itself, the pictures it makes in your mind are ever so much better. We have places here in the West that echo the setting in that novel but of course on a much smaller, but no less spectacular scale. The one most accessible to us is The Great Sand Dunes National park in Colorado.
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A huge expanse of towering sand piled up in truly epic proportions you can see how they might trigger your imagination, populating it with strange creatures and other-worldly adventures. The huge dunes create a wall that looms over you, soon blocking out all else, and you can begin to see where the idea for Herbert’s story began.
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During the mid-day light the dunes become almost featureless under the blazing sun and the color will fade until everything is a bleached white, but as soon as the sun moves down in the sky the colors begins it shift towards the red and the dunes start to come alive.
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At the end of day when the shadows stretch out and every grain of sand is outlined, the dunes are at their very best. The icy blue of the mountains behind create a stunning contrast to the hot colors of the sand. It is a breath taking sight and if the wind drops down and silence comes over the land you will feel like you have been transported to another place and time, even perhaps to another planet.
As an effort to make us more accessible to the general public, the staff and I here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire, have decided to provide our readers with a way to contact us regarding our postings or anything else that might be on your minds. So now whenever the mood strikes you, you can click on the mail link and send us those pithy comments, observations, critiques, recipes, complaints, marriage proposals, old un-deposited tax refund checks, letters of intent, letters of discontent, phone numbers, testimonials to pearls of wisdom gleaned from this site, and finally but not lastly, statements of undying gratitude for making you smile once in a while, if indeed that has happened. Don’t be ashamed, there’s nothing wrong if you’ve chuckled in the privacy of your own home, everybody does it. We don’t judge here.
So do it now, click on mail@BigShotsNow.com while this message appears on your screen because after all, we can’t do this all day. But wait ! Hold on a second, don’t click that link yet. As an extra special bonus available only to you our readers, you may receive at absolutely no extra cost a return email in response. That’s right people, this may turn into a two-way dialogue, with us actually talking to each other, so take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity and send us those thoughts and feelings and if you have them those un-deposited tax refund checks too. Talk to you soon.
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As you know doubt have heard, we have a long standing study being conducted by our head owlogist and sponsored by the Owl Fund Forever here at The World Headquarters of our Media Empire. Through the years we have made many huuuge and invaluable observations of owl behavior, enough that several papers could be published in those fancy scientific journals that you hear about but can’t buy at the newsstand. However, since there was a small problem between our head owlogist and Vinnie and his friend Thug, our friends at Witsec have asked that we don’t use our experts name at this time. Be that at it may we can still share some of our findings with the general public. This study was focusing on the Great Horned Owl and it’s young and we were lucky enough to find this fine specimen at Yellowstone National Park, where so much of our important work has been carried out.
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We have determined that there is a certain amount of boredom that sets in due to the restrictive nature of the young’s immaturity and of course it’s inability to fly. Thus it has a lot of time to engineer disruptive moments in the parents life. After a certain amount of consideration a plan may be forming.
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Several possibilities have been considered and rejected.
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Our owlogist calls this the “Eureka Moment!” which is a scientific term for “Oh man, this is going to be good.”
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The plan, devilish in nature and one that only a young owl could conceive, is to sing the latest rap song at maximum volume.
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The desired result is achieved in a very short time. The adult expresses it’s displeasure and according to our expert on the scene, it was done so in no uncertain terms.
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Undeterred the young owl resorts to expressing it’s intention to continue developing new and unusual ways to interact with it’s parent. Our owlogist suggests that this posturing could be interpreted as the “I could bite you in the neck right now and you wouldn’t even know” behavior that is the universal expression of disdain in the young owls community. We here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire, intend to keep this important work going for as long as it takes, and our funds hold out, to get this behavior not only documented, but interpreted in a manner that will explain this species behavior to the person on the street in a way that can be easily understood. No big words here, no talking down to, no expecting you to know Latin or some other dead stupid language. As our friend Joe Friday used to say “just the facts ma’am” and that ‘s what provided here at The World Headquarters of our Media Empire, and of course , as always, free of charge.
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Bosque del Apache is a wildlife preserve located in New Mexico near the town of Socorro. Primarily a bird sanctuary it is the place to go if you want to see almost all the snow geese alive in the world today. OK, That might be a slight exaggeration but only a little. There are a lot of snow geese down here. They number in the thousands during the winter months and completely fill up the ponds so that it seems like there isn’t space for one more bird to land, but they do. Having said all that these are not Snow geese pictured here. These are Sandhill cranes. I’ll show you Snow geese in another post later. The Sandhills are here in record numbers too and they are really the main attraction for me as far as I’m concerned. Where the Snow geese are noisy and spectacular in the morning when they all take off at the same time, these guys, the Sandhills, are more graceful and sophisticated. They can be noisy also but it is usually when they land, or are calling their mates, or telling that neighbor he is way too close. They have a stately walk, they don’t scramble, they are polite to their mates bowing and nodding and will often engage in an impromptu dance to reaffirm how much they like each other. All in all, very nice birds. They congregate in small groups and those groups will make larger flocks and so on, but they seem to find smaller family gatherings preferable. In the early morning as they are getting ready to go to work they collect their other group members and begin the preparations to leave. In the evening as they return they glide in to the pond areas in formation and settle down for the night. This is the time when they seem to interact with each other the most. They talk over the days events, decide where they’re going tomorrow and then settle down until morning.
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It is a little known secret that I was a frustrated wannabe painter. In fact for years when I was sculpting I used to tell people that I was a sculptor because I couldn’t paint. Later on in life when I had reached a stage where I made grandma Moses look like a freshman cheerleader I went and took lessons from a well known plein air painter. She told me that after she trained me to hold the brush with the bristles towards the canvas and how to get the cap off the paint tube with out redoing the walls, that I might have potential. I defined potential as “No way in Hell” but I persevered. But in my persistence a funny thing happened, not funny in a grab your sides, milk coming out of your nose kind of way, but strange. Funny strange. The more I painted the more I loved paintings as an art form and the less I liked actually doing it. It turned out that I really loved sculpting after all but because of the lifelong dreaming of painting thing I viewed it more as a job rather than a soul satisfying art form that occasionally made me money. That realization however, did not diminish my obsession with the 2D art world. We artists talk like that, 2D, paintings or flatwork, as opposed to 3D, sculpture, it makes us look a lot smarter at parties and stuff. I had traipsed through most of the big museums and galleries here and in Europe and had a catalog of my favorite painters and their work in my head, and when I began photographing in earnest I was always looking for that Monet shot or the light in Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro work. It is surprisingly hard to find in real life. Rarely does chiaroscuro jump out at you when you turn the corner or the subtle light of Monet’s gardens happen every time you get ready to take a picture. But sometimes it does. And when it does, and you get to shoot it, it is like when someone comes up to you and says “I think you are quite the splendid fellow, here’s several million bucks. Take the rest of the day off”, that kind of feeling. That may not have happened to you yet but when it does, are you going to be happy. This image of a coyote in a meadow at Sheep lake in Rocky Mountain National Park was one of those times when Monet’s spirit was at work. If he had been a wildlife artist he would have painted this and been a happy man, just as I was for being able to have seen it.
There are many mysteries in the mountains here in the west but none so intriguing and compelling as this one. It has always seemed strange to me that the horse tribes had such a short history. I don’t mean that they weren’t living on the plains and mountains for hundreds of years but that their glory days, when they had horses and rode proud and free, clothed in leather, carrying lances and bows, fighting with their enemies and living as Kings on this land seemed to be a very short time. That time of their life only seemed to last for decades, a very brief time that was captured by only a few artists, photographers and the memories of their people. Where did that spirit go? It has only been in the recent past that a small numbers of stories, legends if you will, began to emerge. They were always greeted with skepticism if not outright derision whenever they were told. Maybe because you only heard them in the bars and honky-tonks late in the evening and told by those who had had a few too many. The fact that they appeared to believe them with every fiber of their being, did little to keep them from being so easily discounted. The legend of course, is the story of Brigadoon arch.
The way it has been told is that every hundred years or so the Arch appears in the mountains just north of Jackson Hole not far from where their present day airport is located. The exact time it appears is not known nor is it known how long it is open, but when it is, there is the possibility that you, if you were brave enough, could hike up to it and pass through, and there you would find the lost horse tribes living as they always have, in their lodges made of buffalo skins, with their favorite ponies tied out front and the smoke from their campfires slowly spiraling up into the crisp morning air. There are occasionally, unexplained sightings of a string of lights winding down the mountainside late at night, torches perhaps, as some of the young braves trek down to the plains for a last buffalo hunt. One person told me, swearing it on an oath that can not be repeated here and sealed with a shot, that after seeing the lights one night he found pony tracks leading down to the river and nearby a dropped beaded pouch like the ones carried by Arapahoe Dog Soldiers when they were out raiding. Inside it, he said, was a freshly taken scalp barely cured. When asked if the pouch could be seen now he told me sadly that he had lost it in a poker game. It almost made him quit drinking he said, tearing up some, and he was no longer able to speak of it.
Think what you will, I for one, believe that there are things we can’t explain, things that will always remain a mystery. The arch wasn’t there the last time I went through so if you want to find out for yourself I guess you will just have to wait until the arch appears again and go and see for yourself. If it does appear and you are brave enough to enter I would brush up on my Lakota if I were you.
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