Crow Fair 2015 Grand Entry

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

This post has been moved to OpenChutes.com. All future postings of Powwows, Indian Relay Races, Rodeos and Rendezvous will be posted there from now on exclusively. So if you’re looking for new images and posts for all those events attended this year, plus all the old posts posted on BigShotsNow.com check out OpenChutes.com. See you there!

The Grand Entry at Crow Fair is the beginning of all the festivities that take place in the Arbor. The Dance contests, ceremonies, the general get together when everyone dances for the sheer enjoyment of it. It is the center of all the social activities. It always begins with the color guard presenting the flags.

A dancer performs a special dance to complete the flag presentation.

Then the procession begins with the Royalty entering the circle. These are all the Princesses that have been selected by the various tribes participating to represent them.

The men follow.

The elder warriors leading the men into the circle.

Followed by the women dancing their way around the arbor

There are many different emotions displayed by the participants. This is a very special time for all.

They continue dancing, gradually completing the circle.

Everyone who can, participates.

T Each category of dancers enters in their turn.

The men’s group puts maximum effort forth as they enter.

Each dancer showing his own style as they enter.

Women take their place in the circle.

Young mothers with their children dance and bring their young ones into the circle as soon as they can carry them into the arbor.

An elder warrior pensively completes another round as everyone that can fit enters the arbor.

Younger warriors enter in their turn

As the circle tightens and fills towards completion the dancers begin to pick up the pace.

There is movement and color everywhere one looks.

The drummers are tireless. The beat, the songs, the energy, keep everyone focused and the dancers are totally dependent on them. The ceremonies couldn’t take place without them. They are the heroes in the background, usually unseen but always heard.

The circle is complete. All the participants are inside the arbor, the circle has tightened to make room for everyone and the Grand Entry is complete. Soon the dancing will start and continue until the fair is over.

Over the next few days we e will bring you the Dancing, the Parade, Portraits, the Rodeo, and the Closing ceremonies. Stay tuned.

Crow Fair 2015

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

Crow Fair is here again. This is the 97th year that it has taken place on the banks of the Little Big Horn river. It is billed as the Teepee capital of the world and it lived up to its name again as there were over 1200 lodges set up. That would be one thousand two hundred teepees. That is a lot of teepees. The camp is located between Custer’s Last Stand, or the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument as it’s officially known, and extends along the river to the edge of the town of Crow Agency in Montana. That’s a distance of a little under three miles and maybe ¾ of a mile deep.

The official starting date for all the ceremonies and festivities was August 12th and lasted until August 17th, but as you can imagine an endeavor this large didn’t happen overnight. For a couple of weeks in some cases, the participants began moving in and setting up their lodges, creating a camp that hasn’t been seen on this scale since probably 1876. All of the teepees have been set up according to family groups and were usually grouped in a circle if possible with an arbor made of poles set in the ground to form a rectangle in the middle. This framework was then covered with fresh-cut branches with their leaves still green to cover the framework and provide shade. As you walked through the camp you could see family groups sitting at the tables having a meal or simply talking to while away the hours between activities.

They also brought their horses and they were kept in pens set up near the lodges where they could be fed and cared for. In the morning and evening the kids were given the task of seeing that the horses were watered. This meant riding them bareback, usually while leading another, down to drink out of the Little Bighorn river. The only difference between now and a hundred years ago were the clothes the kids wore. Lots of jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes. Lots of smartphones too. It was not unusual to see a youngster riding a horse down to the river texting on the way. Many of the horses seemed to find relief in the cool water and would venture out midway into the river to stand for as long as they were allowed to. Some of the kids were not averse to jumping in the water either as there were several days when the temperature was over 100°.

Over the next few days we’ll be bringing you highlights from the Crow Fair and Rodeo. There was singing and drumming and non-stop dancing. People dressed in regalia that many made themselves. There was ceremony and traditions paid homage to, and most of all a gathering of the Crow people to celebrate their lives and history. Stay tuned.

Middle Fork of the Crazy Woman River

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

Middle Fork of the Crazy Woman river

It’s mid-August and along the Middle Fork of the Crazy Woman river up near the northern border of Wyoming the grass is turning that shade somewhere between old gold and burnished copper. There is still green grass along the river’s edge but further out only yards away the green stopped and botanical fire started. At least that’s what it resembled when the sun was sinking and the wind blew, and it was blowing today. The tall grass fronds were frantically moving back and forth as if to uproot themselves from the very earth that nourished them, their deep color even richer in the late afternoon sun. Their seed heads rasping together made a slight crackling sound like when you stroke a cat’s fur until it raises up and sticks to your hand. The hot wind made wave patterns in the sea of grass swirling the long nodding tops together, showing its path as it swept by. Cloud shadows drifted across the river, here narrow enough you could almost straddle it, then swept across the grass making the copper color look red from the contrast like a slowly burning flame seen from a distance at night.

The antelope herd that was making short thrift of all the green grass they could eat had their backs turned into it, not the way horses do but simply keeping the dust out of their eyes while they fed as rapidly as they could. One large buck kept a wary eye on the surrounding prairie. No wolves or coyotes today but you never knew when that other hunter, man, might suddenly rise up out of the tall grass to kill you. The young ones, this spring’s addition to the herd, grazed a little, but some were still nursing when they weren’t racing along the river at breakneck speed. The wind didn’t bother them, in fact it seemed to add to their speed, picking them up and pushing them until their tiny black hooves were simply a blur as they tried to out race the wind.

Crazy Woman river isn’t too far from the Crow reservation. In the old days one of the tribes, whether it was the Crow or Shoshone or the Bannock, maybe even the Blackfeet down from the Canadian border on a hunting trip or a killing trip, would be concealed downwind watching and waiting for one of the Antelope to wander away from the safety of the herd. Antelope liver with some wild onions over an open fire would be a gift from the spirits tonight. This had to be a stalking hunt, there was no way even the fastest pony could run down an Antelope. So whichever brave brought down one of these would be a mighty hunter indeed.

It is still fearsomely hot, more so with the wind blowing hard enough to lay down the grass. Too hot even for the Antelope to lay down in the shade if there was any shade. Looking off across the valley towards the blue hazy mountains to the west, half hidden by the smoke from a distant wildfire and the heat haze, their shape barely realized, more of a violet smear across the horizon than an outline, heat can be seen rising in a visible shield, everything behind it contorted and shapeless, exaggerated past the point of recognition. Since the early people didn’t think in Fahrenheit, hot was when the rocks were too hot to touch, and when the ponies refused to move without being beaten, when no clothes were too many. It is a time when a person would burn red in the sun if he was too crazy to find shade. This is the time to find shelter and a place to wait out the worst of it.

This is the way it is today on the Middle Fork of the Crazy Woman river and this is the way it had to have been then, when the tribes roamed free and life was different. This is a reminder of those days, made real by the smothering feel of the oppressive heat and the searing burning intensity of the wind across unprotected skin. The difference between then and now is time. Without our air conditioning and our ability to travel through and away from discomfort quickly we’d be right out there as they were, back when you learned to live and adapt and prevail. Some of us would love it.

Rumble In The Rockies

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

Many of you are not clear on how things work here in the Rocky Mountains. Especially as it pertains to the changing of the seasons. You think it’s all just automatic. Some of it is but even so there’s science at work here. Big hairy important science. The kind they make television shows about. The most common misconception is that Winter and its attending snow and cold appear out of the North, invading us like the shock troops at the forefront of that cold weather blitzkrieg known as the Saskatchewan Screamer. Not so. We’ve been blaming our brothers to the North for our misery unnecessarily. Sorry, Canada. However that doesn’t let them completely off the hook. They deserve to be blamed for plenty else, Justin Bieber, to name just one thing, but not for Winter.

The real cause of Winter and this is substantiated if not like totally proven, with improbable theory, old husbands tales, Bigfoot followers, alien probing proponents, people who read those newspapers at the supermarket checkouts, Republicans, Democrats, movie producers, other people who should know better, and Eugene that guy who listens to talk radio 24 hrs. a day, is Snow Volcanoes. I will repeat that, Snow Volcanoes. I know, I know, a collective gasp of disbelief just went racing across the internet, but here is proof.

In the photo above you see the caldera of this awakening Snow Volcano as it spews cold misty clouds filled with moisture that will soon turn into snow. This is the beginning of many eruptions to come as we proceed into Winter.

But wait, you say, isn’t a volcano just a rupture on the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as the Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface? Yes, yes, yes, it is but that’s a HOT volcano. We’re talking about COLD volcanoes. The ones you don’t know anything about, which is why we’re putting out this post. To inform you and bring you up to speed on the latest scientific stuff.

You all know about the freeze-thaw thing that happens, such as when you leave a bottle of beer out on the picnic table overnight when it’s really cold out and the next morning after you’re done heaving your lasagna into the porcelain cistern and you remember you left that beer outside and you rush out to drink it thinking it will make you feel better and you find that freeze-thaw thing has been at work. The frozen beer has been warmed by the sun and expanded, forcing its way out of the bottle, shattering it in the process, as the ice and cold try to escape from its confinement. Well that’s how a cold volcano works.

Underneath the mountain range is a pool of really cold material known as uhm, I’m not sure, but it’s cold, take my word for it. The caldera is bowl-shaped, just perfect for focusing the rays of the sun into its center where the super-energized sunshine, what is known in scientific circles as heat, makes it way down the chimney towards the pool of that super but unnamed cold stuff. As the summer progresses and it gets hotter, so does that concentrated heat that is racing down to meet the cold material. Nature, loving to blow crap up can hardly wait to see what happens as the pressure builds and builds until it is say, November 18th and then, back up, Loretta, it’s going to blow. The pent-up cold and snow seeing its opportunity to escape its confinement races up the chimney and sends a plume of snow and cold miles into the atmosphere. As it falls and lands on your house you are receiving the fulmination of the Snow Volcano. This continues until you are butt deep in fulminations.

That is the eruption, and it doesn’t just happen once. It happens over and over, all winter long until you just can’t… well you know, you’ve been through it before. This then is the beginning of winter and its cause isn’t Canada but Snow Volcanoes. Now you know why and how it happens and that makes dealing with it easier. If you have any questions or concerns about this process feel free to contact us using the concerned and confused email address provided on the site. Thanks and remember, Winter is just around the corner.

Short Days

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

As Director of the World Famous Institute I was surprised and somewhat dismayed at the fact that the days here in the immediate area of the Institute’s holdings are getting noticeably shorter. It was just a moment ago and it was light until nearly 10:00 pm. You could work late. Get things done. Now just a low belch after supper it was getting dark. I mean, like, Geeze. We have things to do yet that require long periods of light. Places to go, pictures to take, stuff to look at. Check out the picture above. That’s what happens when it gets dark early. Well I immediately called a meeting.

Gathering the heads of the various departments that are responsible for handling these types of events I demanded answers. “WTF is going on?” was one of my first queries. Looking around to see who I could pin down for some straight answers my gaze swept over the my elite team of specialists. We have cast offs from NOAA, The WMO: World Meteorological Service, The National Weather Service, the one run by the government, even CoCoRaHS or the Community Collaborative Rain Hail & Snow Network, none of them would look me in the eye. We even have that goofy intern wunderkind that has The WeatherBug widget on his computer at the table, as it seems most of these other supposed experts ask him daily for the forecast. No one ventured an answer.

“This shall not stand!” I roared in my best dictatorial voice “These days shall not get shorter until we get all the crap done we’re supposed to and If heads have to roll, then I advise you to get steel collars on your wife beaters, because they will.” The room got quiet, even the WeatherBug kid snuffed out his joint. They knew I was serious. We’ve had purges here before and for a lot less reason. I reminded them if they had any chance in hell of getting that back pay I was holding just for circumstances like this, they had better get things straightened out and I mean now. Yeah that got the sweat rolling down their faces.

Amazonian Rosewood table, imported before the moratorium on wasting irreplaceable timber resources went into effect, that went from the sublime to the ridiculous. “Let’s pull an iceberg down and plant it off the coast of California and reflect sunlight back this way. That’ll get us a couple more hours.” This was from the NOAA guy. Every other word out of his mouth was iceberg this and iceberg that. I remembered they punched his ticket for spending too much time out on the icebergs until he was just too loopy to find his butt with both hands behind him. He may not have been our best pick of the litter.

Someone asked the guy from the WMO, the ex-World Meteorological Service person, for a suggestion but no one could get him to answer until we provided him with a mike and a whiteboard. He’s turned out to be useless. They wouldn’t even send his dossier over, said it was classified. That’s probably why we got him so cheap.

The suggestions flew around the table, each one more preposterous than the next until a quiet voice was heard back at the end of the table. “How much more time do you need each day? How many hours?” The room went deathly still. You could have heard a pin drop. It was the stoner kid, the intern we took in after they towed the 79 Pontiac he was living in. We hired him because he was able to get Outlook to work again and we could get our email. He’s now the head of our IT department and will make big, I mean big bucks, if we ever pay him. I thought for a minute and said “About 4 hours.” “What time is it now” he asked. I looked at my steel-cased, waterproof to 600 meters Rolex chronometer and said “11:15”. “Set your clocks back 4 hours.” he said.

Set your clocks back 4 hours! Set your clocks back? That would make it like 7:15 in the morning. We had the whole day ahead of us. “Eureka!!!” someone yelled, I think it was that woman from CoCoRaHS and pandemonium broke loose. What an absolute perfect solution and it didn’t cost anything, other than hiring that crazy guy to climb the tower and change that clock up there, but that was nothing compared to the productivity we’d get with the days made 4 hours longer. Who would have thought that little 420 burner, I think his name is Billy Haze, would have the answer. My aide, in a quiet aside, said I should reward him somehow, do something nice for him. So I told him that he could move from his tent into one of the dorm rooms in the intern barracks. He quickly asked if it could be one of the heated ones. I nearly balked but thinking of all the time he saved us I said yes, and he immediately split to move his stuff before I changed my mind.

Right now everyone is in feverish hyperactivity determined to wring every second out of those new 4 hours. Quarterly reviews are coming up and since their pay, or lack of it, is dependent on their scores everyone wants to look like a hero. We’ll see. Personally I’m soon off to an important shoot and can’t wait until I get to pack those 4 hours with pictures from my latest adventure. If I run out of light, I may set my watch back another hour. Genius that kid, absolute genius.

Racing Into The Darkness

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

Every day, from time immemorial, the earth has slowly turned on its axis as it hurtles around the sun in its quest to use up its allotted time in this universe. As it completes its rotation, the terminator, that line that divides light from dark, moves across the face of our planet bringing day for some and night for others. This celestial clock can not be adjusted or reset and there is no force that we know of that can halt this race to darkness or stop the illumination of the first light of dawn.

Here at Monument Valley we see the last of this day’s battle as the earth continues its steady rotation into that good night. The colors of the buttes and the surrounding earth they rest on change from the deep dark red of bright sunlight into the muted colors of night. Soon they will appear to be black, just a silhouette seen under the light of the stars. But as it does every single day the night passes and the bright light of day will arrive restoring the colors to the land.

Every second of this unending process is precious and holds its own special magic. You may be partial to mid-day or early morning but this moment, the moment of change, as the colors intensifies then slowly fade to black, is one of the most special times to witness.

Dog Days Of Summer

Posted on August 9, 2015 by Dwight Lutsey

The dog days of summer are upon us, and no where is it more noticeable than in the hollows and valleys that crisscross Tower road in Yellowstone National Park. Dog days are the days of late summer usually between the last week of July until the middle of August, when the very air you breathe is hot, humid, and oppressive. It saps the vitality and enthusiasm for life right out of your body and leaves you just plain tired. And if the truth be known kind of cranky.

Actually up in Yellowstone, Dog days are a misnomer as there are very few dogs in the park, due to the fact that the wolves and bears like to eat them, so the bears fill in for them. This is Rosie. Rosie has been on display since early March, dutifully bringing out her twins, Virgil and Emma, so the tourists can see real live bears in the wild. The kids have been a handful and hardly notice the weather, Dog days or not, and fill up Rosie’s time with child management skills she has acquired over years and years of raising cubs.

Today’s a little different because she has just about reached her limit. Her teeth hurt, the bottom of her feet are sweating and she had decided to shave off her coat. She has sent the kids up a tree and told them it was quiet time and when they asked her when they could come back down she answered “Maybe in the Spring.” The oppressive air has weighed her down until she feels like she couldn’t move again in this lifetime. She’s been through this before but every year it gets a little tougher to deal with. This year has been particularly trying for some reason. Maybe its because she isn’t a spring chicken any more, or maybe it’s because it really is worse than usual. Anyway she needs to sit quietly, breath shallowly, and think about swimming across the Yellowstone river about a hundred times. Real slow. In fact she might just stop in the middle, it’s shallow there and take a nap. That would be good.

Bears, even Rosie, do not use calendars. They don’t know that there’s only a few more days maybe a long week or so and this will be all over. It will start to cool down, the trees will start to turn and they’ll have to get busy eating Miller Moths, grubs, grass and roadkill to fatten up. The mornings will be crisp and cool. An occasional early frost will rime the grass along the river banks and there’s the den to think about. Right now though that might as well be in the next century. It’s hot now. She may take a nap, and those kids better not come down if they know what’s good for them. Maybe it’ll be cooler tonight.

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BigShots Now

A conversation about Photography: Images and Commentary by Dwight Lutsey

Monthly Archives: August 2015