Category Archives: Places

A Little Glimpse Of Gold

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When you walk through lower Antelope canyon you pass through various ranges of color. Sometimes you’re in a darker area where the purples are predominant, other times you come into a bright area where every shade of orange and red and yellow are on display.

This is one of those areas. The canyon floor is a little wider here than other places and the sun was cooperating so the result is an open airy feeling, that is until a cloud passes in front of the sun, then it gets real dark down here in a hurry. When you’re 100′ or more under ground you want the sun to illuminate the passages. There are no lights down here other than the sun and your enthusiasm.

Sometimes the colors seem to try to outdo each other and when that happens, magic happens. Be quick when you see this type of color arrangement present itself as this is not the norm down here. However if you wait a moment you’ll get something just as spectacular because that’s the canyon’s job. Show the colors and plenty of them.

Moonlight Over Canyonlands

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Moonlight can do strange and wondrous things if you’re lucky enough to be down in the bottom of the canyons under a full moon. The small ravines and gully’s that filter down to the canyon bottom are filled up with the many different grasses that grow here because this is where the water is when there is any.

During the daylight hours these same grasses will appear colorless and faded due to the relentless beating of the sun, but at night when the moon comes out and shines its silvery light on these pockets of splendor they glow with an earthly luminance that equals the best lit studio. Nothing beats Mother Nature when she wants to show off her handiwork.

This vignette was found at the bottom of an unnamed canyon in Canyonlands National Park earlier one evening as the walls blocked the last of the daylight and the full moon rose early. There wasn’t time for setting up a formal shot as the dark was closing in and there was a hair-raising drive to climb out of the canyon before full darkness fell.

So a couple of grab shots taken out of the vehicle window were all there was time for, in fact only two images were taken, but that is often how these things happen. You see beauty, you snap the shutter and you move on. That brief moment lives on in this image for as long as people want to look at it. Which I hope is a long time.

Dune Patrol

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Monument Valley is a big place. It stretches across two states and given the type of terrain encompassed within its borders it requires a huge amount of upkeep. It also gets an enormous number of visitors every day who traipse across its surface, leaving footprints, disturbing the details that make up the various dunes located throughout the park, and generally causing the park to get a slightly tired look by the end of the day.

The Navajo people own Monument valley and do their very best to keep the park pristine. You won’t find any litter along the roadways, or plastic bags stuck in the sagebrush here. But as we mentioned before Monument valley is a big place and there aren’t enough Navajo to get out everyday and tidy up all the aspects of the park that need looking after. That’s where the volunteers come in.

Each morning before the park opens residents and docents of the valley get out at the first sign of dawn long before the park opens for business, and check their areas. Perhaps a wind came through and erased some of the picturesque furrows that give the red sand dunes their distinctive look. Or a passing night hunter came along and left their tracks behind.

That’s what occurred last night when  a coyote spent some time on this dune waiting for something unwary to make itself known. Fortunately for them nothing did and the coyote moved on to better hunting grounds leaving just a few of its tracks in the sandy surface. Jack Rabbit, the overseer of this particular dune, is out inspecting the damage. Fortunately this disruption can be repaired by Jack himself with just a few tamping’s of his big flat feet and a quick roll over on the effected area and the dune will look pristine again.

This little repair was easy, but occasionally one of the large herd of sheep and goats that roam through the park will pass directly over the dune Jack is responsible for. That’s when catastrophe strikes. Dozens upon dozens of hooves tramp across the dune breaking down the edges, leaving deep footprints in the soft surface of the dune, even tearing out the occasional foliage, creating damage that is much too much for Jack to take on himself. That’s when he calls out the big guns. The park’s maintenance team.

The maintenance team is a large group of paid workers made up of Jackrabbits, voles, a large hawk too old to hunt any more who uses his strong wings to brush the surface of the sand dune smooth again and in return is allowed to occasionally borrow one of the mice or voles for dinner, are just a few of the members that make up the maintenance team. This crack team of highly trained professionals rush to damaged areas within the park and perform the triage needed to get the park back up and running in no time at all. They are the unsung heroes of the park, along with Jack and the many other volunteers who spend their time making sure the park is in perfect condition each day when it opens.

They are all part of the Dune Patrol, those tireless workers who keep Monument valley ready for us to view its wonders everyday of the year. Thanks guys, keep up the good work.

Crow Camp – Nearest The Fire

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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!

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Walking through the Crow camp on a moonless night, watching your footing as your eyes are having difficulty adjusting to the darkness, you find yourself entering and leaving one oasis of light after another. Flashlights help but do little to overcome the inky blackness between one set of lodges and another.

The lodges have been set up in a random fashion in rows and groups generally following the banks of the Little Bighorn river as it winds its way from Custer’s battlefield down to the town of Crow Agency. It is one of those places where you have to know where you are before you can get where you’re going. It is very easy to get turned around in the labyrinth that is Crow camp, especially at night. The people living here know where they are. Little kids are out running around, darting like lightning bugs into one campsite after another and back home again as if they had built-in direction finders, which you suspect they do.

The sound of the camp varies from very noisy where one group may be playing the drum and singing, to quieter areas where small groups of the people are sitting around the fire, talking, laughing, enjoying each others company, and on to the stillness of the darkness when you leave the campsites.

Each of these places is a small area where the only light is from the fire and the occasional lantern. These islands of brightness scattered in the sea of blackness are welcoming, making you wish you could enter and sit and be a part of the festivities. Then you’d be home and wouldn’t have to walk and walk until you found your way back to your car and your own temporary home.

At every fireside there is one lodge that is nearest the fire. The flickering light from the burning logs changes the dull white of the lodge, covering it in a wavering, shimmering shade of gold. The lodge poles are highlighted against the darkness, the faint green of the surrounding trees barely visible in the background, the surrounding teepees just catching enough light to show you they are there.

The experience of being in the Crow Camp is one that has many layers, some loud and boisterous, others quieter and filled with subtle visions and sounds. The contrast of night and day is filled with excitement and wonder for someone new to the experience. Perhaps next time you can sit with the people in front of the lodge nearest the fire. What a memory that would be.

The Last Giant

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As you all know if you’ve watched the Animal Channel at all, is that big things once roamed this land we live on. Really big things, like totally humongous things that were Elephant shaped. Only our modern elephants would look like these guys calves if they stood next to them. Mini-mammoths if you will. Then they died and turned into fossils that we go out and dig up if we can get the proper funding.

The largest that we currently know about is the Mammoth Columbi (Mammuthus primigenius). Even its name is big. It was like several of those double-decker busses that they have in London put together. Mammoths lived in the Pleistocene epoch, or about 400,000 years ago which as you also know, is about 382,000 years before the Earth was formed. Our scientists, which are pretty smart guys, are still trying to figure that one out.

However regardless of niggly little facts like that it cannot be disputed that they were here. We got their bones. You can go to any Mammoth Bones display place and for a small fee walk right in and see them. Some places even let you touch them if you’re careful. Can’t hardly argue with that even if you are really bull-headed. So far with the limited funding we’ve been able to scrape up we have only been able to unearth the skull and part of its trunk and the shoulders. We hope to work on getting the tusks revealed soon. Perhaps with a new administration our funding will be restored.

But what a lot of people do not know, even if they are avid watchers of mammoth based shows on the tube, is that there were once even larger mammoth kind of things walking the earth, way earlier than when the regular run-of-the-mill mammoth columbi were out and about. I’m not even sure how that fits in with the time line of when the Earth was formed. I know it sure throws a monkey wrench into the logic, but then that stuffs hard to figure out when you’re limited by really dumb facts.

What we do know however is that back when these really big guys were walking around, give or take several hundred thousand years, they were the biggest animals to live on the earth whether it was here or not. (We try not to take sides when we’re having a serious scientific discussion about this stuff.) How do we know that? Why are we so sure? Because we found one. Not a live one mind you, but a dead one that had the good graces to stay out in the open where you can see it, touch it, walk around it if you have the time, stick your tongue on it and taste it ( it tastes like chicken) and generally be amazed and in awe of its overall size. That’s what you are viewing in the excavation photo above.

The size of this unnamed beast, we are proposing mammoth dwighticus horribilis hoping the fossil naming society will accept it, is close to unbelievable. That trunk sticking up out of the ground could very likely pick up your average sized office building. The tusks are buried in the ground but you can still get some idea of their size as several hundred feet away there is one point sticking up out of the ground. It is taller than your average basketball player and you can’t even chunk a rock from the base of its skull and hit the tip of it.

There is a lot that is unknown about these big mammoth animals but we can surmise a few things. They ate grass. One of the reasons there is very little vegetation left in the areas where these remains are often found is that these guys ate it all. We know that the smaller, more dainty Mammoth Columbi ate up to 400 lbs. of grass and vegetation a day so you can imagine what these big fellas ate. We figure each molar alone was the size of Volkswagen Jetta, the diesel one not the gas model.

Also many of the small pockets of water, little ponds, small lakes and such were likely caused by water filling in their hoof prints or their dust wallows. Like modern buffalo or elephants these mammoths had to roll around in the dirt to remove parasites and sand burs. Just thinking about how big the ticks must have been to fasten on to one of these guys is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. We also think that they were Vegan, prone to bump into things, but social if clumsy animals. We don’t think astrology played an important part in their lives. They may have used the Julian calendar but our guess is that they figured time by how long it took to consume several cubic tons of fodder, then make it to the nearest water hole and drain it dry. That may be why this one became dead. He was late to the water hole. No water, no life.

If you’re still a skeptic and we know that there are some of you out there, just go to Arches National Park and Mammoth burial grounds and see for yourself. Sometimes fiction is stranger than life.

The Rosetta Stone

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While travelling the inner depths of Capitol Reef National Park we stumbled on to what we believe is one of the most significant finds in recent history as it relates to the progression of artistic skill in Anasazi rock art. This discovery is bound to shake the art world to its very core and set Art historians on a new path of understanding as to how the Anasazi went from being rock pounders to major artists.

If you remember your history you know that the smartest minds in the archaeology world could not begin to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was like Chinese arithmetic, really hard and it made their brains hurt, so many just gave up, feeling dumb and ashamed. They just went home, defeated. It wasn’t until some lucky guy found this stone called the Rosetta stone that had three different languages on it translating the same off-color joke into all the other languages. If we remember correctly the languages were Greek, a form of Inuit called “Inuktitut”, and of course hieroglyphics itself. That made it easy. A group of guys and one woman made up of Greek, Inuit and Egyptian scholars soon had the hieroglyphics translated and now practically anybody can just pick up something written in hieroglyphics and read it like it was yesterday’s obits. Because that was what most hieroglyphics were, stuff about dead kings, kings that were already dead, kings that were about to be dead, people who wanted to be king but changed their minds because they didn’t want to become dead, and so on. The obituaries of the day.

So what does this have to do with the art world you ask. Plenty. People who study petroglyphs, Anasazi rock art, have wondered for years “Why didn’t these guys ever get any better ?” Look at any rock depiction of Bighorn sheep. They all look exactly the same no matter when they were created. For like a hundred years these Anasazi petroglyph makers never changed how they created an image of a Bighorn sheep, or any other subject for that matter. You would think with all that practice they’d have gotten better by accident. But they didn’t. They just hammered away in the same old style.

Then the image above was taken showing what was to become the Rosetta Stone of the art world. On this newly discovered rock panel you can see there is a petroglyph in the upper right hand corner of one of the Anasazi’s favorites subjects, an undefined lump or something, maybe the start of another Bighorn sheep that they screwed up and just abandoned, (there is no erasing in Petroglyphs) and this splendid but remarkable painting of foliage in the style of Monet, Renoir, Mr. van Rijn, O’Keeffe. This was a quantum leap forward for the Anasazi, as it showed that at least one of them got sick to death of painting sheep.

*The Institute immediately sent in its crack team of art historians, restoration-ists, and gawkers to secure this painting and to analyze how it was done. They have slowly been taking this image apart piece by piece, picking at it with sharp things, rubbing it gently with 36 grit sandpaper to see what’s underneath, asking themselves “How did they do it? How did these Anasazi’s go from no-talent rock chippers to this level of  sophistication without attending some prestigious art school?” The questions kept building the more they reduced this image to a mere shadow on the wall.

Some new facts were gleaned from this process. One was that the painting was done with brushes made of wooly mammoth hair wrapped onto a slender willow switch, and another was the paint was analyzed and found to be a combination of crushed berries which were used to create the Alizarin Crimson seen in the leaves, acrylic paint from the Artist Den, some off-brand oil paint of the type found at Hobby Lobby all bound together in a matrix of Toad fat. Our experts are still trying to come up with an explanation for the inconsistencies that this brings up, but these are smart people and they’ll come up with some plausible answers. After all their jobs depend on it.

While we are hard at work figuring out all this stuff so that you don’t have to, take a moment to study the image. See how wonderfully clear the artist created the leaves and stems. Look how every leaf conforms to the rock surface it was painted onto, yet shows the brilliant colors that make this image come alive. It ‘s hard to believe that this was painted 1100 years ago.

The Institute will be studying this image plus any more we find, to discover just what new stage in the art of the Ancients this led to. We’ll have those answers and more as this story unfolds. Stay tuned.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

If I Had A Hammer

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It was  a cold, cold Christmas Eve in the Grand Canyon. There was no wind but that just intensified the cold, giving everything a deep blue look. The lodge was still a half mile away and the lights beckoned me forward, each step closer to the beautiful yellow warmth radiating from each window across the canyon, that far off rim seeming weeks away.

The light was nearly gone and my cameras felt like bricks as they weighed against my chest as if they each weighed 50 lbs. a piece. After a full day’s shooting their weight begins to double or triple as you make the long trek back home. When it is dark out and you’re cold and you still have a long walk in front of you, you begin to see things that you might normally just walk by, never noticing their beauty because you have places to go and things to do. But now with nothing else to occupy you other than placing one foot in front of the other, these little things become visible and more intriguing.

Like this handsome wrought iron fence. The park service in its infinite wisdom placed this fence along the edge of the canyon to keep the unwary from rushing up and accidentally hurtling themselves over the side. Apparently tired of hearing the screams as the unlucky made the mile long descent to the canyon floor below, they erected this barrier to promote public safety. They needed the barrier of course, what with the tendency of the public nearly out of their minds with the beauty of Canyon, to save them from themselves, but they didn’t have to make it beautiful. But they did.

 As I wearily approached, the very last ray of the setting sun broke through the high-flying clouds to illuminate just this small portion of the fence. A celestial spotlight saying “Look here. Look at this thing that man has made.”. Each blow from the hammer visible on its surface, the resulting texture with the patina from long exposure to the elements a ripple on the surface of the metal. The top edge of the rail rounded over from the countless caresses of unnoticing hands rubbing its surface as the crowds stood and looked out over the majesty of the Grand Canyon. It  would be easy to not notice this small bit of detail that accents the grandeur that is this spectacular place, this Grand Canyon. And most did not see this fence as such, it being that utilitarian device it is, it just kept them and theirs safe as it was supposed to.

But things look different as I mentioned before, when you are cold and hungry and far from home. Still when you are given a present like this, this tiny showcase of fleeting light and dark and texture and patina, plus the ability to see something common in a new way, a way that shows you the true beauty of everyday things in everyday life, you stop and take it in and marvel that these everyday things in our life can be so beautiful.