Tag Archives: Glacier National Park

Full Moon Over The Crow Camp

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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!

It was nearly midnight as I walked through the camp. It had been a long day. It was Crow Fair 2016 and as always it was spectacular. Starting early in the morning to photograph the staging of the parade, following and shooting the dance competitions, watching the evening performances, it was a day packed full of excitement. This was the last day and I was heading home in the morning.

It had been cloudy and although the sky was covered by those clouds, occasionally the full moon would show itself but never long enough to get a good shot of it. But as luck sometimes favors the photographer the clouds seemed to dissolve and there it was in all its glory, full and round and positioned exactly where it needed to be to make this image. I was given a present in the form of this last memory. Walking through the cool night, feeling the moonlight wash over me, hearing the sound of laughter, singing, people calling out to each other, this was the perfect ending to a summer-long trip along the Powwow trail.

I began the summer in late April with the opportunity to photograph the largest powwow in North America, the Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thousands of dancers, singers, drummers, participants, spectators, all brought together to celebrate their culture. This was spectacle at its grandest. At one point there were over 2800 dancers coming and going from the arena floor. This is like the Superbowl of powwows.

As the summer progressed I had the opportunity to attend powwows and meet people from nearly every tribe in the western part of the United States. There were Shoshone, Arapaho, Bannock, Cree, Chippewa, Blackfeet, Nez Perce, Sioux, Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Hopi, and many other tribes. There were people from the Cree And Chippewa tribes that came down from Canada to participate in the Chippewa/Cree powwow at Rocky Boy Montana. This event was held in the rolling hills of Northern Montana on a hillside where you could see for two days in any direction. No buildings in sight, nothing but the golden prairie stretching on for miles and miles. The sound of drums and singing and the people dancing carried on the wind for days. The reservation in nestled up against the Canadian border just east of Glacier National Park and it was one of the most natural, authentic places I had the good fortune to visit.

People from the various tribes in Washington and Oregon were at different events along the way. It was a chance to see their different regalia and styles of dancing. All were welcome and made to feel like part of the family. That’s what these gatherings felt like. Large family gatherings where you got to see cousins that you hadn’t seen in years. A place where acquaintances were made and spiritual ceremonies brought everyone close together. The sense of community was strong. It felt good to be there.

Over the course of the summer I took over 20,000 images, many were of the various rodeos that were part of the powwow, but never the less, I took a lot of photographs. Now that I am back at my studio I will begin the daunting task of processing these images and posting them on the site. Hopefully the wait hasn’t been too long for those wanting to see the shots of their powwows. Each event will have its images posted as I get to them. My apologies for the delay.

This has been an incredible summer and I couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity to observe, photograph, join in. I got to march in the Color Guard at the Western Shoshone/ Bannock Grand Entry where they celebrated the Vets that had served in all the wars. That was the first time in over 50 years that I have had the opportunity to participate in something like that and I will cherish the experience forever. But just as importantly it was the ability to be able to be a very small part in the total experience. Thank you one and all for making that experience possible for me.

As time goes on I will get the photographs you want to see posted. If you don’t see your event, don’t worry it’ll be there. Also please feel free to email me if you have any questions. Thanks for a great summer.

The Last Hurrah

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On the Going To The Sun highway, just a little ways from Logan’s Visitor Center there is a valley that will take your breath away. There are many valleys in Glacier National Park but this one is spellbinding. It has all the features that make a valley spectacular. Towering cliff walls, verdant green trees reaching up its sides, an echoing view that recedes back into the distance. Plus a small stream called Lunch Creek that runs down out of the mountains to drop into quickly onto the valley floor below.

Who or what was lunch is not explained. This is a place where you can let your imagination run wild. Personally there’s a preference for mammoth grizzly bears and Mountain men with damp powder but then that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

While there a constant stream of clouds formed over the mountains in the background and flowed down through the valley sometimes obscuring it completely. Then the wind would kick up and run them out only to complete the cycle over and over again. The emerald greenness of the valley did nothing to discourage intermittent snow squalls that sometimes brought the visibility down to zero. But the ground was still too warm and the snow never had a chance.

It wouldn’t be long though. There was a bitterness in the wind that would not be denied. Soon the snow would stick, so this was pretty much the last hurrah as far as Summer went. The road, Going To the Sun, would be closed before long and then there’d be the long wait as we slogged through Winter before we could get back up there and see the valley again. Start crossing the days off your calendar. You don’t want to miss this sight.

Blues and Purples and Greens

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OK, you know it is July right, and we’re heading into August, not typically your coolest month of the year. Some people say it is unseasonably warm even if it is summer. That’s the kind of understatement that makes it very clear we were once a British colony. It’s kind of like saying that Donald Trump is somewhat opinionated. We for one are comforted by our governments pronouncement that there is no such thing as Global warming, as otherwise this heat might cause us to despair.

Given all that we are still freaking hot. Even up here where The Institutes main headquarters are located, halfway to the sky amid the cooling breezes of the upper stratosphere, one feels like a guppy placed out on the blacktop to wait while your bowl is being scrubbed out. We feel like we could be quite sharp with whomever it is that schedules summer heat.

It is not unusual then that we turn our thoughts to cooler places. Not places like the Arctic, which as you know is melting away, and you have to use sunscreen to be safe out on the ice. What is wrong with a world where you have to put sunscreen on so you don’t sunburn to death while you’re standing on an ice shelf. That’s sort of a rhetorical question so no answer is expected as it is too ridiculous to contemplate anyway.

We’re thinking of places that aren’t so ludicrous. Places where you can walk into the cool shadows of giant cedar trees, where the deep spaces are filled with emerald green moss, and water drips quietly down the face of deep purple walls to splash into tiny pools of cobalt blue water.  A place where the silence is barely broken by a bird call or the slight rustle of branches swaying high above you. A place like this.

As you come down off the Going To The Sun highway on the western side, there is a hidden trail that leads into old growth cedar trees called the Trail of The Cedars. It is a wooden walkway elevated above the forest floor, with twists and turns and places to stand and look at incredible views that surely Tolkien must have used to create Lothlorien, the land of the Silvan elves. One of those places is located at an abrupt turn of the trail where you cross over a wooden bridge and can peer down into this hidden grotto.

The feeling of the cool moist air that floats out of the grotto to envelope you in its delightful mist is an experience that is as profound as is it is enjoyable. It is so enjoyable in fact, that we here at The Institute are in delicate negotiations with the National Park Service to move this grotto and its stream to The Institute grounds where we can keep it safe from any natural or manmade disaster. We do this with no thought of personal gain or benefit, but simply as a service to the American people. So far they have been tough negotiators but we are nothing if not persistent so our hopes are high at this time.

You too can visit this place if you are pure of heart and don’t throw anything in the pool, because if you do you are immediately transported to Death Valley in your skivvies. With no sunscreen. Rocks melt in Death Valley. Be warned. Just go to Glacier National Park and look for the small sign that says “Trail of The Cedars”. Be prepared to be stunned. Most people aren’t used to this much beauty in one place.

Going To The Sun

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Since we are waiting for the 8000+ images taken of the North American Indian Days event to come out of The Institutes proprietary image developer. The one we had constructed under the auspices of our own Hardware Development Group (TI-HDG) and specially built to handle large jobs by a triumvirate of IBM, Apple, and ACME Pixel  Burner and Screendoor factory to finish the initial processing, we thought we would share another shot from Glacier National Park.

This is a 14 image panorama stitched together in Photoshop under a license with Adobe systems and The Institute, which has been carefully monitored by our own staff of  panorama techno nerds using our own casually leased monitors throughout the process. At the risk of boring you stupid with the technical details we realize that are at least three of you out there that actually care about this technical stuff, so we decided to share the details to enlighten the unenlightened and to fill up page space as we don’t have a lot to say about this image otherwise.

The original images were taken with a professional digital camera set to stun and the resulting pixels were ported to The Institutes own diesel-powered mainframe computer where they were checked for robustness and cohesiveness before being divvied up into equal quantities and parceled out to the 14 techs used for the initial joining process.
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The next step is the labor intensive part of the procedure where the individual techs who have each been given the amount of pixels  to complete one image, lay out the pixels one by one in numerical order on a large clean white piece of poster board. When one image is fully laid out the next tech steps up and begins to lay out his pixels adjacent to the first image so that the pixels touch at the long edge of the orientation. Then a specially formulated glue developed by The Institute and the Amalgamated Glue Workers Union under the watchful eye of NASA, because this is Space like science we’re working with here, and each individual pixel is glued to its matching neighbor on the other image until the two images edges are joined. This entire procedure is then repeated until all 14 images are joined into the one big image you see on the screen today.

The resulting panorama must be left on the poster board for at least 3½ hours for the glue to set and another 5 days for it cure properly so that the images do not separate when you lift them off the paper. At this point the utmost caution is required as the image has the consistency of a freshly molded sheet of very thin jello. This is the hard part. The waiting, because you really want to pick up the image and hold it up to the light to see what it looks like. But just like a fine wine, no image can be picked up before its time, otherwise it will fall apart and you have to start all over again. There is nothing more discouraging than to see the thousands upon thousands of pixels drip off the page and gather together like beads of mercury to fall off the table and scatter to the edges of the room. Grown men have cried at this sight.

Usually the whole process is worth the time and expense, not to mention the nerd power tied up in the project, but it still must be used sparingly. You don’t want to waste this on taking a panorama of your sock drawer. This is the valley seen from the Going To The Sun highway just before you get to the visitors center, and it carries Reynolds creek downstream toward Heavy Runner mountain way off in the background there. Now you could have taken this image as one shot with your smart phone, without going through the panorama business, but had you done so everything in the picture would be itty-bitty scrunched up, tiny little pixels and you wouldn’t have been able to see nothing. Just a bad picture, even though your friends would probably say it was beautiful, trust me, it isn’t. They just say that because they’re your friends and they like you.

OK then, we expect to have images popping out the developer soon so we can begin posting them for you to see everything that happened at the North American Indian Days celebration. Hang in there.

North American Indian Days 2015

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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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Last week, July 9th thru the 12th, The Blackfeet tribe put on its 64th annual North American Indian days (or NAID) on its reservation at Browning, Montana. It was 4 solid days of Dancing, singing, fellowship, and socializing amongst one of the largest gathering of Indian tribes in the United States and Canada.

Every event held throughout the celebration began with the Grand Entrance where the color guard, made up of military veterans from the various tribes, brought in the colors. These included our American flag, Canada’s flag, the Blackfeet tribe’s flag, and others to be presented with respect to everyone assembled. Many men and women of the tribes served in the armed forces and this is a very important part of the ceremony. To participate in this honor, with drums sounding out their deep resonance, singers celebrating with their voices, joining the gathering of hundreds of spectators, the sun beating down and the hot wind blowing through the presentation arbor, this is an experience that will remain with you for a very long time.

When you attend this event one of the first things you notice is the riot of color around you. The regalia, the decorations, the site itself is full of every hue of color imaginable, from the earth tones of the arbor and dancing area to the manmade colors of some regalia, and the natural shades of the surrounding area. The natural light of the far northern part of our country has its own unique look and feel also, and being just a little more than 12 miles from the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park adds to the overall effect with mountains in the background and of course amazing sunsets.

The sounds are the next thing you notice as the deep rhythmic notes of the many drums and songs work their way into your senses. Drums and drummers from many places around the country, the singers joining in, the sounds of the calls made by the various participants as they dance around the arbor, are nearly overwhelming. You are immersed in the experience completely. They draw you in and mesmerize you even if you don’t understand the words. It is easy to get lost in the sound and action and swirling colors, but that is part of the experience of being here. And it feels good.

Over the next few days we will be bringing you the sights of this incredible experience, the regalia , the dances, along with the other events such as the rodeos and Indian Relay Races, plus some of the views of the countryside around the events themselves. It was a spectacular experience. If you can, go to the next one, it is worth every second you spend there. The Blackfeet welcome all guests and you’ll never forget the time you spent at The North American Indian Days celebration.

July To May And Back Again

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Many of you and you know who you are, have been writing us cards and letters lamenting the fact that you missed the May wildflowers this year due to gross negligence on your part. While we can’t provide any sympathy, you should have gotten up earlier, we can give you a second chance. How often does that happen? Not very often, I’d say.

It is the middle of July down here at the lower latitudes and the Spring flowers are mostly long gone, replaced now with dead or dying foliage that is pretty damn ugly, but we have arranged, at no little expense on our part, to bring you Spring flowers once again for a very limited time. And by limited we mean not very long, it’s kind of like a botanical do-over and as it is very expensive to provide you with a large area of wildflowers and their supportive vegetation we can’t do this all day.

Fortunately because we have an excellent working relationship with Glacier National Park they have helped us by sharing the costs and providing their somewhat limited backdrops required to showcase the flowers in their best light. But even they with their vast resources can only sustain this wildflower curtain call for a few more days.

So if you want to see the colors, the forms, and the spectacular groupings Mother Nature is known for, you need to get on up to Glacier National Park, and get in line. No tickets or reservations needed but you’d best hurry if you want a good place to view them. All the good spots are filling up fast.

As always there is no need to thank us, your support is thanks enough, but if you feel the pressing need to help, and I think you know you want to, contributions of large sums of Twenties and Fifties, even the occasional handfuls of 100’s will work, (please, no 10’s, 5’s, or 1’s), loosely bundled in stacks of 100 or so are always appreciated.