This morning feels like Monday Morning Blues. After 10 days of standing out in the searing heat under a white-hot sun, photographing the Greeley Stampede rodeo, it was a relief to be back home and find The Institute grounds shrouded in a cool mist this morning. The temp up at the weather station located in the east tower is 58° as the dawn approaches and the dew point was enough to make your tennis shoes wet when you walked out to check on how the interns were faring.

There were a few smoldering fires in front of several of the tents down in tent city, or as everyone calls it, Internville, in the meadow below, so it looks like they may be up soon getting ready for the days activities but right now it’s pretty quiet. Even the bears are silent as they wander through the small tent city looking for something to eat.

Sometimes you need the gentle calmness of a day like this to change your perspective and allow you to decompress, a time kind of like Luke had, to get his mind right. That’s what makes The Institute special. It provides you with what ever you need. If you’re wound tight and need to reach your inner zen you can do that here. If you need the opposite and have to rev up so you can go out and do good things then that can be found here also.

A good way to get every one pointed in the same direction and up to speed is set the interns to locating and removing the rattlesnake population in the area. That always sets the tone for the day. It’s enjoyable to see them spread out in a long line beating the grass with rattlesnake whippy sticks and hear the call of “There it is! It’s a big one. Get the snake grabber over here before it gets away. OH, man it bit me!” and the gentle chuckles from the other interns who haven’t been bitten yet.

But the best times are when it’s quiet like this and the day hasn’t started yet. The birds are making their first morning noises. The tin roofs are making the creaking groaning sounds they make when there’s been a drastic temperature change, expanding and contracting to their own rhythm. There’s so much dew on the roof that you can hear it running in the rain gutters and dripping into the interns water collection barrel. As Director I walk around the deck in the morning, looking at the grounds, checking to see if any of the interns have escaped, deciding what monumental task we will choose for our next big earth-shaking project and I can almost hear the sound the mist makes as it bumps into the side of the main hall, the center of The Institute’s heart. This is what makes our time here special. Even if it is the Monday Morning Blues.

The image above is Moulton’s Barn in Grand Teton National Park. It gets the blues sometimes too.