2013
Returning once again to the Bosque del Apache in cold January, I wait for first light as it gradually warms the soft wetlands and rouses thousands of migrating fowl. Tens of thousands of snow geese and thousands of Sandhill Cranes raise an amazing raucous as they begin lifting off the water to spread out amongst the adjoining fields of grain. Though the snow geese are quicker to gain flight, the Sandhills with their six-foot wing spans are truly majestic as they slowly rise in powerful flight.
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1939 to protect the last remaining 17 living Sandhill Cranes. By creating a wetlands area off a turn of the Rio Grande seventy-five years ago, Bosque del Apache has served as the major high desert refuge for the Sandhills, various strains of geese, and countless ducks migrating south in fall and returning in early spring.
Against the Chupadera Mountains to the west, the contrast of the wetlands’ water and foliage illuminated by early light makes for a photographer’s dream.
2013
Situated in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, between two 8-9,000′ mountain ranges — the San Andres Mountains to the west and Sacramento Mountains to the east —White Sands, unlike most desert sands made of quartz, is composed of gypsum and calcium sulfate. Unlike sand found on most beaches, white sand is cool to the touch, due to the high rate of evaporation of surface moisture and the fact that the sand reflects rather than absorbs the sun’s rays. At an average 4,000′ elevation, the estimated 275 square miles of White Sands’ dune fields is known as the world’s largest surface deposit of gypsum.
Equally fascinating is how low-angled winter light casts diverse color onto the bright white gypsum sand. Shadowed low and flat light casts blue when shooting west toward last light, while early light casts an orange glow on the gypsum sand.
This is my third visit to White Sands. Each time I see it differently, and each time I come away with images that greatly excite me. A little over a year ago I hung a show at Las Cruces Museum, eleven images from my three visits including three from this series.
2013
The lovely Christmas Mountains run east-west, just north of Big Bend National Park. Their highest peak is 5,728′. The Chihuahuan Desert’s blended colored texture provides a perfect platform for the Christmas Mountains’ distant march. Then, farther east and slightly south, just inside Big Bend National Park, I encountered the wonderfully contrasting Rosillos Peak.
How scale alters texture, and color!
2012
Just south of Santa Fe at the southern terminus of the Rocky Mountains, the Galisteo Basin begins a 2,500′ elevation descent south over 40 miles to the Sandias adjacent to Albuquerque; And to the west it stretches beyond the Rio Grande Rift to the southern end of the foothills of the Jemez Mountains.
Surrounded by these three mountain ranges, the Galisteo Basin’s classic northern New Mexico high desert landscape offers dramatic views in all directions. Having introduced three Galisteo Basin image series captured in 2011, this posting comprises a series of the Galisteo Basin captured from a morning helicopter flight in 2012.
To view more images of the Galisteo Basin, see Galisteo Basin I, Galisteo Basin II and Galisteo Basin III.
2011
Soft Canyon Light
I have celebrated New Year’s Eve 2011 and 2012 at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, shooting the very last light of the year as well as the new year’s very first light. Winter light’s low angle muted with clouds creates such a soft palette, which when lucky enough to also have some snow, softens the canyon even further.
The cold and the silence seem to further soften the winter light, and without thermals, even the ravens are quiet, though still appearing to stand guard along the rim.
This is my ninth consecutive year capturing one of the world’s most iconic landscapes. In one glimpse you can see a third of the Earth’s history layered a mile deep into the canyon. To convey that feeling of elapsed time within single images encompasses my most thrilling moments as an interpretative landscape photographer.
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2011
The Truchas Peaks are 25 miles northeast of Santa Fe in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Spanish for “trout”, it is north-south trending with four identifiable summits including South Truchas Peak, 13,102’, the second highest independent peak in New Mexico and North Truchas Peak, 13,024’.
The birth of the Sangre de Cristos Mountains, the southernmost subrange of the Rockies, began 80 million years ago when the Farallon Plate slid under the North American Plate at such a shallow subduction, it created a broad belt of mountains running down North America. The low angle moved the focus of crustal melting and mountain building much farther inland than the normal 2-300 miles. Over the past 60 million years, erosion stripped away the high rocks, revealing the ancestral rocks beneath, which have since been eroded by water and glaciers to sculpt the Rockies into dramatic peaks and valleys.
I was fortunate to capture Truchas Peaks in late light, immediately following the first snow.
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2011
“It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light.”
—Georgia O’Keefe
An hour north of Santa Fe, begins a landscape of vast vistas, flat-topped mesas, and tall cliffs with winding rivers bordered by huge old cottonwood trees. Ghost Ranch lies in the broad shallow Chama Basin along the eastern margin of the Colorado Plateau as it transitions toward the Rio Grande Rift further east. Occupying parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado, the Colorado Plateau has been a relatively stable block in the Earth’s crust for at least 600 million years; consequently the rocks around Ghost Ranch are generally flat-lying and less mildly deformed by broad-scale folding.
The oldest rocks exposed in the Ghost Ranch area belong to a thick package of brick-red to red siltstone and mudstone and white to tan sandstone, deposited by rivers more than 200 million years ago when the Ghost Ranch area was located about 10 degrees north of the equator.
In 1929, painter Georgia O’Keefe first began working part of the year in northern New Mexico, which she made her permanent home in 1949. Between 1929 and 1949, she spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico. Then in 1934 she first visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu and decided immediately to live there.
Ghost Ranch’s varicolored cliffs inspired some of her most famous landscapes. “The cliffs over there are almost painted for you – you think – until you try to paint them.” O’Keefe wrote in 1977. “Such a beautiful, untouched, lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before…even now I must do it again.” So how can I resist painting this same landscape with my camera, using the foil of time to render my own interpretation?
To view more images of Ghost Ranch, see Ghost Ranch II and Ghost Ranch III.
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2011
Concentrating once again on the Galisteo Basin, situated between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I captured the mountain ranges in its south and west quadrants, plus to the north the very southern end of the last of the Sangre de Cristo foothills – such beautiful high desert light emphasizing their relative elevations.
To view more images of Galisteo Basin, see Galisteo Basin I and Galisteo Basin II
2011
So taken by this basin’s spectacular views at Santa Fe’s southern doorstep, I find myself returning again and again.
An upwelling of the Earth’s mantle thirty million years ago caused a pair of parallel fault zones, 40 miles apart, to cut north-south through New Mexico from the San Juan Mountains in south central Colorado to the southwestern tip of Texas; 8-10 million years later, this slice of the Earth’s crust sank as much as 5 miles, creating the Rio Grande Rift, which in turn extended a network of fault patterns that pulled apart the Earth’s crust to the breaking point. From the Rio Grande Rift west to the Sierras, these faults were the genesis of the southwest’s predominate Basin & Range topography: fallen crustal blocks created basins; uplifted blocks became mountain ranges.
Low-angled high-desert light with some cloud cover makes it possible to emphasize the differing characters of these surrounding mountains
To view more images of Galisteo Basin, see Galisteo Basin I and Galisteo Basin III
2011
The Galisteo Basin is classic northern New Mexico high desert landscape. Surrounded by very visible mountain ranges this basin is situated on the east side of the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Tilted, and interspersed with wide-open plateaus, the basin offers dramatic views in all directions.
This particular series is the result of one afternoon’s roadtrip south from Galisteo to Stanley, along the east side of the Ortiz, Captain Davis and Lone Mountains, and further south, east of the Sandia Mountains.
Like so much of the American west, what is visible today was formed over the last 30 million years, amounting to less than 1% of the Earth’s 4.6 billion year age
To view more images of Galisteo Basin, see Galisteo Basin II and Galisteo Basin III
2011
Spanish for ‘Woods of the Apache’, the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1939 to help protect the endangered Sandhill Cranes. Situated on the Rio Grande in south-central New Mexico, 90 miles south of Albuquerque, this tiny high desert wetland serves as a crowded migratory rest stop for thousands of snow geese and 10-15,000 Sandhill Cranes heading down the continent as winter approaches, and again on their return north for breeding season.
Though it’s been eight years since I moved from Maryland’s eastern shore to Santa Fe, I still marvel at the contrast between New Mexico’s high desert wetlands rimmed by 6-7,000’ mountains, to the eastern shore’s low country wetlands surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay. Even more profound, however, is the contrast between the moisture-laden eastern shore light and New Mexico’s high, dry, ever clear atmosphere.
To view more images of Bosque del Apache, see Bosque del Apache II and Bosque del Apache III
2011
One hundred miles south of the Grand Canyon, Sedona sits in front of the Mogollon rim’s 50 million years of exposed sedimentary layering that evidences the formation of the Colorado Plateau 250 million years ago.
To experience first or last light among its red rocks reveals why Sedona has taken on its own spiritual aura. The red Sandstone and tan mudstone coupled with the immediacy of the formations are breathtaking.
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2007
As the sun drops behind the San Juan Mountains, 75 miles across the San Luis Valley, the last direct light on North America‘s tallest and highest dunes causes the volcanic sand to glow.
This Colorado dune field evolved out of the last major volcanic activity in the San Juan Mountains, 30 million years ago. The Rio Grande carried volcanic ash eastward, while prevailing southwesterly winds plus the snowmelt from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains have maintained its unique balance.
My own visual interpretation of the events that have created this particular evolution in the passage of time is not unlike The Jicarilla Apaches’ “it goes up and down” and the Utes’ “the land that moves back and forth.”
2007
Driving West to the Grand Canyon from Santa Fe, five miles east of the Continental Divide, at 7,200’ elevation, the sun’s low angle dramatically rakes the south face of the Colorado Plateau’s sandstone cliffs.
