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
Known for its picturesque, steep, undulating hills, ‘The Palouse’ encompasses the Palouse River watershed rising west out of north-central Idaho’s Blue Mountains to southeastern Washington State, where it turns south emptying into the Snake River.
The unique Palouse region was formed 30 million years ago as the Pacific Plate was pushed beneath the North American Plate, creating a chain of volcanoes that forced molten rock to erupt from cracks in western Oregon’s and Washington’s crust to form the Columbia Plateau basalts. Twenty million years later, the modern Cascade Range lifted up. Two million years ago, glaciers scoured the Pacific NW, generating volcanic silt (“loess”). Prevailing SW winds covered the Palouse’s lava floor with dunes as high as 200’ of wind-blown volcanic silt, resulting in the most fertile land in the northwest.
Lush grasslands provided prime winter grazing for the Nez Perce Indians’ painted ponies, the Appaloosas, until dry land farmers overran this land in the 1880’s. Contour-farming this fertile land for wheat and lentel beans, as high up the slopes as machinery allowed, the varying “painted” shapes have since traced these contours with the seasons’ beautiful patchwork.
Even more visually intriguing than from ground level, this landscape viewed from an isolated 1,000’ high quartzite ‘hill’, Steptoe Butte, offers spectacular aerial views of the Palouse hills.
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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
Situated within New Mexico’s south-central Tularosa Basin are 270 square miles of White Sands’ dunes comprising the world’s largest surface deposit of gypsum. Beginning 100 miles south of Albuquerque and continuing 100 miles further south to El Paso, this basin lies within the Rio Grande Rift zone and the Chihuahuan Desert.
Unlike typical quartz sand, gypsum sands’ high rate of surface moisture evaporation reflects rather than absorbs the sun’s rays, making the grains cool to the touch, while taking on the hues of first and last light.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago, enormous upheavals in the Rio Grande Rift formed mountain ranges on both the east and west edges of the Tularosa Basin that uncovered these gypsum deposits, which over time leached into the basin.
In the dunes foreground, sparse golden grasses glow in contrast to the brilliant white dunes which in turn contrast against the formidable mountains both east and west.
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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2011
The Edge
The Grand Canyon at first and last light is one of my very favorite places to be with a camera. For the last six years, 5 to 6 times a year for a week or more at a time, I’ve stood at the Canyon’s rim capturing the light playing on and within its voluminous space.
Concentrating on where the canyon walls end and meet what lies beyond 50, even 80 miles to the east and north, I’ve emphasized its vast desert surroundings. At the Grand Canyon, I am able to breathe, focus, and share in its unconditional peace. It is no accident that my images convey the serenity I seek in my life.
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
Zabriskie Point lies along the eastern border of California offering sweeping views West across Death Valley’s floor to the Sierra Nevada front-range. The Sierras run 400 miles north-south and 70 miles west-east. Included within this bountiful mountain range is Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, Mount Whitney at 14,505’ the highest point in the contiguous U.S., and Yosemite Valley sculpted by glaciers out of 100 million-year-old granite.
Four million years ago, the Sierra range began to uplift. Subsequent glacial erosion exposed the granite, forming the light-colored mountains we see today. Approaching the Sierra Nevada Range from across Death Valley provides an even more dramatic perspective of the ethereal vertical-rise.
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2010
The Light Within
My second Grand Canyon series concentrates on the world-within-a-world. By excluding direct sunlight from the frame, I explore intimate moments within the immeasurable space. Each crease and fold flows deeper, absorbing the high desert light that reflects every facet of the surrounding canyon walls.
A half mile below the rim, a world of buttes, towers and mesas emerge in every shade of the sedimentary palette — gray, tan, pink, red, orange, yellow and brown. The enormous scale of the canyon blends and diffuses their color and intensity according to distance and depth. In dramatic contrast, the 1.7 billion year old dark, veined granite gorge plummets another half mile as the Colorado River rushes through its belly. As the sun arcs across the canyon walls, Condors and Ravens soar the thermals.
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.
2007
The Space Between
For the last thirty years, I have consciously evolved my camera strokes to best infuse the passage of time that turned the landscape into single ‘unstill life’ images. The Grand Canyon represents 1.7 billion years of limitless space, a giant vessel through which you can see the countless layers of time.
Looking down more than a mile from the rim to the Colorado River, the stunning array of sedimentary layers, colors, tones and shades represent advancing and retreating ocean coastline deposits of sandstone and shale. This iconic place, where the land so clearly recounts its own story, has become a pilgrimage for me as spiritual as any I have found.
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2002
Passages of Time
In this series, I focused on two regions, north-central Oregon and southeastern Washington. Both volcanic in origin, they provided extremely unique landscapes. By narrowing the content in my images, I found I could portray a visual intimacy in the sensuous curves of land and the richness of the summer colors.
My relationship with the land deepened as I stretched light and color, blended emulsions and increasingly related my camera strokes to the landscape’s flow.
1999
Western Space + Time
Having awakened my appetite for large-scale landscape, I explored other western vistas in Wyoming, Utah, California and northern Arizona, in addition to return visits to the high country of Montana. Experimenting with the panoramic format, I found it easier to capture the breadth of the land while more closely matching its flow.
During the creation of this series, I first realized that my obsession with condensing time via motion within a single frame was intimately linked to a lifetime of restlessness.
1997
Needing an escape from urban living, I spent weeks in the solitude of Montana’s incredible high-country where I first experienced the grandeur of western landscape. It’s grand distances, unavailable in the Washington, DC parks, opened up a host of new possibilities in light, color and resolution that took me to a place I hadn’t experienced since the transatlantic ocean sailing days of my early twenties.
