The American West……The land

I hope to occasionally publish more in this series and if I do, I will try to make most of them brief.  I tend to start small but then they grow like a wildfire. This one began with four pictures and four paragraphs.

I think most American landscape photographers are in love with the American west. I was a small child and my mother brought home a copy of a magazine called Arizona Highways.  My life was changed.  Unfortunately like many large lush magazines of those days, today it is physically smaller and less grand even in the scope of the images they use.

It’s funny when we say a western landscape.  The west can be arid with at least five different desert and high desert terrains.  There are both flat prairies and the beautiful rolling hill prairies .  The mountains are lush and green unless you visit parts of the southwest where they display the character of craggy peaks and earth tones. Of course there are mighty rivers and the world’s biggest ocean as well.  I have only been able to make images of a small piece of the landscape gold that lives in the west, and I have included just a few of those below.

Our first image was made from a wilderness valley in Colorado.  A portion of the Colorado Rockies, Wyoming and Montana’s version of the same range, and much of the mountainous areas of Oregon and Washington State are like this.  Lush and green. This was made on my final wilderness hike in 2007.  I would gladly spend and cherish every breathing moment of the rest of my life in this habitat.  The high desert is my favorite place to make pictures, but is my favorite place to be.

Our next pictures were made in Colorado’s Rocky Mt. N. P.  I was standing at 12,000 feet when I made them.  I have stood in this spot about a dozen times in my life. This image was made in July, and when I lived here in the 1970s, a July morning would have meant much snow on those peaks.  The next picture was made about a mile from the first. They are part of The Never Summer Range.  The habitat in these two shots is merely the continuation of the wilderness picture shown previously. When you start in that lush green valley and climb, you eventually wind up in places like this.  You feel as though you are “on top of the world”.  Notice how those two rock forms in the foreground, in addition to the warm shadowy light, impart an entirely different mood for the first photo than we see in the second

I have been fortunate to have been able to work a lot of red rock parks of the mid and high desert. Monument Valley (mid desert) is a wonderful spot.  The rock forms spread out across the desert floor and give you a thousand ways to create your own version of “rock art”.  Both of the images below were made in Monument Valley.

Of course sand is always equated with the American west, and Great Sand Dunes in Colorado is the most unusual of the famous sand dune parks.  There is simply no other place like this.  The dunes reside at over 8,000 feet and they are at the foot of 12,000 foot peaks.  In the second picture you can see two clouds hanging over the dunes.  If you look very carefully towards the lower right portion of the scene, you will see several tiny figures just before the river (snow melt).  That will help put the 700 foot high dunes in perspective. These images were created 11 years apart with the first having been made with my trusty Pentax 6×7 medium format film camera and the bottom shot with a Nikon DSLR.

While the hot, dry, rugged  country of west Texas was used in many old movies, few landscape photographers since Ansel Adams have featured it. I like the gritty hard feeling to the land here.  Settling and living here certainly was not easy, and I love the atmosphere.  Big Bend N.P. below still exists “a far piece” from the center of civilization.  My kind of place. I should always add the caveat that I always loved to travel and I enjoyed even harsh and difficult places. I favor a lot of locations that others are not fond of.  I am not suggesting that anyone go there, as good landscape imagery is not easy at Big Bend. I think that may have been another reason I enjoyed myself. I indeed did have to work to make ordered images with good compositions.

When you think of autumn colors in the west, you think of Aspen trees.  It is true that Aspens grow in other places such as the northern reaches of my own home state of Wisconsin, and the west has other colorful species.  Just the same it is the Aspen that has “west” stamped all over it.  This one was made in the Jim Bridger Wilderness in Wyoming.

“They laugh at us because we’re different, we smile at them because they’re all the same”  Amish saying