Sheep Mountain

Burned trees, Sheep Mountain.

It's the end of November, and I've barely even picked up my camera this month.  Between the ongoing demands of teaching (1.5 more weeks until the end of the semester!) and a couple of photo shows, I just haven't had time.  I did get out on the Friday after Thanksgiving to hike up Sheep Mountain, west of Laramie, through part of last summer's Squirrel Creek Fire.  These images aren't fine art, but it was interesting to see the burned landscape and disturbing to be up high in late November with no snow and warm temperatures.  

The hike, from the south end of the mountain, crosses very open foothills of low grass and a few shrubs before finally climbing up to the forested summit ridge.  The Squirrel Creek fire burned across terrain that doesn't look like it could carry fire, but widely scattered shrubs were all burned, and patches of trees, isolated from one another, were also torched.  Burned aspen groves are full of new sprouts, but otherwise it's a sterile-looking landscape in the burn, and with the current drought, it will be hard for new trees to establish.  I look forward to hiking up there again in the spring to see what's growing.

Sheep Mountain foothills.

Widely scattered burned trees.

Just below the summit ridge.

Below the summit ridge--thicker trees.

Aspen sprouts, some already browsed (by deer?).

Bikes

My first bike.

I'm going mountain biking today.  That is an unusual thing to say in Laramie, Wyoming on the day before Thanksgiving, but it's been insanely warm and dry here this fall.  Bicycling has come back into my life during the last few years as my knees continue to deteriorate, precluding higher-impact aerobic exercise like running.  Plus, it's fun as hell.  And challenging.  In honor of November mountain biking in the Northern Rockies, I'm posting a few images of bicycles from my collection.

Tibetan Monastery, Xiahe, Gansu, China.

Fetching water, Uganda.

Laramie Enduro, 2009.

Lijiang, Yunnan, China.

Garlic for sale, Kashgar, China.

Autumn, Blair, Wyoming

The Bund, Shanghai, China.  Sunrise.

Kampala, Uganda.

Snowy Range in snowier times, June 2011.

Bei, Soapstone Prairie.  May, 2010.

Touchstone Laramie 2012

(Click to enlarge)

This weekend is Touchstone Laramie--the big art show that we put on every two years.  I've been so busy between teaching and preparing for the show and for my simultaneous show in Boulder, that the blog has fallen by the wayside.  That's been the story all fall, but soon the semester will end and I'll have to think of new excuses--like skiing--to stay away from the cybersphere.  Actually, I'm looking forward to having a little time in my life again for things like photography and laziness.

The Touchstone show, in case you've never been, is at the Fairfield Inn in Laramie.  We rent an entire floor of the hotel, and each artist sets up a room as a gallery.  There are about 35 artists participating, and it's always a fun event--social with good art.  Stop by this weekend (Nov. 17-18) if you're in town!

Old Family Images

Torch Lake, Michigan

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Unless some tragedy has befallen us, like a catastrophic fire or a hurricane, many of us have collections of old photographs in our families.  Sometimes these images are mysterious, with  unknown people long gone, saved because the image has been passed down like a sacred object.  Sometimes the images are artful.  Often they hold our attention because we wonder about distant ancestors and how their lives have somehow shaped our own.  Sometimes they are pictures of our parents when they were younger or of ourselves in what looks like a different world.  

My family has boxes of old images from both my mother's and my father's side.  Some of them have been scanned, and occasionally I work on them--cleaning them up and trying to make them so that they look more like they did when they were taken.  

My Mom, in Enterprise, Alabama where she grew up.  My parents have two cats today and so do we.

My Dad during a bike trip in Michigan where he grew up, long before mountain bikes.

The Grimes, on my mother's side, in Alabama.

My Mom's father, Oscar Lee McCall, at his furniture store in Enterprise.

My Dad with his mother, Nelle, in Arizona.

Me and my sister, Kim, being treated to a Coke at my grandfather's store in Alabama.

My dad and grandmother, "somewhere out West."  Their trips west and the stories about them led me to Wyoming.

Hurricane Sandy

Boathouse and dock, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, before Hurricane Isabel

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In 2003, Hurricane Isabel flooded my parent's house on the Chesapeake Bay in Southern Virginia and washed away the dock and boathouse pictured above.  Consequently, whenever hurricanes threaten the East Coast, I obsessively track the weather and tide websites to try to assess if they are going to have to go through that again.  It looks like they dodged the bullet on this one, though there is one more high tide this morning before the surge from Sandy stops contributing.  

Ellen's sister and her family live in Rumson, New Jersey, which is a little north of Sandy's predicted landfall.  They are threatened by massive storm surge and higher winds than my parents will experience.  Their house is high off the water (30-40') and a little inland, so they should be safe from the surge, but I'm sure the area will suffer, power will be lost, and trees will come down.

Here's wishing everyone well in the path of this storm.

Keanesburg, NJ

Monmouth, NJ

Manhattan looks like a watery place when viewed from NJ.

Bei and her cousins enjoying a gentler summer breeze in 2010 on the Jersey shore.

Show at the Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO

From the Dairy Center website

(click to enlarge)

I'm off to Boulder this afternoon to hang a show of my Uganda photos at the Dairy Center for the Arts.  The show opens this Friday, October 26, with artist talks from 4-5 and a reception from 5-7.  If you're in area, stop by and say hi.  Of course our first significant winter weather of the season is also scheduled for Friday, so If I get snowed into Laramie, I'll let you know--but even if I do, stop by and have a look.  Bay Roberts will be there representing One School at a Time, the NGO whose projects are the subject of my images.

Study session, Kyamulinga, Uganda

Girl with Pencil Box, Kukanga School, Uganda

From the Archives: China Portraits

Woman with pipe, Yunnan Province, China

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I'm too busy right now for a proper blog post, so here are a few portraits from China--above is a woman that we met at a market in a small town called Liming in the mountains up a side valley off of the Yangtze.  She wasn't smoking tobacco.  Liming, by the way, rests below spectacular sandstone cliffs that appear to have potential to be a climbing mecca.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody has put up routes there.  The image below is of a man at another Yunnan Village, called Wenhai, in the mountains above Lijiang, where we lived.  A woman in the village had died the previous week (of a heart attack while working in the fields apparently) and he was at the wake, which was spirited and not glum.  The young woman below lived in the grasslands above a town called Xiahe in the Gansu Province.  Xiahe is a Tibetan town and home of a large monastery.  There's been a lot of unrest there since we visited in 2006.  I was out for a walk when she came out of her house and down the hill to offer me some wildflowers that she had picked in the pasture behind her.

Man with cigarette, Wenhai, China

Young woman, Xiahe, China