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Smoke Settling into the Canyon
Normally, this view goes on just about forever.
A devastating wildfire season on the west coast gave us a much different view, with smoke settling into the canyons and giving everything a weird, muted look. (This was shot at mid-day.) But you know how I am: at least the situation gave me something different than the usual shots of bright blue skies, vivid red rocks, and a blue-green river, and I wasn’t too disappointed about that. “Anyone can get those shots,” I said to myself in a tone that was probably too smug for the actual situation.
But what I learned is that from a photographic standpoint, smoke doesn’t really add that much to an image. And I was reminded to stop being so damn smug, already.
Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah
photographed 9.7.2020
Two Ships
The majestic rock formations were made blurry by the thick plume of smoke that had drifted from the west coast.
(They are called the Monitor and the Merrimac, decidedly Eurocentric titles for a region that was inhabited by the ancient ones for sort of a while before Europeans arrived to re-name everything.)
near Moab, Utah
photographed 9.7.2020
Open Range
As much as we loved the Palouse, we did have to go home.
The day we drove from Park City, Utah, to Farmington, New Mexico, was a day of extremely smoky skies; the smoke obscured almost all of what was there to look at. But if I’d been enchanted by the natural scenery, there’s a chance I would have missed this cast-off stove beside the railroad tracks.
near Moab, Utah
photographed 9.7.2020
Two-track Way
It was extremely difficult for us to make any forward progress while driving around the Palouse: every single road that took off from the highway promised views like this. And every one of them that we didn’t drive on felt like a million missed opportunities.
Zakarison Road
near Fallon, Washington
photographed 9.3.2020
Endless Grain
And, finally, we’ve arrived at what we drove all that way to look at: the Palouse. I’ve wanted to go there for ten years; my expectations were very high, both in terms of photographic value and in beauty of landscape. I was not disappointed in either.
A chatty fellow at a cafe told me that I was there at the “wrong” time, that June was when I ought to have visited because that’s when the famous Palouse wheat fields are green. In spite of that, I am glad I went in the fall, when the harvest was underway. The fields, all in different stages of the harvest, were different colors and textures. And they changed every day.
Steptoe Butte, Washington
photographed 9.1.2020
One Day | One Image 