Big Bend National Park is a fascinating place to learn about fossils because so many have been found here. The NPS has built a cool exhibit that showcases the 130 million years of the land’s development and the creatures that roamed the water and land here. 83-130 million years ago, this place was all water, and the only life was below the surface. But things changed when land rose above the water level. 72-83 Million Years Ag0 As the water drains off, a coastal floodplain emerges. The Deinosuchus or “terrible crocodile” was a hunting dinosaur, as big as a schoolbus. The…
Month: March 2017
Weekly Update: March 29, 2017
Been a slow week on the “moving around” front, splitting the seven days between Caballo Lake and Datil, New Mexico. It’s always nice to stay in one place for a while and get to know it a bit before moving on and that’s been what I’ve been doing lately. Caballo Lake is a fake lake, it’s actually a reservoir of the Rio Grande created as part of the Rio Grande Project back in the 1930s, when the Bureau of Reclamation was damming up every river it could find in the western US. It’s only about 75 feet deep and the…
Big Bend National Park
Catching up on recent travel, I was down in Big Bend National Park in February, and it is yet another amazing place that Americans can enjoy as part of the National Park System. Big and wide, open and ancient, I loved exploring here. From the first glimpse of the mountains on the road down from Marathon, I was constantly challenged to figure out how to capture this place with my camera. Just driving along a road becomes a show, and they thoughtfully provide pullouts for people like me. We spent a whole day exploring the west end of the park…
Sunday Serenity: Focus
One of the things I’ve been working on in my photography is focus and really seeing what I am looking at through the viewfinder. This dried out, used up flower stem from a yucca plant might not look like much at first glance. Take a closer look. And then even closer. The texture, the structure is amazing. Like so much in life, I almost let this beauty slip by me. Be in love with your life, every detail of it. Jack Kerouac
Weekly Update: March 22, 2017
The last week has been a blur of cousins and cemeteries in small towns, which makes sense in my family. My dad’s side of the family has lots of ancestors who were Arizona pioneers and most of them are buried in cemeteries in the southeastern part of the state. My great-grandparents lived in this house just across the state line from Virden, New Mexico during the Depression. The house then was about half the size it is now (and it is a storage shed for the farmer that owns it). That it is still there, almost a hundred years later, kind…