MorseBlog

Introduction The men must have felt some relief as they climbed up out of Separation Canyon. Leaving behind the tension of the expedition and the foreboding of that dark thundering canyon; constantly wet, cold and afraid. Now they move through the forest on the canyon rim and come face-to-face with what must they have thought of as savages. Weaponless and white they were set upon as retribution for some earlier atrocity on the tribe and quickly dispatched.  Thus ended the journey for these men in 1869, some of the first white men to explore the Green and Colorado Rivers, John Wesley Powell and the rest of the expedition had carried on after leaving these men to their fates and completed the journey exiting the Grand Canyon near the Virgin River where Lake Meade is today. Really there was not that much further to go for the three lost men, but at the time nobody knew what was ahead. The perils of being first. Not many years later and many fewer expeditions down the Green ...

In a previous post I contemplated the nature of wilderness and isolation. Having grown up in Flagstaff Arizona and having lived on the edge of the National Forest I had ready access to wilderness and isolation. I was a shy and introverted kid at the time. Tall and skinny, always with long hair. The awkwardness of those pre-teen years assuaged by the quiet forest, the sounds of wind in the ponderosa, the call of the Steller's Jay, that dry pine scent-filled air of northern Arizona. For hours after school and on weekends I wandered this patch of wood and knew every aspect of it. The place we buried our family dog. Where a skinned mountain lion was lying stiff, red-muscled in the grass, and then days later not a trace. Elk or deer stalked, then startled, bolting and bounding through the woods over the gray dead trees with their yellow pitch-striated knots. The hidden delicate vanilla smell of the ponderosa pine when a nose is pressed into its cracked bark.  On warm days the richer s...

Tad Nichols (1911-2000) While in the US on holiday my wife and I visited one of our favorite bookstores in Bonner's Ferry Idaho  Bonner's Books . Highly recommended if you find yourself in the vicinity. This is where I picked up the book The Glory of Our West that I used as the basis for a series of posts here . On this visit I picked up Ansel Adams’ classic  Yosemite and the Range of Light in paperback for $6.00 used hank you very much. One has to be careful in buying photography books because some are printed in truly appalling ways. There were two more books in the bookstore featuring Ansel Adams, one I did not purchase as the tonal range in the printing was awful. The other was better but it featured an identical print to one in  Yosemite and the Range of Light  and I didn't even recognize them at first as the same print so poor was the reproduction in this other book. I also stumbled upon an Eliot Porter book  Down the Colorado; diary of the...