We’re traveling all over this week; it should be fun!
If you’ve been thinking of submitting some pictures, now would be a great time to do it. We’re filled up next week, but wide open after that, so this is your chance to have your stuff show up within a week or two.
(click on the schedule below for a bigger, non-blurry version)
Albatrossity
Today’s excursion started back in 2007, with a trip to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel on Medicine Mountain in Wyoming. Elizabeth was researching an essay for her next book, and I was, per usual, along for the ride. We wanted to see the summer solstice sunrise at the site of the Medicine Wheel, so we headed up there in June 2007. Her essay about this experience, entitled “Geochronicity”, appears in Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World; a shorter version of that essay was also published in Orion in 2008, and is available online. If you want some background about the site and its history, I’d suggest reading the essay before proceeding. Her words illuminate and magnify the experience far better than mine, but I can at least offer some photographs and my own perspective.
Exactly 8 years later we found ourselves in the Bighorns again, enroute to a literary conference in Moscow, Idaho. So this will be a two part experience; today’s and next week’s posts about the 2007 trip, and then several posts about the second visit, as part of a longer road trip travelogue. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed going back through the images, processing them with more modern software tools, and re-living those experiences anew.
As noted in Elizabeth’s essay, we explored the site (accessible via a 1.5 mi trail from a parking area to the 10,000 ft summit), and then camped nearby. It was a lovely streamside campsite, with lots of wildflowers; at this altitude, late June was basically springtime. Thus these first two posts will have lots of flower images and only a few birds. But one of the birds was this Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), the iconic raptor of the West, soaring over the Medicine Wheel when we arrived there. This bird would have been very familiar to the folks who constructed this ceremonial site on the mountaintop. Click here for larger image.
On The Road – Albatrossity – The Bighorns – 1Post + Comments (14)