Desert Love

   Something I've been thinking about lately is the beauty of the fact that once we experience the humbling beauty of a place for the first time, it's kind of like falling in love, it enables us to better feel and recognize the beauty of other distinct places.   For example, I first experienced the overwhelmingly powerful magnificence of a landscape in Western North Carolina, where I grew up.  I was standing on top of some of the bald peaks looking with awe at one of the planet's oldest mountain ranges, I marveled at the contours of the ridges and the depth of the valleys,I felt the tremor of ancestors who had hugged the mighty rivers of the mountains through millennia and the people of the present who build cities around their very banks.  I breathed in every facet of the landscape. And I did it in one breath.  It got me high, you might say.  It was a sensory and emotional overload that can only be described as ineffable, beyond expression.  

      My senses and emotions were never the same.  They were enhanced tenfold, capable of registering beauty in nearly every square inch of the earth.  It didn't matter if it was a sandy flat on the bottom of the sea, or the flatlands of Western Kentucky.  I could see it.  I could feel it.  

     Coming to Colorado and playing in it's deserts and woods, I've experienced it again.  It has so inspired me that in nearly every moment I dream of exploring it's landscapes in an effort to bring description to that which is otherwise ineffable.

      That being said, I'm about to head to Moab to experience the red rock that inspired Everett Ruess to write these words:

"I am drunk with a searing intoxication that liquor could never bring--drunk with the fiery elixir of beauty, the destroying draught of power, and the soul-piercing inevitability of music. Often I am tortured to think that what I so deeply feel must always remain, for the most, unshared, uncommunicated. Yet, at least I have felt, have heard and seen and known, beauty that is inconceivable, that no words and no creative medium are able to convey. Knowing that the cards are stacked, and realized achievements are mere shadows of the dream, I still try to give some faint but tangible suggestion of what has burned without destroying me."

        Here are a few pictures from a couple of days around Little Dominguez Canyon last week with Mike and L.D:

View off towards Grand Mesa over Little Dominguez Canyon

Enjoying a nap in the warm sun after a cold night in the bottom of my sleeping bag.

Meandering on Steamboat Mesa

L.D and Mike at Little Dominguez intersection with Lightning Basin

Poor cow was right on the trail on the way back.
Where was he on the way out...