Things I'm not

 

America, where are you now

Don't you care about your sons and daughters

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

     – Monster, Steppenwolf, November, 1969

We all, I suspect, bumble through life with a sort of internal, unwritten rulebook tucked away in a dusty corner of our minds. Some of its tenets are hard-won, forged in the fiery crucible of some calamitous personal experience—like, for instance, learning that the precise moment a man is holding a wrench and staring grimly at a frustrated, cantankerous part of an engine is not the time to cheerfully ask if he "needs any help." Other rules are simply imposed upon us by a world that, on the whole, would prefer we not be complete fools.

Moon View Overlook, Near Hanksville, Utah.

Now, I’m not about to climb a pulpit and start thumping it about morality. Goodness knows, some morals are as situational as a waterproof poncho in the Gobi Desert. But I am talking about the little list of "Things I Will Do" and "Things I Absolutely Won't" that I carry around, especially when I find myself out in the backcountry—or, as I think of it, 'in the field' with my rock hammer and camera.

My primary rule is to act like a visitor, because that’s precisely what I am. I’m a guest in a very, very old house. In some places, it’s more than that. It is, and I hesitate to use the word lest I sound like I’ve been communing with crystals, a spiritual experience. But it’s not about vibrations or energy vortexes. It's about the staggering, humbling presence of deep time. I'm talking about the feeling of standing in a canyon where the walls are a library, and every distinct layer is a page turned on a day 190 million years ago. You can feel the sheer, ponderous weight of all those yesterdays. It does something to your perspective. Suddenly, that worrying email from your financial advisor seems, well, a little less apocalyptic. Some people aren't wired for that feeling, I realize, but it’s how I roll.

And since I’ve mentioned the rock hammer, let's get a crucial bit of business out of the way. There is a sacred commandment among those of us who go about tapping on the planet’s stony bits: Thou shalt not use thy hammer to wantonly deface a rock in a State or National Park. It’s simply not done. Furthermore, if you are lucky enough to stumble upon a vertebrate fossil—a bit of bone, a tooth, the outline of something that swam or scurried when the world was young—you have a profound duty. You are to leave it. That’s right, leave it be. Take a picture, get a GPS reading, write down what you see. Then you call it in. Every fossil is a story, a chapter in the Earth’s immense biography. To pocket it for a paperweight is to be the kind of villain who tears a page from a priceless book. Give a specialist a chance to read that story. It belongs to all of us.

Right, that’s as preachy as I intend to get. But it all flows into a practical code for looking at rocks without being a total ass about it.

First, and it physically pains me that this even needs to be said, carry a garbage bag. And not just for your own apple cores and sandwich wrappers. Appoint yourself a mobile, voluntary sanitation engineer. If you see some other thoughtless soul’s discarded Ho-Ho wrapper, pick it up. If you stumble upon a full-blown crime scene of dumping—a whole tableau of tires and tattered furniture—too vast for your single bag, make a note of the location and report that, too. It is a curiously and deeply satisfying endeavor to leave a place a little tidier than you found it.

Then there is the delicate matter of the other people. The tourists. And let me be clear, I say this with no malice. We are all, after all, tourists somewhere. But there’s a certain choreography to a crowded viewpoint at a national park, say, on the rim of the Colorado National Monument on a sunny Saturday, that is a spectacle all its own.

You have the great, silent, profound abyss of geological time stretching out before you, and then you have the frantic, bustling, utterly human chaos pressed up against the guardrail. It's a ballet of selfie sticks, of parents trying to corral children who are dangerously fascinated by a chipmunk, and of people holding up iPads to take photos, which has always struck me as being like trying to film a wedding with a serving tray.

Now, I am often burdened with a tripod, a device which, when its legs are fully splayed, has the spatial footprint of a small lunar lander and an almost magnetic ability to attract unwary shins. To plonk this contraption down at the prime viewing spot at high noon is an act of profound territorial aggression. You might as well bring a deckchair and a cooler.

And you look at them—a family from, let's say, Ohio, who have saved up all year, driven for two days in a minivan filled with snack wrappers and simmering sibling rivalries, all for this one sublime moment of looking into the abyss. This might be it for them. Their one and only glimpse into this particular majesty. Who am I, in all good conscience, to be the lanky fellow with the complicated camera gear who photobombs their one precious holiday memory? You cannot, you simply must not, be the reason their photo album has a permanent, three-legged aluminum asterisk in the middle of the view.

So, I’ve learned to engage in a bit of strategic avoidance. It’s not just polite; it’s frankly a better experience. You let the great midday rush have its frantic, happy hour. Let them have their joy unimpeded. I find a quieter corner, or more often, I simply come back when the crowds have thinned. The best light, after all, is at the fringes of the day anyway, when the air is cooler, the shadows are long, and the only sound is the wind and the faint, satisfied sigh of the Earth settling in for the night. You get a better picture, and you don’t have to apologize to a stranger for tripping them. It is, in every way, a victory.

Then we have the matter of cairns. Please, for the love of all that is geologically stable, don’t build little towers of rocks. I know they seem harmless, a sort of rustic "Kilroy was here." But under every one of those rocks is a micro-environment, a tiny, bustling metropolis of lichens, microbes, and insects going about their important business. When you move that rock, you are, with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, obliterating an entire city block. I’ve seen places where this foolishness starts with one tidy stack, and a year later it's spread like a rash, a veritable Stonehenge of bad ideas, each one a little monument to the human need to prove "I was here, and I was briefly bored."

This sensitivity extends to the very ground you walk on. Much of the desert is covered in something called biological soil crust, it’s the desert biome. It looks like dirt. It feels like dirt. But it is, in fact, a magnificent, living skin—a fragile condominium of bacteria, fungi, and lichen that holds the whole place together. Stomp across it and you leave a wound that can take a century—a hundred years—to properly heal. So I pay attention. If my goal is a particularly fetching fossil dune over yonder, I’ll pick my path with care, sticking to hard rock or the gravelly bottom of a flash arroyo—nature’s designated highways.

My courtesies even extend to the domestic beasts. If I drive past a herd of what I gently termed 'meat cows', I slow to a crawl and turn the music down. They don’t need my dust and racket. Frankly, they look miserable enough, trying to conjure a meal from a landscape that’s mostly brown. And though I don’t eat the stuff, I do wonder if a life of stress and grit affects the taste. I suspect it hardly matters by the time it's been processed into something that looks cheerfully red in the grocery cooler. And don’t even get me started on frozen burger patties. There’s a dark, industrial alchemy in that process that my frozen blueberries, bless their little antioxidant hearts, have never had to witness.

Wild things, of course, get an even wider berth. A pronghorn, or any of the herding ungulates out here, operates with a personal space bubble of about half a mile. They are creatures wound tight, perpetually ready to explode into a dead sprint. The last thing I want to be is the lumbering reason their cortisol levels spike. I want them to remain relaxed, to continue their important business of chewing and looking nervously at the horizon. And as for bears... well, I find I don’t need a rule for bears. They have their own, and they are notoriously strict about enforcement. The onus, as they say, is entirely on you to not be a furry, 600-pound enforcer’s problem.

And then there are the coyotes. They are the ghosts of the landscape, and you must assume they are always there, watching. This is why I rarely build fires. A fire is a lovely thing, but it’s a wall of light that blinds you to the world beyond its flicker. You miss the whole show. A coyote will sit just past the edge of your light, a silent observer. Peer out into the blackness, and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch the glint of their eyes, a pair of tiny, floating embers reflecting your intrusion. At night, they’ll entertain you, yipping and howling stories to one another across the vast, dark stage. It’s the best theater in the world.

Campground etiquette is a whole other chapter. I often keep strange hours for photography, so if I arrive late, I’ll pick a campe site near the entrance, or park near the entrance and quietly walk my gear in. When it’s truly quiet, the sound of a tent zipper can be as startlingly loud as a bugle call. As for the rolling apartment blocks that pass for RVs these days, with their generators humming through the night with all the gentle ambiance of a light industrial park... well, that is a sermon I shall save for another time, perhaps when my mood is fouler and my pen is sharper.

Colorado National Monument

This brings me to technology and communication. I carry radios—CB, GMRS, UHF/VHF HAM. Your mobile phone out here is a fickle friend. It will either have no signal, or its battery will die at the precise moment you need it most. And while satellite communicators are all the rage, I have a deep-seated reluctance to have my lifeline depend on the whims of a billionaire’s orbital hobby. There’s an excellent concept called the Wilderness Protocol for radios, a sort of safety net of strangers listening for strangers. It’s a fine, old-fashioned thought.
And now, a confession. After all this talk of treading lightly, I will tell on myself. Every so often, when I am absolutely certain I am twenty miles from nowhere and haven’t seen another soul for hours, I will do a silly thing as the sun goes down and the stars come up. I’ll fire up an amplifier and speakers and subject the local geology to classic rock and roll. Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" echoing off sandstone walls that were laid down 200 million years ago is a glorious, surreal, and deeply satisfying experience. I like to think the coyotes sing along. It’s probably a fault of mine, but it helps keep me feeling both wild and, in a strange way, perfectly settled.

It occurs to me sometimes, usually when I'm in the middle of some absurdly specific personal task—arranging the toast on a plate in a particular way, for instance, or patting all my pockets in the correct sequence before leaving the house (wallet, keys, phone, nameless dread)—that we are all just hopeless slaves to ritual. And the truly baffling thing, the thing that stops you in your tracks if you give it more than a moment's thought, is that we humans have been doing this forever.

Honestly, we have. You can't seem to dig a hole anywhere on this planet without finding evidence of our ancient ancestors doing something profoundly and predictably odd. You find a 40,000-year-old skeleton, and it’s not just a pile of bones; it’s been carefully arranged, sprinkled with red ochre, and buried with a selection of perfectly good tools that you have to think the rest of the tribe could have desperately used. Why? Ritual.

It's all faintly bonkers, if you stop and think about it. Imagine Ug the Caveman and his brother Ga. Ug has just spent three days meticulously chipping a beautiful flint axe head. It's a masterpiece. But does he use it to fend off a sabre-toothed cat? No. He trudges ten miles to a special cave to bury their recently departed Uncle Grog with it, because that’s just what you do. Ga probably stood there, swatting flies, thinking, "You know, Grog is beyond the point of needing a sharp axe, but that bear that keeps sniffing around the camp decidedly is not." But he doesn't say anything, because it's the ritual.

And it has never, ever stopped. You go from sprinkling bones with pigment to building Stonehenge—a project of such back-breaking, multi-generational effort that it makes putting together an IKEA shelf look like a lazy Sunday afternoon, all apparently to find out when the days are about to get longer, something a reasonably observant badger could have told them for free. You get the Romans, a people of otherwise formidable practicality, who wouldn't dream of starting a war without first checking which way a chicken pecked at its corn. Think of it. The fate of an empire resting on the lunchtime whims of a hen.

We look back and chuckle at all this, of course, feeling terribly modern and sensible, right before we knock on a wooden table or refuse to walk under a ladder. A baseball player will step up to the plate and perform a series of tics, taps, and tugs so complex it looks less like a prelude to sport and more like a man trying to disarm a bomb only he can see. We have our lucky shirts, our special coffee mugs, the side of the bed we must sleep on.

Fundamentally, I don't think the urge has changed one bit. We are pattern-seeking creatures adrift in a universe of magnificent, terrifying chaos, and the little rituals are our way of trying to impose a sliver of order on it all. We are drawing a bison on the cave wall, tapping the bat on the plate, and sprinkling the ochre on the bones, all in the desperate, hopeful belief that if we just do the little things right, the big things might not eat us. It almost never works, of course, but the amazing thing is, we just keep on doing it. It’s the longest, strangest, and most deeply human tradition we have.

So, I suppose it’s all quite simple: Pay attention. Be aware. Give everything some space. And understand, fundamentally, that you are an interloper. It’s not your house. You’re just a visitor, lucky enough to be passing through.

Thanks for stopping by for a read!

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserve

Critters

 

The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot, and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound

I've been through the desert
On a horse with no name...

                --Horse With No Name, America

It has always struck me as a peculiar feature of the American West that you can leave a perfectly respectable city—in my case, a bustling metropolis of some seventy thousand souls on the Colorado side of things—and within the time it takes to listen to two-thirds of a classic rock album, find yourself in a place where the human population has plummeted to something like ten people per square mile. That feels, to an Easterner’s sensibilities, like splendid isolation. But you push on. You cross into Utah, and the numbers perform a truly astonishing vanishing act. Suddenly you’re in a landscape administered by the Bureau of Land Management, where the population figure is not ten, or even one, but a statistically comical 0.01 people per square mile. That’s not a population; it’s a rounding error. You could shout a reasonably clever limerick and the sound waves would dissipate into the heat-shimmered void having never troubled a single human eardrum.

Even Moab, the region’s hub of fleece-vested, mountain-biking humanity, only manages a density of about 2.6 people per square mile, a figure that feels practically Parisian after the drive in. This, you see, leaves an awful lot of country for the non-human residents. And it is full, absolutely chock-a-block, with critters.

Now, one must be specific here. The dominant life form, the great overlord of this semi-arid kingdom, is the cow. Not the bison, that noble, shaggy emblem of the West, but Bos taurus, the common meat cow. They are everywhere, standing around with the vacant, slightly bewildered expression of a tourist who has lost his map. They are, to put it mildly, an invasive species of ambulatory steaks, and every other poor ungulate in the vicinity is locked in a desperate competition with them for the few blades of grass that have the audacity to turn green in a land that measures its rainfall in wistful sighs.

But if you look past the bovine hegemony, the real West begins to reveal itself. You see hawks, magnificent and aloof, carving circles in a sky so blue it hurts the eyes. You see the flash of a coyote, all lean muscle and intelligent cunning, trotting along a ridgeline as if it owns the place, which, in a spiritual sense, it absolutely does. I have a particular soft spot for the coyote. If you find yourself in the right canyon, just as the evening light turns the sandstone to liquid gold, you can hear them. It’s not a howl, not really. It’s a conversation—a series of yips, barks, and wails that feels ancient and deeply important, as if they’re settling the affairs of the universe. To overhear it is a privilege.

There are pronghorn, looking perpetually startled, nibbling at the leftovers from the cows’ banquet. And underfoot, a whole Lilliputian world unfolds: lizards doing push-ups on sun-baked rocks, scorpions tucked away like malevolent little secrets, and the ghosts of creatures far grander. Just a few feet beneath your boots lie the fossilized bones of dinosaurs, the undiscovered remains of a world so alien and monstrous it beggars belief. I sometimes like to think that something of them lingers—not just their bones, but a certain weight in the air, a sense of deep, deep time that makes your own concerns feel rather small.

Of course, nature is not all majestic eagles and philosophical coyotes. It also contains things that want to drink your blood. My personal nemesis is a creature known to science as Ceratopogonidae, but known to me as a tiny, flying spawn of Satan. These are the no-see-ums, midges that, for their size, possess a ferocity that would make a wolverine blush. They have a particular fondness for my ears. Despite my best efforts with repellents that could likely dissolve plastic, one will invariably get through. The result is a throbbing, cherry-red earlobe that takes the better part of a week to return to its normal, unremarkable state. I’ve learned that a dab of anti-histamine cream helps, but it’s a losing battle. My blood type is O+, which I’m told is a universal donor. Apparently, this also makes me a universal delicacy for the entire biting insect kingdom.

But then there are the moments of connection. The ravens in Rabbit Valley got to know my truck. I’d put out an aluminum pie pan with some water and shelled peanuts, and within minutes, these magnificent, glossy black birds would drop from the sky, their calls like a deep, throaty chuckle. They are impossibly smart, and to be recognized by one feels like being accepted into a very exclusive club.

I’ve learned a healthy respect for the snakes, too. We have our rattlers, of course. My view is that if you get bitten by a rattlesnake, the fault is, more often than not, yours. The snake wants absolutely nothing to do with you. It is not lying in wait, plotting your demise. It is, most likely, having a pleasant snooze in the sun. If you go crashing through the brush without looking where you’re putting your feet, you can’t be terribly surprised when you frighten the living daylights out of it. A walking staff bounced on a rock is a wonderful announcer of one’s presence. It simply says, "Pardon me, I’m just passing through," giving her ample time to wake up and glide silently away.

I’ve recently acquired a monstrously large 100−400 mm zoom lens, a piece of equipment that looks like it ought to be mounted on a battleship. My plan is to keep it on the passenger seat, ready for those fleeting moments. My head is usually buried in a geological outcrop, trying to comprehend the unfathomable story told by layers of sandstone and shale, but I’m hoping to pay more attention to the living narrative around me. I’m not a stalker; I have no desire to stress these animals. I just want to capture a moment of their lives without disturbing the scene.

It’s that life, in all its fragility, that stays with you. A few weeks ago, during what has been a punishingly hot and dry summer, I saw something that lodged itself in my heart. Along the side of the highway, a coyote was tugging at the desiccated hide of a road-killed cow that had been lying there since spring. There was almost nothing left of the carcass—just a cage of sun-bleached ribs and a stiff, black sheet of leather. The coyote, lean and visibly stressed by the drought, was working tirelessly in the late afternoon heat, with cars whizzing past just yards away.

There was no majesty in it. It wasn't the noble predator of a nature documentary. It was just a hungry animal, doing what it had to do to survive, pulling apart the sad, leathery remains of a dead thing. It was grim, and desperate, and profoundly sad. And yet, it was also just… life. Hard, unrelenting, and stubbornly, beautifully persistent, out here in the great, empty, everything.

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Heart of the sunrise

 

Love comes to you and then after
Dream on, on to the heart of the sunrise
You’re lost on a wave that you're dreaming
Dream on, on to the heart of the sunrise

                  -- Heart of the Sunrise, Yes

Good morning.


There is a particular and peculiar madness that grips a landscape photographer, and it begins, as so many questionable life choices do, with a bowel schedule. My preparations for a sunrise shoot in Canyonlands National Park don’t start with charging batteries or cleaning lenses, but with a strategic dietary shutdown two full days in advance. By the evening before the day before the main event, I am eating no more.


Now, this may seem a trifle extreme, but I invite you to consider the alternative. There is a specific type of existential dread that can only be induced by one’s intestines staging a mutiny at the precise moment the pre-dawn sky begins to blush with colour. The only recourse is a hasty, clench-legged dash to a National Park pit toilet, a structure that, more often than not, has recently weathered the collective digestive turmoil of several tour buses full of people who apparently subsist on a diet of chili dogs and regret. It is an experience that can strip the soul of its poetry, and so, I fast.

The alarm, when it shrieks, does so at 1:00 a.m. One in the morning. An hour so profoundly unnatural that even the mice are still asleep. There follows a silent, zombie-like ritual: coffee, the loading of an alarming amount of gear into the truck, and then onto I-70 to head west into the immense, inky blackness of the high desert. From my front door to the moment the camera clicks onto the tripod is a journey of two hours, and I am a stickler for being there a full hour and a half before the sun even considers making an appearance. You have to be there to watch the world wake up.

I am, of course, entirely at the mercy of the atmosphere. I’ll spend days watching weather models, trying to triangulate a morning that promises a nice scattering of clouds for dramatic effect, but not a solid duvet of grey that smothers the whole affair. But you can plan all you want; sometimes the sky simply doesn’t get the memo. And then there's the eternal nemesis: that stubborn, low-slung bank of clouds that invariably parks itself directly over the La Sal Mountains, hiding the sun until it’s so high that the soft, magical light is gone and the canyons are just fully, bluntly lit.

My relationship with my equipment has become, I'll admit, slightly complicated. I recently acquired my second-ever digital camera, a gleaming modern marvel with a set of zooms that covers a frankly preposterous range, from a wide 14 mm out to 400 mm. My last new camera was purchased back in 2015, an old friend I know so intimately I could operate it in a coma. It still comes with me, naturally. I’ll set it up on a second tripod, methodically clicking away on an interval timer, capturing a time-lapse while I fuss with the new gadget. The new camera’s neatest trick is an adaptor that lets it talk to my menagerie of legacy prime lenses, beautiful old pieces of glass I’ve accumulated over the years.

There used to be a rather tedious and long-running debate in photography circles about primes versus zooms, but it’s mostly vanished now. If you have the money, a good zoom is a spectacular thing. And yet, given the choice between one of those and a jewel-like prime lens on an adaptor, I’ll shoot the prime. There’s just something about it.

Now, Canyonlands' Island in the Sky district is littered with majestic viewpoints, and I have my favorites. There is one, however, that I almost religiously avoid for sunrise: the Mesa Arch overlook. I’ve been there in the late morning and afternoon, and it’s lovely. But in the pre-dawn hours, the parking lot tells a different story. It’s a staging ground, filled with adventure vans and rental cars, engines rumbling, a nervous energy hanging in the air. I went in once, just to see, and was confronted with a solid wall of tripods, a bristling phalanx of carbon fiber and aluminum, each with a shooter hunched over it in grim determination. I snapped one picture of the crowd itself and left.

I’ve heard tales of actual fisticuffs breaking out over prime spots. And I suppose I get it. If you’ve flown across the country for your one week of vacation, and you have exactly one chance to bag that iconic shot of the sun glowing through the arch—an image a quick Google search will provide you in overwhelming abundance—you’re going to jostle for position. But the whole scene is a complete antithesis to my purpose. My sunrise journeys are, for me, bordering on mystic experiences. The Mesa Arch scrum, with its barely suppressed tripod-rage, simply doesn’t pass my needs test. In the back of my mind, I keep telling myself I’ll sneak over on some bleak Tuesday in January or February, chancing upon an empty lot. I’ve been out here ten years and that day has yet to arrive.

After the sun is properly up and the light is getting harsh, I pack up and invariably head over to the Green River Overlook. It never disappoints. The morning cloud activity over that staggering immensity of carved earth is almost always good for something. I always find an excuse to stop here; the view is one of those you’ll be thinking about during your last moments on earth, if you’re lucky enough to have the time.

By the time I’m finished, cameras packed and stowed, it’s usually around 10:30 a.m. If time permits, the next stop is breakfast in Moab. I’ve sampled them all, and you can get a good breakfast anywhere in town, but my heart belongs to the Moab Diner. At that hour, even during high season, I can usually get a table. They’re busy, but they have a knack for finding you a seat. I can only speak to their eggs over easy with wheat toast and a side of oatmeal, with coffee. It’s always good, it arrives with startling speed, and my coffee cup is never allowed to see its own bottom. If it’s not too busy—and I am a considerate fellow who watches for a line at the door—I’ll linger, drinking frankly inadvisable amounts of coffee and scribbling notes about what I saw, what worked, and what edits I might try. I tip well, always more than half the cost of the meal, the right thing to do for breakfast service.

Again, when time is a luxury, the trip back is not via the interstate. I take Route 128, which winds through the magnificent Colorado River canyon, past the town of Castle Valley, toward the semi-ghost town of Cisco. If you haven’t driven this road, you simply must. A word of warning: you may find yourself behind a convoy of those tricked-out Jeeps, the ones with tires taller than a St. Bernard, all jostling each other like puppies on a road that is decidedly not a playground. It’s a Moab thing.

The alternative is Route 191, straight out of Moab back to I-70. It’s faster, but you’ll be sharing the road with an endless procession of long-haul trucks. They are 'moving', and much of the road is just two lanes. There is absolutely nothing ignoble about spotting one of those behemoths in your rearview mirror and diving into the nearest pull-off spot to let it rumble past.

Unless I’m staying over, I head straight home. In my mind, the journey is 80 miles at 80 miles per hour, but it’s actually longer. The speed limit drops to 75 as you cross into Colorado, just west of Rabbit Valley. Then it’s the reverse of the morning’s ritual: unload the gear, take a very long shower, and then surrender to a nap. The day ends in front of the computer, unloading the memory cards and reviewing the day’s haul. While it’s all fresh, I’ll make editing notes and, most importantly, begin planning the next trip. Are there gear refinements to be made? A different spot to try? They call this "lessons learned" my other world of project management. For me, it’s about the incremental perfecting of a skill, and of finding that one image that captures the emotional weight of a cold, lonely, and utterly perfect morning in the desert.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Design the Thing

 The enterprise begins not with a shutter’s click but with the rustle of a map, long before the truck’s engine turns over. There is a geology to preparation, a stratigraphy of intent. The initial survey might be a formal reconnaissance on foot, smelling the air and noting the angle of the late-afternoon sun, or it can be a purely cartographic exploration, tracing contour lines with a fingertip across a USGS quadrangle. From this data, a design emerges. The design of the thing—the collection of images you intend to bring back—assumes a weight, a physical gravity, in direct proportion to the cost of acquisition. And the cost, out here, is measured less in dollars than in sweat, in vertical feet, in the number of suns that will rise and set before you return to a paved road. The more remote the objective, the more unforgiving the calculus of preparation becomes.

Raw rough photo out the front window of the truck in the back-country of Western Utah.

What follows is an exercise in the absolute defeat of entropy, and its primary weapon is the list. Not one list, but a constellation of them, because chaos on-site is a given. In the disorienting quiet of a pre-dawn setup, with the cold seeping through your knees, you will not have the luxury of speculative searching. You will need to know, with Newtonian certainty, the location of the 3mm Allen key for the tripod head. Thus, the lists are broken down by function, by discrete missions within the larger expedition. A sheet for Time-lapse: intervalometer, dummy battery, power cable, ND filter set. A sheet for Sound: shotgun mic, dead cat, field recorder, XLR cables. Landscape. Video. And then, Infrastructure—the gear that supports the gear: batteries, chargers, power station, headlamps, gaffer tape.

A second manifest cross-references the first. It answers the question, “What box is it in?” The Pelican 1510. The blue dry bag. The small F-Stop ICU. Organization is a system of nested dependencies, a matryoshka doll of containment. Loose items are items that have achieved a state of nonexistence; they will never be seen again. To prevent this, you create a bag of bags and a box of boxes. A small zippered pouch for filters goes into a padded lens case, which in turn goes into a specific slot in the main camera pack. A box of boxes and bags becomes a known universe, each object in its predictable orbit. For indispensable items—the satellite messenger, the primary camera body—the rule is twofold: they have one and only one home, or their various locations are noted on a master list with the precision of a land deed. The complexity of the shoot dictates the rigidity of the system. Add the variable of a three-mile hike in the dark, and the system becomes scripture.

A venture on foot is a different species entirely from a trip based out of the truck. From the truck, you can afford profligacy. You can haul more weight than you need, make multiple trips from the tailgate to the tripod, indulging in the luxury of forgotten items. A ten-mile hike in, however, is an exercise in brutal distillation. The equipment list is honed to the point of savage elegance. The technique itself simplifies. You are not merely packing gear; you are curating a specific outcome. You detail the requirements for the final product—the photograph, the video clip—and from that, you design backward, allowing no more mass into the pack than is essential to the task.

Before the final closing of bags and the latching of hard cases, there is the last ritual, a final catechism recited at the tailgate. Refer to the checklist. Are the batteries charged? All of them? And where, precisely, are they? A glance at the sky, a check of the forecast on the satellite uplink. The wind is shifting. Where are the fingerless gloves? Where is the insulated vest, the one packed not for comfort but for contingency? Then, and only then, do the zippers sing their final note, the locks click shut.

There are, of course, the standing protocols, the personal systems refined over years. In the cab of the truck, always, is a sling bag. In it, a Nikon Z8 with the 24-120mm S lens—a combination of staggering versatility. With it, a carbon-fiber monopod and a lightweight tripod. This is the kit of opportunity, ready for the ephemeral wash of light on a distant mesa or the sharp, sudden violence of a hawk diving on a prairie dog. The rest of the camera equipment rides in the bed, inside a padded cube that is itself nestled inside a large cooler, packed with reusable freeze packs. Heat is the enemy of sensors and batteries, and out here, heat is a certainty. Redundancy is another. A duplicate set of all necessary keys lives in a secondary bag, far from the first.

More freeze packs are in the cab, where the sling bag sits, keeping the ready-kit and its spare batteries from cooking in the high-desert sun. The cab is also the communications hub: CB, GMRS, UHF/VHF radios, and the battery banks to run them. For a short trip, power is a portable affair—an EcoFlow River 3, perhaps its Plus sibling with the auxiliary battery. A longer stay, farther from the hard road, means adding two 100-watt solar panels to the manifest, and maybe the two hulking Delta 3 batteries, a private power grid for the wilderness. The battery equation is a function of time and distance. How many days? How many miles from the nearest outlet?

And because most of these outings are solo, the final inventory is not of equipment, but of survival. Water. A spare container of water. And a filter to make more. A sunshade for the truck. And the first-aid kit. These things are not on a list. They are part of the truck itself, as permanent and non-negotiable as the tires.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

That Smell

Ooh, that smell
Can't you smell that smell?
Ooh, that smell
The smell of death surrounds you

             -- Lynyrd Skynyrd

The thing about watching rock is that it rarely does anything. At least, not on your timetable. You set up a tripod, you wait for the angle of the sun to perform its subtle surgery on a jut of Entrada Sandstone, and you find yourself with an abundance of time. The Entrada, out here in Rabbit Valley, is a Late Jurassic artifact—massive, cross-bedded, a wind-deposited eolian unit, pale white to light-brown, now sculpted by erosion into shapes that make for good photographs. This particular afternoon, I was monitoring the shadows creeping across a cliff face, a landscape photographer's job description, which, when distilled, is mostly just waiting. And, inevitably, thinking.

The solitude is an open invitation for the mind to wander, to chew on something less immediate than f/11 at a hundred-and-sixty. Above the Entrada, you can see the overlying Morrison Formation, which is where the true paleontological currency is found. The bones. Which brought me, as it often does when contemplating deep time, to Dinosaur National Monument. Up in Northern Colorado, time has tilted the earth on its side, and you can stand in a pavilion staring at a vertical wall of accumulated calamity: thousands of bones, stacked, intermingled, a traffic jam of extinct vertebrates. They were washed into a lake, fossilized, and now they wait for a slow, methodical excavation.

But what I was chewing on, watching the light change from brass to gold on the silent sandstone, was the lake itself. Not the finished, fossilized wall, but the raw, messy event. What did that place smell like?

There is no way to know. Only to make educated, and frankly, hilarious, guesses. My mind conjured a small, slow-moving water pit, frequently fed by a flooding river. Upriver, a number of large, recently deceased organisms—say, a hadrosaur, perhaps a small apatosaur—had been swept along, rolling like submerged logs, until they settled in the quiet depths of this lake. The rotting. The sinking. The gases. The slow, aqueous decomposition of a ten-ton body. You see the thousands of bones piled at the Monument, and you’re looking at what was once an odoriferous, magnificent mess.

This train of thought, however, inevitably expands. What did the whole world smell like after the Chicxulub asteroid came crashing in at the end of the Cretaceous? The dust cloud, the global winter, the widespread wildfires, and then, the sheer, unimaginable tonnage of suddenly dead dinosaur.

We don't know the population sizes. We can only suppose by analogy. And analogy, when dealing with biomass on that scale, is a fool's errand. We men, for all our supposed enlightenment, are efficient at elimination. We've certainly impacted total biomass. The historical account of passenger pigeons darkening the sky in the 1700s—flocks of them, so numerous they blocked the sun—and then their utter extinction after the colonists brought over the 10-gauge shotgun. We have their bones. We have the scattered records. But we don’t know the biomass of that species in its prime. We don't know the exact number of individuals it took to fill the sky. We are left with an unknowable absence.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Observation of self

 Chasing Ghosts in the Stone: A Journey to Earth's Great Dying

The Cartography of Cataclysm

To the geologist, the land is a library, its stone shelves holding volumes of immense age. He has spent a lifetime reading them, but now, with a large-format camera and a tripod strapped to his pack, he has come west on a different sort of expedition. He is not here to map mineral claims or survey for dams, but to take portraits of ghosts. His subjects are the great cataclysms of the Mesozoic Era, planetary convulsions that are not abstract dates in a textbook but physical boundaries, sutures of stone stitched into the earth. They are the tangible edges of lost worlds, visible to anyone who knows how and where to look.

His itinerary is a cartography of doom. He seeks two specific scars on the face of the continent. The first is the line drawn circa 252 million years ago between the Permian and Triassic periods, the tombstone of the Paleozoic Era, an event so profound it is known simply as "The Great Dying." The second, a lesser but still pivotal crisis, marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic, some 201 million years in the past, the moment that cleared the global stage for the reign of dinosaurs. His pilgrimage begins at the first and most significant of these, a place where the scale of the cataclysm is matched only by the grandeur of the landscape that records it.

The Great Dying: Reading the Pages of the Permian-Triassic Extinction

Of all the planet's violent chapter endings, the Permian-Triassic extinction was the most severe. The single largest annihilation in the history of life, it carved the fundamental divide between the Paleozoic, the era of ancient life, and the Mesozoic, the era of middle life. The geologist’s challenge, and the photographer’s frustration, is that an event of such magnitude is often marked not by a dramatic, charcoal-black line of ash, but by its opposite: a profound absence. The boundary is an unconformity, a gap in the story, a moment of planetary crisis so deep that for millions of years, in many places, almost nothing was written down at all. To photograph this void is to capture the shape of silence.

A Gulf in Time at the Grand Canyon

He stands on the South Rim, waiting as the evening light lowers, knowing that only the sharpest, lowest angles of the sun can carve definition into the story he wants to capture. The air is cool and thin. His lens is aimed not down into the chasm, but across its top. The flat, cream-colored caprock on which he and a million tourists stand is the Kaibab Formation, a limestone laid down in a shallow Permian sea. This is the final page of the Paleozoic, the last word of an old world. His gaze drifts past the rim, toward the vast plateaus stretching north and east, where the reddish, layered slopes of the Moenkopi Formation mark the first chapter of the Triassic. Between the top of the Kaibab under his feet and the bottom of the Moenkopi over there is a gulf not of space, but of time. Geologists have a quiet word for this kind of temporal gulf: a disconformity. The layers above and below lie parallel, giving the illusion of a continuous story, but the alignment is a lie. A chapter is missing, its binding cracked, leaving the end of Genesis pressed against the start of Exodus. Using a long focal length to compress the immense distance, he waits for the shadows to deepen in the intervening valleys, turning the unseen gap into a tangible, dark line in his composition.

A Smear of Red in the Colorado Front Range

Days later, he finds himself in a landscape less stark but more perplexing, navigating the hogbacks of the Colorado Front Range near Denver. Here, the boundary is not a clean, majestic gap but a subtle, frustrating blur. He walks through a gentle valley that time and weather have eroded between two harder ridges. To his west rises the Fountain Formation, a sandstone coarse as crushed brick, marking the Permian. To his east, the indistinct red beds of the Triassic Lykins Formation. The Great Dying is here, somewhere in the soft dirt and scrub oak under his boots. It is not a line but a zone. The photographic challenge is immense, especially in the flat midday light that washes out the subtle shifts in color. He gets low to the ground, trying to use the texture of the soil to hint at the change in the underlying rock, but the event refuses to sit still and announce itself. How do you create a portrait of a smear of red mudstone, a boundary that bleeds from one world into the next?

He had now seen the shape of the Great Dying; one a void, the other a blur. His journey now pulled him forward fifty million years, to a boundary not of absence, but of violent replacement.

The Second Silence: Witnessing the Triassic-Jurassic Divide

While it did not possess the sheer obliterating force of the Permian event, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction was a crisis of global consequence. It was the filter through which life had to pass, and what emerged on the other side would define the planet for the next 150 million years. The geologist’s quest now is to find the physical evidence of this second silence—the environmental shift that crippled the dominant Triassic ecosystems and created the ecological vacuum that the dinosaurs would so spectacularly fill.

From Painted Mud to a Sea of Sand

In the sculpted canyons near Zion, the story is written in a dramatic, three-act structure, stacked one atop the other. The geologist stands where the first act ends. At his feet are the uppermost layers of the Chinle Formation, a painter’s palette of rock—purple, grey, and crimson mudstones deposited by ancient rivers that meandered across lush Triassic floodplains. This was a world of water.

He tilts his head back, his gaze climbing the cliff face. Immediately above the variegated Chinle are the thinner, more subdued beds of the Moenave Formation. This is the fine print, the second act that records the crisis itself. He scrambles up a talus slope to get closer, running a hand over the rock. It feels friable, a mix of siltstone and fine-grained sandstone. Here, in the subtle shifts of texture, he can read the environmental chaos—the story of faltering rivers, of seasons of drought and flood that choked the vibrant world below. This less-famous unit is the crucial text, preserving the pivotal transition.

Then he looks up again, past the Moenave, to the third and final act, and the scale of it forces him to take a step back. Soaring hundreds of feet into the Utah sky is the monolithic, cross-bedded face of the Navajo Sandstone. It is the rock of the Early Jurassic, a colossal sea of sand, an erg that once stretched across this entire region. The story is a clear and devastating narrative: a wet world died in the chaotic fine print of the Moenave, and in its place rose one of the largest deserts the planet has ever known. This is not just a change in rock type; it is a portrait of planetary trauma, an environmental coup frozen in stone.

Portraits of Time

The long drive home is a time for reflection. The images captured on his digital chips are more than geological curiosities. They are portraits of ghosts, and he has learned that ghosts have different personalities. The Earth, it seems, does not record its traumas with a single signature, but with a whole language of silence, change, and rebirth.

At the Grand Canyon, he photographed a ghost of absence—a clean, profound void where millions of years of life simply ceased to be recorded. In the Colorado foothills, he pursued a ghost of transition, a fugitive smear in the rock that chronicled the same event as a slow, indistinct bleeding from one world into the next. And on the Colorado Plateau, he witnessed a cinematic transformation, where the boundary was a sharp, environmental narrative: a vibrant world of painted mud and rivers, extinguished and then buried under an empire of sand.

To stand on these boundaries is to gain a humbling and necessary perspective. It is to feel the true weight of the planet's history under your feet and to understand that our own world is but a single, delicate page in a library of stone whose volumes are measured in ages, and whose most dramatic stories are told in silence.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved