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A Moment in the Sun
Bluff, Utah
2022

A squirrel, just passing through, gets a solar halo.

Good Cairn
Butler Wash, Utah
2022

Cairns are built for various reasons and have a long history, especially in places such as Scotland dating back to the megalith days. Large cairns also have a long history of being built on mountain summits. Smaller ones along cross country hiking routes, especially over rocky areas are used for navigation. If you’ve ever followed such a route, you know how important they are to prevent getting lost or at least off track. Unfortunately, a recent craze in building cairns just about anywhere someone finds idle time and a pile of rock has led to people getting off route when hiking. Not only that, but they clutter up an otherwise natural view of the surroundings. I’ve built a cairn or two myself, e.g. on a beach, but never in a remote area where they might be confused as a trail marker. In the backcountry, I think cairns are either good, (i.e. marking the trail) or bad (i.e. leading to misdirection and needlessly marring the landscape). If happen across a bad cairn, I typically dismantle it and scatter the rocks.

Lost City
Monument Valley, Arizona
2022

Live Long and Prosper
Monument Valley, Arizona
2022

It’s always hard to drive through Monument Valley without spending some time there, but that’s what we did on our way home from Tubac in March. About all we did was to stop along the side of the road for lunch and to snap a few quick images. It’s always hard to get interesting landscape images in the harsh light of midday in the desert, but when it’s either that or nothing, one must do what they can with the views at hand.

A Slow, Subtle War
Gray Mountain, Arizona
2022

Change
Gray Mountain, Arizona
2022

Rent Reform Needed
Gray Mountain, Arizona
2022

Sage Bond Sings
Gray Mountain, Arizona
2022

This photo is of Navajo/Apache musician Sage Bond. She was involved in the Painted Desert project.

Sign of the Times
Shonto, Arizona
2022

The Navajo people seemed to take masking during the pandemic more seriously than any area I’ve seen off reservation, and for good reason as they’ve suffered a very high rate of fatalities from covid-19. Their concern and diligence is shown in some of the photos posted on the abandoned buildings on Highway 160. Some information I read about the Painted Desert Project that produced and installed them seemed to indicate it was started during the pandemic both as a way of expressing concern but also as a means of giving some folks a safe program to be a part of during the pandemic shutdowns and restrictions.

Rez Dog and Friends
Shonto, Arizona
2022

The western part of U.S. Highway 160 in or near the Navajo Reservation contains a number of abandoned structures, mostly commercial in nature. No longer serving their original purposes, they all seem to have been repurposed into art canvases and message boards. Much of what appears on these buildings is really just impromtu scrawled messages or crude drawings interspersed with more planned, free-form work by random graffiti artists. But some very large areas of a number the buildings contain what are obviously formally planned works of art (often containing a political message). Included are quite a few large reproductions of black and white photos which I very much enjoyed viewing. It is interesting that while the less formal graffiti seems to be fair game for painting over or defacing with new work, at least so far the larger works have remained untouched. It turns out that the large works are part of The Painted Desert Project whose mission statement states: “The Painted Desert Project connects public artists with communities through mural opportunities on the Navajo Nation.”