"To the horizon," Wyoming, May 2006

To the horizon

"If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame," Counting Crows, "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"

"Elk Antler Arch, Jackson, Wyoming," May 2006

Elk Antler Arch, town square, Jackson, Wyoming

When my college roommate, Bryan, and I celebrated the year we turned 30 in 2006, we met in Denver for a road trip through the Rockies. He requested nights in Boulder and Jackson and I planned a loop trip through those towns and up into Idaho and Montana before we made our way back to Denver. We hit states we hadn't ever visited and got to national parks I'd long ached to see, namely Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone.

In Jackson, where we spent two nights to allow for a full day touring Yellowstone, we found a hotel near the center of town and walked through the town square on our way to a nice dinner one evening. Entering and exiting the square, we passed through these archways made of elk antlers.

Now that my photo a day project is complete, in order to keep this blog fresh (and perhaps as another resolution), I'm going to shoot for participation in each of this year's Photo Friday challenges, at the least. Hopefully, I'll be able to post one photo a month that is either taken specifically for the challenge or was taken within the past few months, rather than relying on my archives for each one. (And if I can scan in my film negatives with any regularity, perhaps one photo a month will be one from way back.)

So away we go.

"Yellowstone isolation," May 2006

Bryan and the bison

There is little that can heighten the feeling of isolation more than finding yourself staring out on the open vistas in the West, whether it's the rolling green hills of Yellowstone or the golden desert of Arizona -- or any expansive vista in between.

"Gold and Grand Tetons," Wyoming, May 2006

Tetons in bloom

While I've certainly taken my share of macro and closeup flower photos, I tend to prefer blooms as an accent to the scene rather than a bulb of color dominating the frame. Those shots certainly have their use, and I continue to shoot them, but my personal preference is to try to work the bulbs into a more wide-reaching image. So that's why I knelt on the ground on a breeze May afternoon outside Grand Teton National Park to position these low-lying flowers just right.

"The patient pine," Wyoming, May 2006

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect's noonday hum,-

from "The Inward Morning," Henry David Thoreau

"Color becomes black and white," Wyoming, May 2006

Color becomes black and white

No special effects (as in, the click of a button in Picasa) here -- this is a full-color photo of trees in Yellowstone National Park on an overcast morning. The gray sky and muted backlight render the trees black. It's similar to one of my favorite photos, taken at Oregon's Crater Lake National Park, that for the moment still only lives on film -- yet another reminder that I've got to get organized and start plugging through some of those to get them online.

"On the old highways of America"

The road to myself

"On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk -- times neither day nor night -- the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself."

-- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

"Blame it on the Tetons," May 2006

In Wyoming, May 27, 2006

On an overcast late-May day in northwestern Wyoming, the clouds hang low over the Grand Tetons, which dwarf the bison grazing in the fields. I have no shortage of images that would fit the category of "peaceful," but most are stored away on negatives in albums on a shelf in the spare bedroom. My grand plan to sort through the vast -- albeit mostly mediocre -- archives and try my hand at scanning them in has yet to begin.

I can already picture some of the, well, pictures that would work for this theme. There's one of me sitting on a rock, looking out over a frozen pond deep in the Maine winter. There's Notre Dame's grotto at night, the candles illuminating the rocks in the alcove in a soft, yellow light. There are numerous snowscapes in which you can feel the cold and sense the silence of the muffled scene.

Just one more item for the to-do list.

"Inside the kitchen," Wyoming, May 2006

Inside the kitchen, originally uploaded by DC Products.

The destruction inside an abandoned cafe and rest stop on a rural Wyoming highway.

"Lost in the Mist," Yellowstone National Park, May 2006

I couldn't decide between the two. I like the vertical one for the scale and the bits of detail in the foreground and the stripped trees up on the hill. But I like the horizontal one for the simple solitude of a man alone with an umbrella in the mist. The combination of a cold rain on this gray May afternoon and the warm steam coming up from the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park made this a thoroughly wet experience. It was like being in a sauna with the shower on -- while dressed. And I didn't have a raincoat, only a fleece.

"American bison, Yellowstone," May 2006

"American bison, Yellowstone," May 2006

It may have been May, but in the high elevations of northwestern Wyoming -- in Yellowstone National Park -- you can get winter weather late into the year. The day began cool and overcast, and it wouldn't have been a bad one to tour the park, but when we found ourselves getting out of the car in the rain to see a thermal spring, or when I had to tuck my camera under my coat to keep the snow off it when looking at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and the river's Lower Falls, it got to be a little much.

At this point, we were on our way out of the park, completing the loop we had started and about to hit the road south that would take us back to Jackson Hole. We noticed ahead a car coming in the opposite direction that had stopped; the vehicle in front of us braked and I noticed, through the falling snow, a bison crossing the road. As we approached the spot, we saw that the one that had crossed was following another; back on the right side of the pavement, where the first two had come from, three others remained.

Conveniently, the two bison had crossed at a turnout, so I turned into it and we waited. The second one to cross stopped barely 50 feet from the road -- where a half-dozen cars were now scattered, watching. As the huge animal turned and walked back to the edge of where the macadam met the grass, one woman got out of her car to get a photo, and Bryan and I laughed at the idiocy of this arrogant tourist. She returned to her car without incident, and we watched as the three lagging bison made their way, one by one, across to join the first two. This shot is of two of those final three, plus the one who crossed and waited, setting off into the valley.