In honor of National Parks Week, I’ve just read T. H. Watkin’s book Stone Time (Southern Utah: A Portrait and a Meditation), and Jon Luoma’s The Hidden Forest, which focuses on forest research being conducted in the Andrews Experimental Forest and other National Forest research stations. I’ve also downloaded dozens of brochures from the many National Parks, National Monuments and National Forests I’ll be visiting in May and June, and I’ve installed the “Park Maps” app on my new iPod Touch (the program contains a lot of popular park maps, but just the tip of the NPS/NFS iceberg, and no BLM maps at all).
Check it out: one of the watercolor sketches from my recent artist residency in Badlands National Park is currently featured as the “Park Photo of the Week” at National Parks Traveler!
On Friday, this article appeared in the Post Crescent newspaper, published in NE Wisconsin (where I grew up on a dairy farm, in the unincorporated town of Sugar Bush). As the boys on the street corners used to say, read all about it!
Wait! It’s too soon! — I’ve got another day! but yes, I know….
Neighboring staff with contracts that ended on April 1 are moving out today, and others are moving in. As I begin to pack my belongings, I’m replaying brilliant and sublime moments from this past month in the Badlands. Erosion. Weather Geology. Solitude. It truly has been a spectacular and diverse time to be here, a real blessing. Doing some laundry today, I picked up a book called “Battling For The National Parks” by George B. Hartzog with an intro by the late Stewart Udall. I should explain that the laundry room has bookshelves for swapping reading materials (lots of mysteries!). In Chapter I, Hartzog is jotting down his early experiences and impressions as Director of the National Park Service. Hippies want access for large meadow-sit-ins. Conservation clubs are running utility lines through park meadows. A decision to open locked gates to back roads in the Great Smokies brings nothing but criticism. Everybody seems to want something different. Meanwhile, human rights marchers have set up great encampments on the (Park Service administered) Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Again and again, Hartzog must ask himself “Whose parks are these?” How do you manage so many different parks for the “public” when the public has so many faces and opinions? He includes this paragraph:
A mother in Detroit wrote to tell me of the joyous two-week vacation she, her husband and two children had in the national parks. They had tent-camped, she wrote, in ten parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite. She was complimentary of the rangers they had met, the clean campgrounds and the good roads. My road atlas indicated that the two-week trip must have involved at least 5,000 miles. They wind-shielded a lot of scenery.
I enjoyed that passage so much, wind-shielding, as it reminded me of the joy of those long “see it all” car trips we took when I was a kid, chalking up as many parks as possible, although our method feels so wrong in retrospect. By comparison, I’ve driven 800 miles in past month — but just within the Badlands.
It’s a wide park, stretched out like a bison, grazing downhill, and I really wanted to familiarize myself with as much terrain as possible (since the geology varies so wildly from location to location). Thought I’d share my visualization of the park map, as overlaid with a bison. North Unit of the Badlands (experienced by most visitors) is upper corner. Back-tail-hind-legs. You can see the Loop Road runs up the hind leg (and if the tail were lifted, it would point at Wall). The South Unit, which is large and wild and difficult to experience fully, is located in the bison’s great shaggy head-horns-shoulders-front-legs.
For the past couple days I’ve been crafting and revising drafts of poems, re-reading my scribbled notes, and printing copies as the words begin to gel. Part of my own creative process involves making watercolor landscape sketches. Here are those sketches, as a Flickr slideshow.
If you’re a plant in the Badlands, the first thing you need to do each spring is tunnel up through new sediments! (this stuff can be about as soft as poured cement when it hardens). But as it dries, the claypan cracks, and the spring perennials are forcing up through these gaps. Pretty incredible to witness. The green spears must be in the Allium family, because I pinched a bit and they taste/smell like chives. I believe the other plant, developing yellow/ruddy buds, is a “fetid marigold.” Doesn’t stink yet!
The trees are budding out, and the lawns appear 80% green today (without squinting or using a magnifying glass). Further afield, the sod tables still appear to be a dozen hues of winter-beige, but this is only because they are covered with long dry grasses that conceal all the subtle greening happening below.
It will be hard to leave this heady dose of spring and return to Upper Michigan (although it has been warm there, too, and the ice melted early): along the shoreline of Lake Superior, our lilacs won’t be blossoming until mid June. Until Friday, at least, I’m loving the sight of buds…..
Another liquid-amber sunset flickering like a grassfire over the Badlands! These pics are taken from my “home-away-from-home” in the Badlands, the park housing unit tucked behind the Visitor Center. Hard to imagine getting “used” to spectacular scenes like this! What happens? — you say “another stellar sunset? Nah, I’ll pass.” — ??
In photo #4, the gold hour is over (as suddenly as it began) but the sky continued unfolding layers of frosting and cloud-fronds in an extended after-glow show.
Comparing two aerial images from the Badlands, viewed via GoogleMap. One is a bombing target carved into the earth by the military (the bottom portion of the target is less visible, so it may be grazed now, and if so, I am guessing there is a cattle-fence running through the center of the old target). The other location is a Sundance (ceremonial) site. Sacred and Profane; within field-glass view of each other. It is hard to shift our perspectives. Try walking around all day looking at the world through a magnifying glass. The fact that we can see our daily terrain from the perspective of plane-photos and satellite imagery is really a major paradigm-shift. Here is an aerial view of the Minuteman Missile Silo I visited, just north of the Badlands…. and the aerial view of a Badlands prairie dog town. I am really amazed that all of these patterns are so strikingly visible at such distances.
Vernal pool at Cactus Flats was a chorus of spring peepers this morning! Good fer what ails ya!
Sorry for the wind sounds on this file. If it annoys you too much, there are two shorter clips that also feature peepers — sans wind. (Posted to my Flickr account). Make sure you have your sound on!
These peepers are making me homesick for a certain husband, and a certain pond on the Yellow Dog Plains of Upper Michigan, but I’ll be back home soon-very-soon.
The sun illuminates the sediment layers, the wind and water carve them into sensual formations. I let the wind and sun (70s today!) and a stream of visitors grit-scour all dark thoughts of “The Day After” from my mind. The landscape sweeps out our cobwebs.
As the late Stewart Udall once wrote:
“By a fascinating irony, what we have called in the past the “badlands” turn out to be good lands, and very good lands indeed. I like to tell the story that is related by one of the Utah historians whose grandparents came across some of the desolate southern Utah country with which Powell was so familiar. In those days water was so scarce and the weather so harsh that the people referred to this arid country as “the land God forgot.” This historian writes that now, 100 years later, we see that it was indeed the land “God saved for Himself.”
The sense of scale at Big Badlands Overlook is pretty stunning, both in the long view down into the White River valley and lower grasslands, and in the sheer drop of the eroding wall itself, prairie to thousand-foot tumble in just a few steps. This photo shows just a tiny bit of the scene, like a sliver of apple, as one is looking back from the jutting overlook platform. But I love the reference-point of my truck in the upper corner, insignificant as an ant.
