I recently made a long-awaited trip to Dinosaur National Monument, located where the far northwest corner of Colorado meets Utah and Wyoming. These photographs were made in many incredible places - Medicine Bow National Forest, Vedauwoo, Flaming Gorge, Sheep Creek Canyon, Rawah Wilderness - that I visited along the way to and from Dinosaur.
Look for a post of photographs from Dinosaur itself soon.
Summerlong
I find a profound joy in the possibilities of losing myself in the isolation of the Sandhills, even if it’s just for a few hours over a long weekend - especially when summer rains have made the grasses a brilliant green and millions of Prairie Sunflowers are in bloom along the road and hillsides. There are hundreds of miles of narrow asphalt and gravel roads winding through the landscape and hardly a human being to be found. It’s an experience I am still hoping to capture in a photograph.
As July turns to August
Photographs from yet another trip to the Sandhills as summer begins to wane…
Roots
When I was in my early teens, I spent a significant portion of summers staying with my grandparents at their home in Victor, Iowa. My grandpa was winding down the business he had founded and ran for decades, and would soon be forced to sell the house and move to a small apartment in a neighboring town.
He and I spent countless hours driving around in his S10 pickup exploring the countryside and looking for fishing holes. As we drove, he told me stories about all of the towns we passed through and highways we traversed. Stories about himself, about local history, about place names, and about how it had all changed. I drew maps of where we fished and kept statistics on what we caught.
The reality of my grandparents’ financial situation was rarely mentioned to me, and they seemed to do their best to enjoy our time together. I am not sure I really grasped the changes that were about to occur - the loss of something I still look back fondly on, and the end of my relationship with this idyllic (to me) small town.
Summer in this part of Iowa brings me right back to those days and reminds me why I have the need to endlessly document such places. A lot of things do change for the better but that doesn’t make our personal losses any easier to forget.
Victor
Keswick
Delta
near Belle Plaine
Lake Iowa
What Cheer