I have always vowed to greet sunrise as often as I can, and on road trips this becomes a balancing act between photographing late into the night, greeting sunrise, and driving hundreds of miles afterward. On this last day of our father-son road trip, the already tenuous cloud cover began to stream away just as the first light of dawn touched the ancient walls of the canyon, setting the stage for a sunrise to be remembered... Photographed August 2021.
Light flees the Owens Valley well before sunset, as the Sierran crags capture its vermillion hues on their western flanks, leaving the valley in a dusky trance awaiting nightfall. The beginning of this daily ritual is marked by the crescent Sun crowning the highest peaks, and casting one last glance into the valley it leaves to the clouds above and rocks below. There are few trees in the Alabama Hills, but each looks forward to this moment when it erupts in backlit flame. Photographed November 2018.
When faced with deciphering the markings left by our ancestors less than ten millennia ere, we invoke sympathetic magic for the hunt, the thirteen full moons of some solar years, and other fantasies that pretend at the truth. And so, a rock face that greets the southron Sun day after day is perhaps a harbinger of our First Contact with a starfaring civilization. How will we converse with an alien civilization descended from the stars if we cannot speak the language of our ancestors? How will we decipher that first message, even if it’s a simple pictograph? Photographed July 2021.
