Vermillion Cliffs National Monument (03-21-12) — Image by kenne
This remote and unspoiled 280,000-acre monument is a geologic treasure with some of the most spectacular trails and views in the world. The monument contains many diverse landscapes, including the Paria Plateau, Vermilion Cliffs, Coyote Buttes, and Paria Canyon. The monument borders Kaibab National Forest to the west and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to the east. The monument includes the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Elevations range from 3,100 to 7,100 feet. The monument is also home to a growing number of endangered California condors. Each year, condors hatched and raised in a captive breeding program are released in the monument. To visit the monument, you’ll need extra planning and awareness of potential hazards. Most roads need a high clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle due to deep sand.
Finding the Way Through Doubtful Pass– Image by kenne
“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”
. . . I have been following Thomas Davis’ blog since 2012, and feel so fortunate to have found his blog. “With billions of humans on this earth, it’s not easy to connect with poets who express the human experience so worthy of being a poet’s poet. Thomas can open the door to why we exist!”
Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings — The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems was recently by Tribal College Press. Davis sees the book of poems as “an introduction to the tribal college movement and the world of Indigenous nations.”
These poems tell the story of the tribal college movement. Davis writes, “They record history in a different way. History is not just made up of facts and events, as momentous as those events may be, but also of emotions, dreams, striving, failing, tragedy, struggling against long odds, laughter, joy, and personalities that make significant differences even as those contributions are lost when historians begin to shuffle through dust bins of primary sources.“
In March, 2003, Robert Martin invited Davis to Tohono O’odham in southern Arizona. While there, he wrote “A Visit to Tohono O’odham Community College as It is Being Born, 2/6/03.”
Thomas Davis Source: Green Bay Press-Gazette
The poem begins:
Perry Horse said, looking out to saguaro cactus, palo verde trees, bone- white trunk of an eucalyptus tree, brown dryness of desert, steep dirt sides of an arroyo, “can you smell this place? It smells different from your country with its trees, big water, and winter’s deep cold.” The arroyo channeled toward large skirts of a mountain that raised brown earth, dark rock into rare clouds that looked as if they might hold rain. Green smells of Tohono O’odham Nation were as pale as trunks of the palo verde trees.
The last paragraph in the poem reads:
American has always been a nation of peoples, of nations. In desert air at night stars hover bright and close to dark mountains that shine and breathe as we sing into another time.
Davis, 74, lives in Sturgeon Bay and is the author of the award-winning novel “In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams,” and other works. He still serves in leadership roles at several tribal colleges.
I prefer the original name, Boulder Dam. Originally known as Boulder Dam from 1933, it was officially renamed Hoover Dam for President Herbert Hoover by a joint resolution of Congress in 1947.
Common Buckeye Butterfly (Junonia coenia) — Image by kenne
So, I begin researching articles on butterfly color and found “The evolution of color: How butterfly wings can shift in hue” in ScienceDaily. They found that buckeyes and other Junonia species can create a rainbow of structural colors simply by tuning the thickness of the wing scale’s bottom layer (the lamina), which creates iridescent colors in the same way a soap bubble does.
“In each Junonia species, structural color came from the lamina. And they are producing a big range of lamina thicknesses that create a rainbow of different colors, everything from gold to magenta to blue to green,” says first author Rachel Thayer. “This helps us understand how structural color has evolved over millions of years.” You can find more information structured color at Marine Biological Laboratory. (Please note, I’m a photographer, not a biologist.)
Boulder Dam Viewed from the Arizona Side (November 5, 2020) — Panorama by kenne
Most of the time, when we drive to Las Vegas from Tucson, we pass by the dam. The last time we stopped, we drove the two-lane road on top of the dam on our way back to Houston in 2007. The Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge was under construction and was not completed until 2010. The drive across the Boulder Dam would take quite a while, depending on the volume of traffic.
The Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge Above the Boulder Dam (upper left corner) — Image by kenne
Currently, the Lake Mead water level is 147.41 feet below the full pool of 1,229.00, 40% of its full capacity. The Colorado River, which supplies Nevada, Arizona and California, most of its water, has long been chronically overused and has dwindled during two decades of mostly dry years. The drought has been worsened by higher temperatures unleashed by climate change.
Americans are in serious intellectual trouble – in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
Doubtful Pass Signposts – Image by kenne
Painted Desert– B&W Image by kenne
Vermillion Cliffs National Monument — Panorama by kenne
Serious Birders (Tubac, Arizona — March 2018) — Image by kenne
Antelope Canyon On Lake Powell — Images by kenne
Joshua Tree — Image by kenne
The Open Road — Image by kenne
