Launch post

This is my initial foray into blogging. My first desire was to share some of my photos of favorite places. Places I get spiritually centered, grounded, overwhelmed, breathtaken. I discovered the American Southwest five years ago on a business trip (it seems much longer than that) and have returned two or three times a year since then. It is a timeless place of stunning beauty.

I have read thousands of pages by Western writers. Of adventure, environmental issues, hiking, river running, tales of geology, flora, fauna. Ed Abbey and Katie Lee and Craig Childs and Terry Tempest Williams, the journals of the lost vagabond of beauty Everett Reuss and many more. I have become active in the Glen Canyon Institute; an organization that lives and breathes and fights the fight to restore Glen Canyon. John Wesley Powell would turn in his grave if he knew a giant artificial resevoir held in place by millions of tons of concrete with jet skis and noisy boats and litterers had replaced his beloved Colorado River. Damn the dam.

I have attended an Ed Abbey speaks celebration at Ken Sleight's (Abbey's Seldom Seen Smith) Pack Creek Ranch just outside Moab, Utah in the La Sal Mountains and met and talked to several of the authors and river runners and adventurers and environmental activists I have been reading for the past five years. I have hiked a few hundred miles, driven thousands, terrified myself on ledges and edges, been miles from another human being, gone days without seeing a stop light, a McDonalds, visited with Mormons, Hopi Indians, Navahos. Waded rivers, twisted through narrow canyons, looked up in wonder, looked down in amazement. Taken hundreds of photographs, none of which can begin to capture the grandeur that is the desert, is the entire Colorado Plateau, is the majestic canyons and spires and rivers and mountains and hoodoos. The reds of all shades, the bluest skies ever, anywhere. Soon, I will go back again.
Sooner the better.