Last Quest of the American West

For my summer vacation this year, I met up with my family in Lake Powell, located on the Arizona - Utah border.  These photos were taken around Page, AZ at Horseshoe Bend, Antelope Canyon, and at a scenic overlook near Lake Powell. I visited the museum in Page and learned a lot about John Wesley Powell, the explorer and geologist that Lake Powell is ironically named after.

Powell's expedition was the last great exploration in America and the first to chart the Green River.  He started his journey on a small boat in Green River, Wyoming and ended his trip at the Grand Canyon. Powell's main goal of the expedition was to prove his geological theories which later gave him the title of the Father of American Geology. What's unique about the Colorado Plateau is that it's walls reveal the secrets of the earth's surface--of how it formed and changed over millions of years. But now, much of Powell's discoveries are now under water...at the bottom of Lake Powell.

"The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock, cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock, ten thousand strangely carved forms...cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored."  - John Wesley Powell


Medicine Lodge, Black & White

 

This is an extension from my last post - photos of Medicine Lodge, this time in black and white.  Some images are the same, just black and white versions.  I also added a couple more that didn't work so well in color.


Medicine Lodge, Color Images

 

In the summer of 2009, I took a trip back home to Idaho.  While there, I traveled up to Dubois with my dad.  We visited the old Ellis homesteads in Medicine Lodge where my ancestors had immigrated from Wales.  We stopped by a few places where I took several shots with my camera... the Lew Ellis ranch where my grandma was born, a few fishing holes, the Edie School where my Great Uncle Art rode horseback to school, and the Hoggan ranch where I used to fish with my dad and Grandpa Kator.

I took these photos over two years ago but never really looked at them until now.  My dad recently wrote a short story about fishing with his Grandpa in Medicine Lodge, and he's asked me to design a book with several photos of the area.  I was then reminded of the images I took on my last summer trip to Dubois, and went searching through the files on my laptop to rediscover them.  So, here they are - color corrected, touched up, and processed.  I created black and white versions as well.  Look for these in my next post.


Lovely Landscapes

Ahh, my last post was in April!  I've been busy, but I'm committed to make a post once a week.  Back in April, I went on a road trip from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Copenhagen, Denmark via northern Germany and the Wadden Sea.  I have way too many photos from the trip.  It will take a while to get through them all, so here's a sneak peek...a landscape from each country I visited.