Lone Buck Mountain

Running up Lone Buck Mountain,

with a nice cold wind blowing from the west.

  

 Going up.  Looking across Bear Canyon at Picacho.

 The top of Picacho, still above me.   

 One of my favorite color combinations.  In oil paints, that green is ivory black + cadmium yellow light.

 The first false summit beckons.

The ski basin comes into view, north, through the ponderosas.

 A gap in the ponderosas.

 Second false summit.

 Looking west, across Santa Fe, to the Jemez Mountains,  where the fires burned this summer.

 The scruffy head of my old friend Atalaya.  My parents' ashes lie on top.

 The summit.  The sun is just rising up here.

 Picacho, below me now.

 Looking south, across the slope of Atalaya, to the Cerrillos Hills, and Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains.

 OK, no more photos of pink rocks with green lichen.

 Ready to head back down.  Sort of. 

 McLure Reservoir, at drought level.

One small step for man . . . Dang!  I thought I was the only human ever to set foot in this pristine wilderness.  I'm certainly not the only being.  Just passed a pile of bear scat.  My kids say no more scat photos.

 Looking down on Santa Fe, St. John's College in the foreground.

 Picacho, looming large again.

 Noodling around with hand-held camera.  I prefer going up to going down.

 But it's down I must go.

 Looking west one last time before it all disappears in trees.

 The ridge between Picacho and Atalaya.

 Last view of the ski basin.  Into the trees.

 I wandered too far south on the way down, apparently to photograph this dead tree. . . 

  . . . and ended up, as usual, overcorrecting to the north and landing between two sets of gnarly cliffs.  I call it the Bermuda Triangle.  Once, I was here in a big wind and I thought there was someone above, throwing rocks at me.  After tearing a tendon in a wild attempt to elude my tormentor, and contemplating it in the ER, I concluded it must have been the west wind throwing rocks at me.

 

 There's only one way out of the Bermuda Triangle.

 Follow the tracks of a rabbit.

They always know the best way.

The best time of the year

 Big Red, oil on panel, 10 x 10 x 2 inches

I've been drawn to baby animals of late.  Perhaps I should title the series "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Cute."    

The best time of year is here, and I am getting out in the wilderness as much as I can.  Land art resonates with me the clearest when I stumble upon it and it is not created by humans.   This tree is a "scrape," used by a small mule deer buck to rub the velvet off of his new antlers.  Once deer find a scrape, they return to it.  This tree is girdled and its fate sealed (or peeled).  It will be a standing home to many for a time and then it will fall and slowly become one with the forest floor, new life springing up in its form.    

   

What painter could come up with so balanced a composition?  The aspen leaves flow in an unbroken line out of the red striations in the rock.  The streams in the mountains and foothills are  waning as the harvest moon waxes.  When I'm out running, I'm never far from a brook, always mindful of the munificence of water dakinis in a desert.

631, oil and original acrylic gel transfer photograph on back-framed panel, 24 x 18 x 2.25 inches.

Two months ago, I wrote about the wildfires consuming the forests. The Las Conchas fire became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, burning more than 150,000 acres, a third of them the first night, fueled by 60 mph winds. I watched it from my front porch, wishing I could do something for the animals made homeless or worse by the inferno. From my back yard, I watched smoke from the Pacheco fire, burning ten miles up the watershed. I started this painting when the fires were new. They continued, and I continued, for weeks.

I began by photographing an abandoned gas station at 631 Cerrillos Road. It had been a street art magnet for fifteen years. When I photographed it, I did not know it would be cordoned off and demolished within a few days. The disappearance of the gas station coincided with the erasure by the forest fires of human-built structures in the forest and of other, less tangible constructs that a fire of this order brings into question. 

As I lay awake at night listening to the whir of water-bearing helicopters, the howling of coyotes, and the drone of planes dropping chemical goo on the fires, the painting began to take shape.  I applied a mirror image of the gas station photo to a panel, using the acrylic gel transfer process, and then several layers of PVA ground.  The gas station became a place of uneasy refuge for the forest animals I painted over it in oils.  Meanwhile, bears and deer roamed the night streets of Los Alamos, driven into the strange urban landscape by the destruction of their habitat and nourishment.  When I completed the painting, our summer rains finally arrived, and the fires were out, leaving 160,000 acres of charred wilderness.    

I found a beautiful pigeon with a badly fractured wing on a ridgetop in the wilderness. I've never seen a pigeon in the backcountry before.  I ran for about a mile with her carefully wrapped in my shirt, and then drove her 20 miles to the wildlife hospital.  The fracture was recent but gnarly; I fear they euthanized her. 

She was so calm and sweet, and dare I say trusting. She had such presence.   What an adventurous bird! 

I do not usually name wildlife, but if there was a name for this bird, it would be Amelia Earhart.  I often make a sort of offering to the animal in the painting; a symbol, some flowers, corn, snow; whatever comes to mind.  Hence the painting's title, Apple Blossoms for Ameila Earhart (oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches).  May she live long and well. 

My newest painting, Baby Javelina Thriving at Wildlife Center (oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches) has been written up on Santa Fe Reporter staff writer Wren Abbott's blog.  Thanks, Wren.

News flash: it rained!

Las Conchas Fire, Day 1, from my porch, 60mph winds

Up until a couple of nights ago, I could see the flames of the Las Conchas Fire running along the ridgetop and down into canyons 20 miles to the west, and shooting 300-500 feet or more up into the sky. About 1/5 of the western horizon is still glowing like the huge ember that it now is. There is another fire closer, in deep wilderness about 10-15 miles to the north, near our ski basin. If it comes running down the watershed, it will be at my house in no time, if the winds blow from the north.  If the fire gets into the watershed, though, they will fight it aggressively. 

My home is in no danger at present. Wish I could say the same for the animals in the forest.  And the residents of Santa Clara Pueblo.  After all of the prayers for rain, they now have to worry about flash floods and erosion, since the fire took their watershed last week.

The air has been smoke-filled for a more than a month. We have  lost hundreds of thousands of acres, within a 25-mile radius, to 2 fires.  Not to mention the massive Wallow fire still burning after a month, in Arizona and now western central New Mexico, the biggest fire either state has ever seen. 

I feel pretty helpless.  Animals talk to me in my dreams, asking for succor.  I am working on a painting of ravens, a coyote, a fawn, a rabbit, and fire. 

This is the worst drought in NM recorded history.  The forests are still a tinderbox, but we finally had a brief rain yesterday.  May it be a harbinger of things to come, and may it come gently to Santa Clara.

Tassel Eared Squirrel

The Conversationalist in a Contemplative Moment,
oil on panel, 10 x 8 inches.

Here's the latest piece in my Horizontal Brothers series.  Can you tell that I am slowly wending my way through John Muir's collected works?  This little guy is an Albert's Squirrel or Tassel-Eared Squirrel.  They shed their ear tassels in the summer.  The painting is a portrait of a being I see frequently in Bear Canyon, near the Randall Davey Audubon Center.  He lives pretty far back in the canyon, in a huge ponderosa pine.  When I run by, he makes a loud noise, usually by pushing something out of the tree, which always gets my attention.  Then he comes down and poses for me, often with hands on hips, giving me hell in squirrelspeak.   I placed him in a snowy setting to protect him from the forest fires that are still burning to the North and West.  I have begun work on another squirrel I see frequently at the Audubon Center, a ground squirrel who is much more shy.