We set out from an altitude of about 9000′. Hiked down 800 vertical feet to the valley, where we picked up an elk trail fragrant with droppings. The grass was laid in the direction of travel, roughly northeast. We followed; the trail led us along the edge of the meadow, then abruptly back up the 800 vertical feet, through the ashy pine wood to the rim.
Never caught up to the elk. Probably they didn’t have to stop so often and sit down.
…but in the Triassic or thereabouts, when shallow seas and river deltas inundated where now we walk in the desert, it might have been. These are the red waves of the Bay of Fundy.
And this is how the waters of time soften and embellish the work of our hands:
More than fifty elk, cautious but unworried, moved slowly away from us around the base of a narrow mesa. We hoofed it up the slope and across the mesa top in time to watch them leap two fences and head single file up the next ridge.
Not the best focus, but the best behinds.
It feels like what it is, a field journal. I’m delighted with it:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore/p/breathing-stone
You can order it from your favorite indie bookstore; from Bookshop, the indie alternative to the big A:
or from the publisher, single copies okay:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore
Many miles of quiet walkabout. Illustrated.
April 16:
May 4:
The desert was in superbloom. Our UFO is a scarlet beehive or hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus, exploiting a crack in a huge hematitic concretion. There were many concretions on the hillside, each with its resident beehive. The yellow carpet is probably Fendler’s bladder pod: Physaria fendleri.
Two ponderosasr in a sandy bowl, both lightning-struck. One, a gray ghost; the other, twisted like a pretzel but still living, shelters a juniper in its embrace.
Sheer mesa, Cretaceous mudlands, lightning-blasted ponderosas. But what struck me were the sherds of a busted sixties coffee mug and an open safety pin.
On raindrop-pecked sand, the subtle lunar crescent of an Archaic metate broken and abandoned a few thousand years ago.
An Archaic mano, or hand grinding stone, begins its next few thousand years in the sand of a hearth. Time and weather have reduced the charcoal of ancient campfires to a shadow in the soil.
Under a juniper instead of a cork tree. Picked clean by coyotes and bleached by the desert sun.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 