As you may know, the southwestern part of North America has an array of large and fantastic geological formations. Over millions of years, layers of sediments cemented into sandstone; great plates of earth heaved the sandstone up, twisted it, buckled it, let it sink again; shallow seas rose, shrank away, and rose again; and all along, mindless and tireless, the elements of everyday erosion have gone on with their work.

When you see the incomparably dramatic landscapes of the Grand Canyon, or Zion Canyon, or Arches, or Monument Valley and the rest, you have a natural tendency to wonder, how did this happen? And then you have a natural tendency to think first of some ancient catastrophe. What we see as signs of destruction are everywhere. Great gashes in the earth, boulders the size of buildings lying where they tumbled from a cliff face, immense sculpted towers and strange, broken shapes. Earthworks this big, we feel, must have resulted from some massive, catastrophic series of events. After all, it’s rock; maybe not hard volcanic, but still rock. So, what but huge earthquakes could have broken open the Grand Canyon, what but thousand-year floods could have carved out the massive undulations of Escalante Canyon or Capitol Reef?

Well, over the ages of tectonic wandering, there has certainly been the occasional earthquake or eruption or flood; but it’s the ongoing, day by day, night by night work of sun, wind, water, and plant life that have caused the great majority of what catches our eye. We witness an incomprehensible slowness of change. Though it looks dead-still, in fact change is always going on right now as we look [or don’t look], though it’s so slow we can’t see it. Some of the giant collapsed walls in Zion or Arches or Capitol Reef thundered down at some specific, dramatic moment. But the cause was as likely to be the millimeter by millimeter incisions of ice and rain over ungraspable time as it was some shattering earthquake event. And if you look closer, you can see that many of those collapsed walls, instead of crashing down all at once must have slipped down at their leisure, millimeter by millimeter over yet more ungraspable time.

This realization makes it all even more astounding. How can such tiny, undirected tools have possibly crafted such dramatic landscapes? Though the San Juan and the Green and the Colorado rivers are substantial by desert standards, still, how could they possibly have cut such deep, deep canyons into the rock? The only answer, of course, is time. Even the littlest ongoing processes over a long enough time can create such things.

And so, in places like this, time itself stands forth and declares itself to us, though it does so silently; for the silence in the desert is as stunning and dramatic as the scenery. Time is sedimented intimately and, for us time-enclosed creatures, unsettlingly within the continuing beauty. This strange spectacle expresses an inescapable, rock-hard insistence on sheer, simple ongoingness; it resounds with the endlessly-open non-mortality of humanless being.

Still, as tiny mortal incisions in this ongoingness, we play our essential part, just in the act of bearing astonished witness to it all.

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Below are thumbnail clicks to individual galleries. Just click each one separately in order to be taken to each gallery. Some of my images are in black and white, and a few in color. Others, thanks to photoshop, are both: a kind of hybrid image. In photoshop you can add a black and white digital version of the image over the original digital color image, then ‘erase’ portions of the black and white to reveal the original color beneath: so it’s a hybrid color and black and white image. I’ve at times included both a black and white and a hybrid version of the same image. Sometimes I’m not really sure which, if either, I prefer.

Anyway, I hope you’ll investigate…