Welcome back to our 2nd installment of new series: a look behind the lens. Our photography journal takes us behind the scenes as Sky Factory’s visual artists explore the landscape, find their way into the contours of the topography and capture the wide-open panoramas and undisturbed areas where living systems thrive and prosper.
We kick-off the year with this Spring entry from Andrew Murray who heads out west to the wonderful and rugged landscapes of Utah, a state whose name means people of the mountains. His journal begins…
After flying into Utah, I drove south out of Salt Lake City and soon the mountains and green hills gave way to red rocks and junipers as I approached the small town of Torrey. The April mornings brought frost and snow to the area around Capitol Reef National Park, which melted off by early afternoon. As the sun warmed the rocks, small lizards made themselves known, skittering across the trail and darting in and out of crevices.
Looking deeper and deeper into the landscape revealed increasingly complex patterns cut into the earth, patterns that could also be seen on a minute scale beneath my boots. One morning I was able to make the short drive to Fishlake National Forest to see Pando, the aspen tree—the largest living thing on the planet.
The Pando Aspen Cone consists of somewhere between 40,000-47,000 genetically identical aspen stems (trees) that share a single, underground root system. Pando is taken from Latin which means “I spread”. This forest of one weighs approximately 13 million pounds and has developed over eons. The National Forest Service states that these stems are thought to have risen from a single seed at the end of the last Ice Age (about 2.6 million years ago).
From Torrey, I then drove to Moab, nestled between Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Here the topography is immense in scale and standing at the edge of a canyon’s overlook makes you feel like a tiny speck in time and space. The red-orange cliffs drop hundreds of feet before stretching out to meet the sky at the horizon.
Dinosaur tracks can be found in the rock surface that was a muddy swamp a hundred million years ago, looking like they were made just last week. Even the short-statured trees are gnarled and twisted with centuries of age.
The final few days of the trip were spent near Salt Lake City in the Wasatch Range. The mountain tops were still buried under four feet of snow, but spring had arrived to the lower altitudes. The pointed peaks were reflected in small alpine ponds and birds sang loud and proud from the blossoming trees. For someone who lives in the upper Midwest, the idea of seeing mountains out your window every day is still almost unbelievable.
Soon enough, it was time to return home. It is always a relief to get back after a tiring trip, but it wasn’t long until I was remembering the sights of ravens swooping through canyons, clouds casting their shadows on mountains below, rocks glowing in the rising sun, and thinking about when I could return.
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