From Here to the Horizon

From Here to the Horizon Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez January–May 2023 Learning Guide

From Here to the Horizon Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez January–May 2023

From Here to the Horizon presents work by fifty American photographers assembled in honor of Barry Lopez (1945-2020).

Winner of the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, Lopez was the author of over two dozen works of fiction and non-fiction and numerous wideranging essays. Recognized for his “glittering, mica-like prose poetry,” Lopez was one of our most highly regarded writers about humankind’s relationship with the natural world and a touchstone for a diverse community of writers and artists.

The images in the exhibition were selected by the photographers in conversation with Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, a “reader’s dictionary” of geographic terms that Lopez compiled with his spouse Debra Gwartney. Standing as a marker of the admiration and affection of Barry’s peers, this collection traces the profile of our national landscape, finding elegance, inspiration, and solace in the places we call home.

Exhibition support is provided by Phyllis Acklie, Kristen and Geoff Cline, D F Dillon Foundation, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, Melanie and Jon Gross, Patricia and Joel Meier, Erica Peterson and Bart Dillashaw, Rhonda Seacrest, and Peck Stacpoole Foundation.

ROBERT ADAMS

born Orange, NJ, 1937

Clearcut. Second-growth Stump on Top of Old-growth Stump. Coos County, Oregon Gelatin silver print, 2013; 11 3/16 × 9 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1197.2022

Barry Lopez was an extremely

Old-growth Forest

courageous person, and his courage

Forest as elder, where trees coexist in the

was ultimately on behalf of all of us,

full spectrum of their development—from

urging hope without reason except for

seedling to sapling to ancient, to snag and

what we can see. When he was asked

generative nurse log: old-growth forest

why we should protect the earth, he said

features include thick duff, trees hoary with

simply, “because it is so beautiful.”

age, and certain indicator species that rely on the settled richness of variety in plant, insect, lichen, and other life forms. It seems to take about two centuries for these features to develop, by which time a forest crosses a threshold between a monoculture of trees of similar age—often the result of catastrophic fire or clearcut—to a multiage population of trees, with attendant opportunities for broad range in plant and animal populations.

What old age gives the individual person, old growth conditions give a forest: a life-library of survival wisdom, flexibility, initiative, and a sustaining life process. Formerly called virgin forest, as untouched wilderness, oldgrowth forest has become controversial and precious. Besides the old-growth forests dominated by Douglas fir in the Pacific Northwest, old growth includes local stands of redwood in California, ponderosa pine east of the Cascade Mountains, eastern hemlock in the Great Smoky Mountains, as well as cedar, cypress, tulip tree, oak, and other species, often in tiny forest remnants.

—Kim Stafford

VIRGINIA BEAHAN

born Philadelphia, PA, 1946

17 Palms Oasis, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California Pigment print, 2013; 31 5/16 × 40 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1276.2022

Barry Lopez’s writing has been a major

Oasis

influence for me—I carried Arctic

The word oasis is apparently of Egyptian

Dreams around for years, sharing

origin and refers to a place in the desert

passages and ideas from it with anyone

where water is present. An oasis means life

who would listen. What impressed me

and fertility: permanent plant growth and the

so much about Barry’s writing, and

possibility for human settlement, drinking

Arctic Dreams in particular, was the

water, and enough moisture to grow plants

slow-moving attention to detail. I felt like

and trees. An oasis can vary in size, from an

he was with me, using his version of a

ooze in cracked mud to a gurgling spring, to

view camera—or I was with him—as he

a pond or spring system so large it can hold

studied and thought about and tried to

whole cities. Natural oases occur in artesian

make sense of the world.

basins or in deflation hollows, where dunes and sediments have been removed by wind, thus exposing an area that is at groundwater level. Nearly one hundred places in the United States are named Oasis, including the town of Oasis, California, the Oasis Reservoir in Colorado, Oasis Pond in Montana, and Oasis Lake in Texas. Another sort of oasis can be found in polar deserts—an ice-free area in an icebound landscape. Pearyland at the top of Greenland is one. Historically, the word oasis has been used to refer to the dark spots occurring on Mars. But most often an oasis is an island of aquatic relief. It is the place where lives are saved, and figuratively speaking, refers to any calm center. The piece of foam that holds flower stems in a floral arrangement is called an oasis; it too, represents an island of security, but one that sits just under the water’s surface. As a topographic feature, an oasis is life; it is a gathering point, a sanctuary, and a feeding station. It is the desert’s umbilical.

—Gretel Ehrlich

MARION BELANGER

born Willimantic, CT, 1957

Mangroves, Everglades City, Florida, from the series Everglades Pigment print, 2002; 17 1/2 × 21 7/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1209.2022

To me, the mangrove forest is the

Mangrove swamp

modern age superhero of the wetlands.

To poet Elizabeth Bishop, mangroves made

Mangrove obtains fresh water from

up the “celestial landscape” of Florida, with

saltwater and sequesters carbon. The

herons in “tiers and tiers of immaculate

forests protect against storm surges

reflection” shining whitely among the leaves.

and eroding coastlines and provide

She compared the roots of one mangrove, a

rich breeding grounds for marine

red mangrove, Rhizophora mangle, to Gothic

life. Hugging the edges of the land,

arches because of its distinctive bower of

mangrove forests seem impenetrable

aerial roots and numerous fingerlike breather

and prehistoric, and their silence fools

roots—pneumatophores—rising from the

one into thinking that one is alone. Yet

mud. Though mangroves flourish worldwide in

creatures abound – birds including the

tropical and subtropical areas, this particular

Wood Stork and White Ibis, alligators,

one, the red, can be found only in Florida,

crocodiles, turtles, crabs, fish, barnacles,

while the white and black are found in Florida

and the endangered manatee. I imagine

and elsewhere. Possessing all three of these

this wilderness as boundless.

salt-loving, tropical-zone trees, Florida has luxuriant mangrove “forests.” The red is the great colonizer, its foot-long seedlings dropping and rooting in the protective tangle of detritus below, or drifting off in storm-season tides to implant themselves elsewhere. Mangroves are essential to many water birds for rookeries and rest—the brown pelican nests almost exclusively on mangrove islands—and the watery, airy mazes the trees provide are favored by lobster, tarpon, and manatee alike. A peculiar environment, the mangrove swamp: displeasing to man in its tangled impenetrability, but celestial to a great and lovely multitude that is not man.

—Joy Williams

MICHAEL BERMAN

born New York, NY, 1956

Cajón Bonito, Sierra San Luis, Chihuahua, Mexico Pigment print, 2020; 11 1/16 × 16 9/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1212.2022

In the Sierra San Luis, the borders of

Borderland

two nations, Mexico and the United

A land or district on or near the border

States, and four great ecosystems,

between two countries or districts is

the Chihuahuan Desert, the Sonoran

borderland, conveying the idea of a fringe or

Desert, the Rocky Mountains, and the

intermediary state or region. In the Southwest,

Sierra Madres, as well as the corners

the borderland is the stretch between Mexico

of the states of Arizona, New Mexico,

and the United States, and the term carries

Chihuahua, and Sonora divide the

with it the idea of a mixing and confluence

territory. On the horizon is Canyon

of cultures. It also includes the idea of

de los Embudos, where Geronimo

disparate economic systems that produce

negotiated his surrender and below

poverty, along with cultural interactions rich

is Cajón Bonito, where Cormac

in ambiguities and tensions. Chicana poet and

McCarthy’s young cowboy descended

activist Gloria Anzaldúa describes the U.S.-

into Mexico with his wolf. Nestled on

Mexico borderland as “una herida abierta”—

the hilltops, narcos still lay in the same

an open wound. Borderland is thus no longer a

lookouts the Apaches used.

geographical term but a geopolitical one.

—Arthur Sze

ANDREW BOROWIEC

born New York, NY, 1956

Meigs County, Ohio, from the series Along the Ohio Pigment print, 1988; 13 7/16 × 20 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1214.2022

Appreciating the Ohio River requires a

man and his own works dominate the

rarer and more inclusive idea of beauty,

landscape, is hereby recognized as an area

one that exists not despite, but thanks

where the earth and its community of life are

to mankind’s shaping influence on the

untrammeled by man, where man himself is

landscape. Even on the most bucolic

a visitor who does not remain.” The National

stretches of the river, it is difficult not to

Wilderness Preservation System, which the

be aware of a human presence. There is

act established, now includes over 105 million

always a plume of steam fluttering above

acres of federal land, more than half of which

a power plant just around the bend, or

is in Alaska. Irony necessarily abides in so

the distant buzzing of a chain saw, or

protean a term: land that westering white

a tire gently bobbing in a pool by the

Americans in the nineteenth century judged

shore. It is as if the river and humanity

to be wilderness was home ground from the

are tenaciously conjoined.

point of view of native tribes, and the birth of the wilderness preservation movement

Wilderness

in the twentieth century occurred only after

Wilderness is a cultural, not an

the lands on which it focused had been

ecological, concept. While its

substantially tamed by the removal of the

meaning and the values that attach

natives who inhabited them. Today wilderness

to it have shifted through the ages,

remains one of the most evocative concepts in

it stands essentially for the land and

American culture. It might be said to describe

space where culture is not, or at least

any place on land (or sea) where the powers

where the impacts of human culture

of nature are paramount and where the call

are minimal: the desert wilderness of

of the wild might be heard. Ed Abbey, among

the Old Testament; the Adirondack

many others, had meditated on its meaning:

wilderness of the Hudson River

“Wilderness. The word itself is music.

painters; the comparatively prosaic

Wilderness, wilderness. . . . We scarcely know

concepts of backcountry, bush,

what we mean by the term, though the sound

or the “high lonesome”; and the

of it draws all whose nerves and emotions

administrative designation conceived

have not yet been irreparably stunned,

by Aldo Leopold as “a continuous

deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of

stretch of country preserved in

commerce, the sweating scramble for profit

its natural state . . . big enough to

and domination.”

absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of . . . works of man.”

The most powerful of all definitions of wilderness is to be found in the 1964 Wilderness Act: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where

—William deBuys

BARBARA BOSWORTH

born Novelty, OH, 1953

Moon Rising, the Night the Bird was Singing, Carlisle, Massachusetts, from the series The Meadow Pigment print, 2006; 32 × 40 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1278.2022

The night I made Moon Rising, the Night

grassland, often along a river or in a marshy

the Bird was Singing, the air was misty.

region, as described by James Galvin in The

At midnight, the moon was rising above

Meadow: “There is an island on the island

the treetops. A bird in the tree next to

which is a meadow, offered up among the

me began singing loud and clear, its

ridges, wearing a necklace of waterways,

song a glorious serenade as I worked.

concentrically nested inside the darker

The singing continued still as I took my

green of pines, and then the gray-green of

leave from the meadow hours later as

sage and the yellow-green of prairie grass.”

dawn approached. Barry Lopez’s writing

Though rare, meadow can mean—chiefly in

taught me that photographs, like words,

Newfoundland—an area of sea ice where

can hold the unseen, the invisible. That

seals come out of the water in large numbers,

song, like that moonlight, is forever

thus also seal meadow. Meadow is often

embedded in this image.

a modifier or part of a compound noun, as in meadow flower, meadowlark, meadow

Meadow

mouse. This modifying habit is especially

Land covered with grasses, or a

notable in the names of plants, denoting

grassy field, or other discernable

species that thrive in meadows, such as

area of grassland either mown for

meadow barley, meadow buttercup, meadow

hay or used as pasture is known

campion, meadow clover, and meadow

as a meadow. Also, though rarely,

crocus. Sometimes the linkage creates an

the hay that is mown from this area.

entirely new and figurative meaning, as in

The term is used either to denote a

meadow silver, an obsolete term for a cash

“natural” (uncultivated) meadow or

payment made in lieu of the feudal service

one planted to enhance the presence

of mowing. Meadow thatch is another such

of particular flowers or to discourage

term, meaning the coarse grass or rush used

the invasion of others. This distinction

for roofing a cottage. There is as well the

between an uncultivated and

term salt meadow, which is a grassy area

cultivated meadow usually depends

subject to flooding or overflow by salt water.

on the context in which the word

The etymology of meadow is directly related

is used. Thus, a meadow can be

to mead, the alcoholic beverage made by

wild or landscaped, but in general

fermenting honey and water. And mead,

a healthy meadow has fifty percent

in turn, may have been a noun-form of the

of its surface in some form of grass.

adjective meaning “sweet” in many old forms

(Subalpine meadows, however, are

of languages as diverse as Frisian, Dutch,

dominated by herbaceous plants).

Icelandic, Swedish, Gothic, Sanskrit, Irish,

In North American usage, meadow

Breton, and Church Slavonic.

refers most often, though not exclusively, to a tract of uncultivated

—Patricia Hampl

JOANN BRENNAN

born Philadelphia, PA, 1962

North Platte River Reclamation, Walden, Colorado Pigment print, 2000; 14 3/4 × 18 3/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1215.2022

We marvel at trout swimming in a deep

Pool and riffle

pool, wisps of fur along a game trail, or a

Few things assert the dynamism of nature

raptor nest balanced at the top of a tree.

better than the development of pools and

Do we also notice the cluster of boulders

riffles in a stream. Even if a channel is

anchored to the streambank, a motion-

straight and the bed uniform, flowing water

activated camera strapped to the trunk,

will generate turbulence. Depending on the

or the conical guard stopping predators

resistance of the streambed, this turbulence

from taking eggs and hatchlings from

may scour pools in certain places, which

the nest? In light of our constant and

alternate with shallow bars called riffles

devastating impact on the natural world,

or drops, where the excavated material is

anywhere there are wild animals, there

deposited. Generally the distance from one

are also scientists and researchers

pool to the next is five to seven times the width

seeking solutions to a precarious

of the stream, and successive pools will tend

situation, hoping to ensure a future with

to develop on opposite sides of the channel,

wildness still in it.

precursors to the formation of meanders. Very steep streams have step-pool sequences with similar cyclicity. Experienced anglers tend to be attentive to the pattern of pools and riffles, as fish like to wait in the slow water of a pool while watching for food to arrive from the faster flow of an upstream riffle.

—William deBuys

LOIS CONNER

born Rockville Centre, NY, 1951 Badlands National Park, South Dakota Platinum print, 1996; 7 7/16 × 18 3/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1221.2022

When you arrive at the entryway to

Badlands

the Badlands, you drive down into the

Badlands are regions dissected into steep

landscape. It’s like leaping off a diving

hills and deep gullies by the action of wind,

board and landing in a parallel of Alice’s

rain, and flash floods. The name was originally

Wonderland, or the moon. Each time

applied to a semiarid area in South Dakota

I’ve visited, my visual experience has

east of the Black Hills, called les mauvaises

been surprisingly different. Here, I was

terres à traverser by the French because

probably unconsciously remembering

it was so difficult to cross; the term is now

Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s 1872 photograph

generally applied to similar lands throughout

from Vermillion Creek Canyon, Utah,

the continent. In All the Strange Hours, Loren

where the profile of the horizon (or

Eiseley writes: “I will never forget my first day of

in my case the edge of the bluff) and

registration at the University of Pennsylvania. I

the undulating shadow cast against it

had come directly from the Mauvaises terres,

allowed me to nestle the hoodoo into the

the Tertiary badlands of western Nebraska, into

dip of the skyline, where it becomes both

a great city of banging, jangling trolleys, out of

separate from and part of the shadow

a silence as dreadful as that of the moon.” The

behind it.

friable topography of the Badlands, composed primarily of shales, clays, and sandstones, has been sculpted into a maze of barren ravines and tunnels, and grassy-topped tables. (The sparse vegetation is deceptive; while puny on the slopes, it can be comparatively lush on the flat tops.) The average slope angle in the heart of this desiccated world often exceeds thirtyfive degrees—steep enough to drive rain from seasonal summer thunderstorms downhill with scouring force, leaving the sides of the tables looking barren and peeled. The Lakota Sioux name for the Dakota Badlands is Mako Sica, meaning “eroded land,” a region they were wary of. During the Ghost Dance conflicts of the late 1800s, diehard Lakota warriors assembled on remote tables in the depths of the Badlands, out of sight of white authorities who feared the dancing would foment an outbreak of violence.

—Conger Beasley, Jr.

GREGORY CONNIFF

born Jersey City, NJ, 1944

Madison, Wisconsin Gelatin silver print, 1979; 12 × 16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1217.2022

New houses have lawns. Old houses

Yard

have yards. A yard is home to the spirits

You can hear in yard its resemblance to

of those who brought it into being,

garden and girdle. All three words arise from

people whose domestic lives extended

a root meaning “to enclose, surround.” The

out of doors: soil wear, rusted hardware

most familiar sort of yard is the plot of ground

and peeling fences—and often garden

surrounding a house, often planted in grass,

plots, either managed through their

flowers, and bushes—hence the ubiquitous

seasons or abandoned and slipping into

yard sales and laborious yard work. Nearly

wild ruin. The yard in this photograph

as familiar, and probably older, is the use of

(long gone, erased by asphalt

yard to describe a plot of ground that is itself

emptiness) has the earned wear of a

enclosed by a fence or wall and devoted

beloved work coat, the upright character

to a specific purpose, as in a farmyard,

of a mature and orderly mind, and, with

churchyard, or shipyard. When loggers haul

its shovel in the thin, clear light, belief in a

felled trees to a landing, they are said to be

future where a body might adjust the old

yarding. By analogy to the pen where poultry

place to fit a new idea.

and livestock are kept, yard also means a place where deer or moose gather to feed in winter.

—Scott Russell Sanders

LINDA CONNOR

born New York, NY, 1944

Lava, Hawaii Gelatin silver print on printing-out paper, 1979; 8 × 9 15/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1219.2022

This past summer I was in Hawaii and

Pāhoehoe

was able to go back to this beautiful

Galway Kinnell captures the marked

lava flow—it has been climbed on and

differences in the congealed flows of the two

chipped and lost its amazing sheen. I

types of lava erupted by Hawaiian volcanoes

was lucky I was able to photograph it

in his poem “Lava”: smooth, ropy pāhoehoe

when we both were young.

is “a clear brazened surface/one can cross barefooted,” while jagged ‘a‘ā resembles “a mass of rubble still/ tumbling.” These terms are now standard for Western geologists describing the highly fluid basalt erupted by shield volcanoes (though Icelanders have their own names: helluhraun for pāhoehoe and apalhraun for ‘a‘ā). As it cools, a slowmoving pāhoehoe flow may solidify into fantastic forms: geologists speak of entrail, as well as filamented, corded, sharkskin, slab, and shelly pāhoehoe. What Hawai‘i residents call blue rock is an unusually dense basalt sometimes encountered when cut-ting roads through old lava.

—Pamela Frierson

THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER

born San Francisco, CA, 1946

The Snake River / Cauldron Linn, No. 2 / Jerome County, Idaho Gelatin silver print, 2003–2004; 4 9/16 × 6 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1223.2022

I traveled to Idaho in July of 2003 to

Cauldron

make work in the same spaces where

A particularly chaotic type of gaping river hole,

Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographed

a cauldron is characterized by “big, squirrelly,

in 1868 and 1874. His images from

boily water,” in the words of one river runner.

Shoshone Falls have been a beacon

River cauldrons form where rocks, which have

since I made my own first photograph

accumulated on the riverbed at a spot where

almost exactly a century later in 1967.

the river suddenly drops, scour out a bowl-

Upon arriving at the Snake River, I

shaped depression. The surface of the river

approached the falls from above,

churns and explodes here like soup boiling

stopping first at Cauldron Linn. In this

over in a pot. Sulphur Cauldron, on the upper

narrow basalt channel, the Snake River

Yellowstone River in northwestern Wyoming,

suggests something of its free-flowing

is one of many famed river cauldrons.

past—its name, likely given after a

Cauldrons are also a seacoast feature.

waterfall in Scotland, was a message to

When ocean swells and breakers surge into

my adopted home ground of Glasgow.

constricted openings in the seaward face of the land, they sometimes produce ferocious hydraulics—violent whirlpools, geysers, and suddenly collapsing haystacks of white water.

—Terry Tempest Williams

ROBERT DAWSON

born Sacramento, CA, 1950

Spillway, Lake Berryessa, California, from the Great Central Valley project Gelatin silver print, 1986; 10 5/8 × 18 7/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1225.2022

Prior to the construction of the

Glory hole

Monticello Dam and the creation

The term glory hole can refer to a cylindrical

of Lake Berryessa in the 1950s,

feature in a reservoir, built right in front of the

Berryessa Valley was an agricultural

dam, designed to keep the dam from being

paradise. Photographers Dorothea

overtopped—that is, if the water gets too high,

Lange and Pirkle Jones documented

it flows into the glory hole and is transported

the forced abandonment of the town

under the dam and downstream. However,

of Monticello in their book Death of a

glory hole is most often used as a mining

Valley. Residents left their homes, the

term. Originally conjured during the gold rush

Monticello cemetery was relocated,

to describe the process employed by those

and houses and buildings were

miners who could not afford conventional and

destroyed. Ranchers were evicted

more sophisticated extraction methods, the

as equipment was auctioned away,

glory hole was the single shaft dug straight

the valley deforested, and their land

down in hopes of happening upon a gold

flooded. Today, the dam provides flood

seam. The Glory Hole near Central City,

control, electrical generation, drinking

Colorado, for instance, was once part of the

water, recreation, and irrigation for the

most productive gold mining area in the world.

Sacramento Valley.

In modern mining, the term has come to signify the belowground cavern—whether natural or man-made—from which material is mined.

This contemporary sense, ironically, harks back to another colloquial use of the term to mean any small room or cupboard, or, in the instance of Jack London’s novel Michael, Brother of Jerry, the hidden locker at the stern of a ship. Connotatively, the expression indicates both the means to, and the chamber of, secret and sequestered booty.

—Antonya Nelson

PETER de LORY

born Fall River, MA, 1948

Canyonlands Saunter: Slick Rock Pool; The Narrows; Peek-a-Boo Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Utah Gelatin silver print, 1997; 15 × 14 7/8 inches, each image Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1226.A-C.2022

My triptych Canyonlands Saunter was

Slot canyon

compiled in 1997 from hikes made over

Slot, or slit, canyons are rare formations, the

several years exploring the remote

result of the combined forces of wind and

Needles area of Canyonlands National

water on sandstone. The narrow crevice

Park, one of the most distilled, isolated

sliced through a mesa by rushing water

landscapes I have found, at once grand

evolves from a hairline crack into a series

and intimate. The Kodak Ektalure G

of convoluted hollows, in some instances

surface paper I used has an unusually

stacked many stories high. Little light enters,

warm, milky tone that captured the

but its quality, as filtered, refracted, reflected,

tactile feel of the rock surfaces. This

and observed from below, illuminates

piece speaks more eloquently than

incandescent striations of the sand-stone as

anything I have read as an expression of

it has been etched over centuries by the flow

the land and the experience of moving

of subterranean rivers. In 1931, a twelve-year-

through it.

old girl was herding sheep in what is now the Navajo Indian Reservation in the Four Corners region when she discovered the country’s best-known slot canyon. It’s most often called Antelope Canyon, but is also referred to as Corkscrew, Upper Antelope, Wind Cave, or the Crack. A slot canyon that looks as if it has been cut out of sandstone with a saw is called a saw-cut canyon. Most U.S. examples of this feature are found in Arizona’s Glen Canyon, and include Labyrinth Canyon, which is about three miles of a twisting, turning passage that’s no more than two or three feet wide at the bottom and hundreds of feet high.

—Antonya Nelson

LUCINDA DEVLIN

born Ann Arbor, MI, 1947

Lake Huron, 5-10-2011 8:43pm, from the series Lake Pictures Pigment print, 2011; 20 × 20 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1228.2022

Everyone who has grown up or lives in

Horizon

Michigan has some relationship to the

The horizon or sensible horizon is, first of all,

Great Lakes since the upper and lower

the visible place where earth, or sea, and sky

peninsulas are surrounded by three of

appear to meet. At a hundred feet above sea

the five Lakes. Living on the shores of

level, the horizon is approximately fourteen

Lake Huron, as I do five months of the

miles away. The word has other technical

year, the Lake is a source of calm and

meanings. A true, astronomical, or celestial

contemplation for me. What could be

horizon in astronomy is the circle on the

lost if we fail to cherish and attend to

celestial sphere whose plane is at right angles

these natural wonders?

to the visible horizon. In geology, the horizon is the plane of a stratified surface containing a particular series of fossils. In soil science, it is a layer of soil in a cross section of land.

In literature it is, of course, often a symbol for opportunity, especially if it is out of reach.

Here is Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with their tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation.” In the plural horizons can be sequences of days, as in this seascape from Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West”: “Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped/On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/Of sea and sky.”

—Robert Hass

RICK DINGUS

born Appleton City, MO, 1951 Visitor Center, Monahans Sandhills State Park, Texas Pigment print, 2004; 15 × 36 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1230.2022

This photograph was made for a

crashing near the present-day Piedmont

documentary project recording different

fall line. The extensive 24,000-square-

perspectives about the Llano Estacado

mile sandhill region of Nebraska has a more

region of West Texas and Eastern New

complex history: blown sand from ancient

Mexico. The images we made were

river deposits eroded from the sandstones of

informed by a series of roundtable

the Rocky Mountains, which were, in turn, the

discussions with artists and scholars,

former seabed of an ancient inland sea that

including Barry Lopez. Our dialog led

vanished as the North American continent

me to consider the diverse ways we

and mountains were uplifted. In time the

experience and interpret landscapes—

sandstone of the newly formed mountains

we may study, measure, sing songs,

began to erode; the resulting sand (along with

describe, map, illustrate, or photograph

silt and gravel) was transported across the

to grapple with the implications of a

plains by braided rivers, blanketing the plains

place. These frames and filters reflect

east of the mountains. Then, over the last

our hopes and expectations, which are

several million years, new rivers dissected

also part of the story.

the mass of sand, carrying some away, and exposing some to wind. Through differential

Sandhill

wind-generated erosion, the finest particles

Landlocked and located far from

were blown eastward to form loess deposits

existing coastlines, some sandhills

in Iowa; the heavier sand-sized particles

are the remains of dune fields and

remained behind and were moved only a short

beaches once amassed along the

distance, forming the Nebraska Sandhills.

shores of ancient oceans; others are

Vast and undulating, ranging up to six hundred

the windblown products of erosion.

feet high, sandhills are majestic, serene, and

Like present-day coastal dunes,

elemental places. For many of the Plains

sandhills are eolian landforms,

Indians, they were sacred, the final home for

shaped by winds acting on plentiful

departed spirits. The term has been applied

supplies of sand. Their various

to towns (Sandhill, Texas); entertainment

locations—southwest from the

facilities (Sandhills Drive-In Theater, Box

Texas Panhandle; miles inland from

Butte, Nebraska); a magnificent bird (the

the Carolina and Georgia coasts; in

sandhill crane); and historically, to inhabitants

the heartland of Nebraska—are a

of the pinelands of South Carolina and

geological timepiece, marking these

Georgia, who were known as sand-hillers.

notably dry regions as former marine and riverine habitats. The Carolina Sandhills, for instance, indicate that the Atlantic Ocean was once much higher than today, its waves anciently

—Emily Hiestand

TERRY EVANS

born Kansas City, MO, 1944 Platte River, Nebraska Pigment print, 1990; 19 1/16 × 19 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1232.2022

Layers of use, layers of loss and

earthen freight consisting of silt suspended in

recovery and loss again, vestiges. These

water (suspended load) and rocks and gravel

photographs are neither a critique of

tumbling along the riverbed (bed load). If by

land use nor a statement about the

virtue of velocity or volume a river has more

irony of its beauty. The photographs are

energy than it needs to accomplish its work,

not about abstract visual design; they

it will spend that extra energy to reshape its

are about specific places. They show

course. Sometimes a river will incise its channel,

marks that contain contradictions and

ultimately lowering its bed, which is a way of

mysteries that raise questions about

diminishing the gradient at which it moves

how we live on the prairie. All of these

downhill; this in turn diminishes its velocity and

places are beautiful to me, perhaps

the energy it has to spend. In other instances a

because all land is beautiful.

river will extend its channel laterally by carving a series of curves or meanders. Here the river

Meander

diminishes its gradient by lengthening the

The river Menderes, which rises in

distance over which it descends a given amount

what is today western Turkey and was

of elevation. Meander formation is especially

known among the ancient Greeks as

characteristic of rivers that flow through soft

the Maiandros of Phrygia, flows to the

material and lack the erosive tools (i.e., bed load)

Aegean with such seeming reluctance

to incise their channels. The Mississippi, twining

that it continually doubles back on itself,

from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, is a classic

wreathing its floodplain in loop after

meanderer, while the canyon-carving Colorado

serpentine loop of wandering channel.

River is the Mississippi’s incisive opposite. The

The name of the river, descended to

physics of meandering are consistent across all

modern English from Greek, gives us

scales of flowing water, from great streams like

meander, which is our best verb for

the Mississippi to rivulets of meltwater on the

expressing randomness in thought and

surface of a glacier. Notably, the distance from

movement. The coinage is not without

the apex of one meander to the next, known

its irony, however, for the meandering

as the wavelength of the meander, tends to be

of a river is only superficially random.

seven to fifteen times the width of the channel.

If one thinks of a river or stream as

Also noteworthy is the fact that meandering

energy moving through terrain, one can

is not restricted to terrestrial waters and

begin to see the ordered sinuosity of a

distractible humans. Ocean currents like the

meandering channel as the expression

Gulf Stream meander, as do the jet stream and

of how that energy is spent by the

other currents of air.

river and absorbed by the land. A river does two kinds of work: it transports its volume of water downhill, and it also transports some amount of

—William deBuys

LUKAS FELZMANN

born Zürich, Switzerland, 1959

The Western Edge of the Sacramento Valley, California Pigment print, 2009; 16 1/2 × 23 7/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1234.2022

I started this project because I was

Foothill

curious about this terrain, which is

The base of a mountain or a mountain range

mostly bypassed by people speeding

is usually ringed or lined by a series of low

on the freeways dissecting it. Many

rises. These are called foothills. The western

consider it boring, flat, and empty. I

slope of California’s Sierra Nevada offers

never felt this way, as I have compassion

a spectacular example of a complex and

for all places. And over the many years

manifold system of foothills. Starting east

of roaming and crisscrossing the

of Sacramento it begins as soft, elevated

valley on the grid of small roads, I have

undulations that develop into rounded but

found a varied landscape. The wooded

steeper and eventually sharper hills, morphing

uplands of the parameters give way

into one of the most sublime North American

to grasslands and brush, and as one

mountain ranges. A more gentle and extended

descends into the swampy basins the

range of foothills is the Piedmont area of

vast sky is mirrored by sloughs, ponds,

the Middle Atlantic States, stretching from

canals, and rice fields.

Maryland through the Carolinas. Compared with the ascendant and aristocratic peaks and ridges presiding above them, foothills are like steady commoners who occupy a middle ground between flatland and mountains. One feels at home in this proletarian landscape, consoled and reassured by its human scale.

—Michael Collier

STEVE FITCH

born Tucson, AZ, 1949 Jaguar with a Rattlesnake Tail Petroglyph, Overlooking the Tularosa Basin and Trinity Site, Three Rivers, New Mexico, January 10, 1983 Pigment print, 1983; 15 1/16 × 19 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1235.20

One of my desires as a photographer

Basin

is to show context. This petroglyph—

A basin is a large hollow or depression in

possibly depicting a jaguar with a

the earth, either erosional or structural in

rattlesnake tail—commands a view

origin; it is also a region that is drained by a

of the Tularosa Basin and the distant

river and its tributaries. The Mississippi River

Oscura Mountains in southern New

and its tributaries drain a basin that covers

Mexico. What cannot be as easily seen is

approximately two-fifths of the coterminous

the passage of time. These petroglyphs

United States. The term basin also applies to

were likely created between 1050 and

an area of inland drainage where rivers unable

1400 AD and the jaguar has stood as

to reach the sea flow into lakes or evaporate in

a silent witness to at least 600 years

playas. The Great Basin, centered in western

of time, including the mushroom cloud

Utah and Nevada, is a prime example. A cold

rising from the first atomic test at the

desert in the Basin and Range province, the

Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. The Tularosa

Great Basin encompasses Death Valley,

Basin was downwind from the explosion.

nuclear bomb test sites, and Yucca Mountain, a proposed nuclear-waste storage site. In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee describes the Great Basin as “an ocean of loose sediment with these mountain ranges standing in it as if they were members of a fleet without precedent.” The term is also widely used for many of the land’s bowlshaped features, such as a ski basin in a single mountain. In her poem “The Matrix,” Amy Lowell writes: “Brown-lily-pads lie heavy and supine/Within a granite basin, under one/The bronze-gold glimmer of a carp; and I/Reach out my hand and pluck a nectarine.”

—Donna Seaman

FRANK GOHLKE

born Wichita Falls, TX, 1942 Looking Southeast across Lahar (mud flow), Six Miles Southeast of Mount St. Helen’s, Washington Gelatin silver print, 1983; 18 × 21 7/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1237.2022

On the morning of the eruption on

Lahar

May 18, 1980, a torrent of viscous gray

Javanese for rapid mudflow associated with

mud carried away trees, vehicles of

volcanic activity, a lahar is created when

every size, houses, and whatever else

volcanic ash is converted into a mobile paste

was in its path; tore bridges from their

by water from torrential rain, snowmelt, or

abutments and bore them along, buried

breaching of the walls of a crater lake. This

roads, and ultimately blocked shipping

fluid landslide may spread many miles from

on the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers. The

the source volcano when confined along

water powering these flows came from

preexisting valleys: the five-thousand-

the current winter’s snowfield and the

year-old Osceola Lahar of Puget Sound in

year-round glaciers that had ringed the

Washington is up to five hundred feet thick

summit of Mount St. Helens. Several

and extends over two hundred square miles.

lakes’ worth were released almost

When the Electron Lahar that swept from

simultaneously, to descend several

Mount Rainier about five hundred years ago

thousand steep vertical feet, picking up,

was excavated in 1993, remnants of an old-

in addition to momentum, everything

growth forest were exposed. Associated

that wasn’t attached to the slope and

with lahars are nuées ardentes, French for

most of what was.

glowing clouds—highly mobile, turbulent, and sometimes incandescent clouds erupted from a volcano and containing large amounts of ash and other pyroclastics. Such a mixture, once it settles, is quite fluid, and it can move rapidly down even a gentle slope. When the mixture comes to rest, the hot glass fragments meld together, forming a welded tuff. It was an eruption of this kind from Mount Vesuvius that buried the city of Pompeii in A.D. 79.

In 1985, more than twenty-three thousand people were killed by a lahar that swept through Armero, Colombia. Lahars are, in fact, often catastrophic and the cause of most volcanic fatalities, which is why the United States Geological Survey recently instituted a pilot project in Washington called the Mount Rainier Volcano Lahar Warning System.

—Kim Barnes

PETER GOIN

born Madison, WI, 1951 Tapestry Wall, Colorado River, Lake Powell, Utah Pigment print, 2013; 16 × 46 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1203.2022

My travels to Lake Powell began in 1987,

Tapestry wall

seven years after the first full pond.

Sheets of darker colors seem to hang like

The controversy over the lake’s origin

curtains on the faces of many canyon walls

and destiny makes me wonder about

in arid environments. The towering, buff-

my role in a complex dependency as

colored sandstone cliffs of Canyon de Chelly

I appreciated the undulating rhythms

in northeastern Arizona, for example, which

of blending colors—sky, sandstone,

are famously revealed in the photographs

and sunlight reflected and energized

of Edward Curtis and others, seem draped

by canyon walls and the smooth flow of

with umber hangings. The patterns of color

water. And now, in 2022, based on the

on such tapestry walls record the patterns

best available climate data, Lake Powell

of water spills and seeps that periodically

may become a place in-name-only,

irrigate the walls with snowmelt and storm

drained, the fundamental reality of living

runoff. When the water evaporates, it leaves

within aridity. Nature is under siege, yet

behind microscopic deposits of the minerals

icons of its inspiration reside within our

it once contained. These minerals gradually

collective imagination.

oxidize, perhaps as a result of the metabolic activity of bacteria that colonize the rock, and the buildup of oxides, rusty to brown where iron is dominant, accounts for the contrasting colors of the tapestry. Vegetation can also produce the impression of a tapestry hanging on the sheer face of a cliff or canyon wall.

Vesey’s Paradise in the Grand Canyon, for example, is fed by a spring that pours from a seam high on the side of the lower canyon.

A jungle of green seems to hang from the mouth of the spring, and, notwithstanding that much of this vegetation consists of nettle and poison ivy, such a profusion of green in a sere and sun-blasted environment gives an impression of a kind of Eden.

—William deBuys

EMMET GOWIN

born Danville, VA, 1941

Alluvial Fan, Natural Drainage, near the Yuma Proving Ground and the Arizona-California Border Gelatin silver print, 1988; 9 11/16 × 9 5/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1198.2022

In a landscape photograph, both the

Alluvial fan

mind and the heart need to find their

Alluvium is the sediment deposited by the

proper place. Before the landscape we

flow of a river, so an alluvial fan is the mass

look for an invitation to stand without

of sediment, sand and gravel, silt and clay,

premeditation. It is always, in some

deposited in a fanlike shape by the flow of

sense, our home. At times we may also

a mountain stream or river when it has left a

look for an architecture of light and a

confined channel and opened onto a broad

poetry of atmosphere which welcomes

plain. Alluvial fans occur in humid as well as

the eye into a landscape of process. It

arid and semiarid landscapes, although the

may also be the map—the evidence of

most prominent ones are in deserts. A series

the thing itself. May it also and always be

of fans, formed by parallel streams flowing

a vision of the double world—the world

out of a range of mountains, sometimes

of appearances and the invisible world

forms a continuous and overlapping apron of

all at once.

sediment which is called a bajada or alluvial apron. Norman Hinds notes an instance in his Evolution of the California Landscape: “Because of the height of the ranges around Death Valley and their consequently steep slopes, a host of valleys has been eroded into them and the streams have carried quantities of debris into the basin forming alluvial fans and aprons.”

—Robert Hass

WAYNE GUDMUNDSON

born Fargo, ND, 1949

Red River, North of Georgetown, Minnesota Gelatin silver print, 2013; 13 7/16 × 16 13/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1238.2022

A 4 x 5 inch negative is capable of

Floodplain

rendering detail from your toes to

The area of a flat valley floor that a river,

infinity. Bringing that capacity to a

swollen by spring melt and spring rains in

documentary project in northwest North

some parts of the country, and by hurricanes

Dakota initiated a way of seeing and

and tropical storms in others, will cover

working with a distinctive landscape that

when it overflows its usual course or

I have employed ever since. Over the

banks is a floodplain. It is an area in which

years, I have worked on many projects

you will probably not be able to buy flood

that were driven by specific subjects—

insurance from a private company. Floodplain

an oil boom, cemetery folk art, ethnic log

incursions are measured according to a

structures, a government canal system,

river’s history—a variety of frequencies

Icelandic ancestral landscapes. These

depending on the region’s hydrology and the

interests appear in all of my work, be

upstream control by dams. The hundred-year

it deep space, marks on the earth’s

floodplain is inundated once a century; the

surface, artifacts, or the sense of a

one-year floodplain, annually. The means of

particular place.

managing floodplain regions include dikes, floodways, and zoning and building codes— these regulated by community or state laws, unless they do not meet federal government, especially Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), minimum standards; then federal law applies.

—Larry Woiwode

OWEN GUMP

born Kentfield, CA, 1980 Mine Tailings, Lyon County, Nevada Pigment print, 2018; 12 5/8 × 18 7/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1241.2022

I’ve learned a lot from the ‘beginnings’

Tailings pile

of photography, in particular landscape

After a mineral ore has been mined, crushed,

photographs from the late nineteenth

and stripped of all concentrates valuable

century. The way space is depicted,

enough to be smelted, the remaining

the clarity and isolation of forms—

pulverized rock debris is called tailings.

for me this era represents the first

Being of no economic use, these loose waste

kind of ‘photographic seeing’ that,

materials are dumped near an active mine into

it’s interesting to note, wasn’t always

tall, barren tailings piles, whose sides slope

thought of as art. These impulses

according to the angle of repose. A large

are important to re-examine, though

mining operation turns the earth inside out

I wouldn’t do this through aesthetic

as it buries surrounding landscapes under

or technical means. What remains

vast, pyramid-shaped mountains devoid of

significant is this way of looking, in which

vegetation. A tailings pile is typically the most

the medium can lead the artist to certain

prominent physical evidence of a mine.

subjects and ways of putting them in a larger context.

—Barbara Kingsolver

DAVID T. HANSON

born Billings, MT, 1948

Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond, Tailings Dam, and Leach Pads, Butte, Montana, from the series The Treasure State Pigment print, 1991; 14 11/16 × 18 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1242.2022

Hard-rock mining—such as gold,

Tailings pond

copper, or nickel extraction—produces

Modern mining operations in the United

more waste by volume than all other

States are required to contain and treat

industrial sources combined. Most hard-

their waste piles because of the toxic

rock mines west of the Mississippi fall

cocktails they contain: zinc, copper, mercury,

under the jurisdiction of the antiquated

cadmium, lead, and other heavy metals are

Mining Law of 1872, including 500,000

commonly present, along with the acids of

abandoned mines. According to the

cyanide and sulfur that are used in slurry

Environmental Protection Agency, hard-

extraction processes. The resulting dammed

rock mining has polluted 40 percent of

depressions are not ponds in any sense

western watershed headwaters and is

dreamed of by Thoreau at Walden, but rather,

the nation’s leading toxic polluter. Since

immense puddles of suspended pollutants.

1872, mining companies have extracted

The hazards of holding volumes of poisonous

over $300 billion of publicly owned

fluids above ground are obvious: foundation

minerals without paying taxpayers

seepage, seasonal flooding, or structural

a dime. Now the nation is faced with

collapse will release the concentrated toxins

billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

into groundwater or the receiving watershed.

—Barbara Kingsolver

ALEX HARRIS

born Atlanta, GA, 1949 Black Mesa, New Mexico, Looking East from Fred Cata’s 1957 Chevrolet Belair Pigment print, 1987; 22 × 27 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1244.2022

When I found a car interior I especially

Mesa

liked, I would photograph it against the

In the North American landscape a mesa,

backdrop of the man’s village, or the

which in Spain is merely a dinner table,

landscape he frequently drove through.

occupies a grander scale: a flat-topped

I chose the location, the car, its

mountain or rock mass, usually capped with

orientation, the season, and the time of

a weather-resistant rock stratum, it stands

day or night to make the exposure. As I

above an arid plain as a remnant of eons of

learned to control the depth of field and

erosion. Mesas and their smaller relatives,

to balance light with my view camera,

buttes—a butte is taller than it is wide, a

I realized I could show what it was like

mesa wider than it is tall—figure in place-

for these men to be—and to see—in

names throughout the semiarid lands of

their cars.

Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.

The world’s most famous mesa-and-butte landscape, in the Navajo Nation Monument Valley Tribal Park of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah, has so regularly served as the backdrop of cowboy movies and other manufactured visions of the American West that these unusual landforms are mistakenly assumed, throughout the world, to be the dominant feature of the western landscape.

Mesas, in art, also commonly co-occur with another cliché of the Southwest, the saguaro cactus with its pair of raised arms, even though that plant has a limited range and does not grow within two hundred miles of Monument Valley.

—Barbara Kingsolver

ALLEN HESS

born Dayton, OH, 1950 Levee Break, Quincy, Illinois, Mississippi River Flood, August 27, 1993, from the series The River’s Green Margins Pigment print, 1993; 12 × 16 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1205.2022

The 1993 Missouri and Mississippi

Levee

flood began in April and continued

A levee is an embankment along a river that

until September. Water from 150 rivers

resists the overflow of the stream. Derived

and tributaries flooded over 17 million

in the eighteenth century from the French

acres in nine upper Midwestern states.

levée, meaning “act of raising,” the word

Floodwaters overtopped or damaged

refers in modern times especially to the

1,083 federal, state, and local levees, 75

elevated ground along the Mississippi and its

towns were completely inundated, and

tributaries. Natural levees are built up year

50,000 homes were damaged or swept

after year by the deposit of sandy soil on the

away. Barge traffic was stopped for two

banks of the flooding river. As the floodwaters

months, and virtually all railroads in the

rise over the banks, no longer held by the

Midwest were shut down. On August 1,

channel, the velocity of the current drops,

1993 the Mississippi River at St. Louis

along with the water’s ability to hold sediment.

crested at 49.6 feet, 19.6 feet above

Coarser materials fall out first, and finer silt

flood stage with a record flow greater

and clay are carried into the back swamp

than 1 million cubic feet per second.

areas of the floodplain, where they drop out of suspension as the water slows even more.

The levees themselves are made of sand and coarser sediments. Man-made levees are constructed to control flooding and protect populated areas along the river. Extensive levees have been built along the Mississippi system. The most famous use of the word is perhaps the Don McLean song celebrating rock and roll and lamenting the death of Buddy Holly: “Drove my Chevy to the levee/ but the levee was dry.”

—Robert Morgan

BEN HUFF

born LeClaire, IA, 1973 Above the Gilkey Trench, Camp 18, Juneau Icefield, Alaska, from The Light That Got Lost Pigment print, 2018; 20 × 25 1/4 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1246.2022

Shortly after moving to Juneau from the

Nunatak

Interior, I worked on a set of pictures at

Nunatak is from an Inuktiut (Inuit Eskimo)

the Mendenhall Glacier. I struggled with

word, nunataq, meaning “something prominent

the landscape, as I tried to illustrate the

standing alone” or, more prosaically, “lonely

gulf I felt between the joy of seeing that

peak.” (In the Iñupiaq language of the Iñu-

glacier for the first time, and the sense

piat, who live on the Alaska coastal plain far

of mourning I felt with each subsequent

from mountainous terrain, nunataq refers

trip. Years later, my curiosity drew me

primarily to a cache of meat in the ground.)

back to a need to explore that vast blue

In its Anglicized form, the word refers to an

space and eventually to the Juneau

isolated island of bedrock jutting out from

Icefield Research Program. Through

a sea of glacial snow and ice. Nunataks are

the students of the program—these

landforms that existed before glaciation,

young scientists, teachers, artists, and

and within North America they are scattered

advocates—I have found a small degree

in Alaska and Canada, and throughout the

of hope.

high-altitude, glacier-bound landscapes of the Rocky Mountains. One might think that these rock outcroppings sequestered in ice would be barren of life, but they have been found to be refuges for a diversity of species.

Researchers studying nunataks in Canada’s Yukon Territory have found miniature meadows and gardens of sedges, moss campion, mountain heather, tiny poppies, saxifrages, daisies, and other plants that host rare insects and a species of wolf spider and attract occasional butterflies. The collared pika, a tough little mammal, has also found its way to these nunataks and made them home.

All too often, nunataks are the final resting place for straying migratory birds seeking an oasis in the vast stretches of snow.

—Carolyn Servid

RON JUDE

born Los Angeles, CA, 1965 River, from the series 12 Hz Pigment print, 2017; 15 × 20 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1248.2022

I had recently moved to Oregon, and I

Turbulent flow

didn’t have a plan or an agenda. I just

In contrast to laminar flow, in turbulent flow

started making pictures until some

any particle of a body may move in any

things bubbled to the surface, which

direction with respect to any other particle.

were these completely uninhabited

Hydrologists and river scientists, as well

landscapes—looking at geological

as the curious, beginning with Leonardo da

forms, mostly rocks and water and ice.

Vinci, have studied turbulence in the Earth’s

I wanted to know if it was possible to

water and atmosphere, and all have found

step back and look at the landscape in

such movements difficult, if not impossible,

a way that didn’t sentimentalize it, that

to predict. Turbulence in a river occurs when

reminded us of a sense of scale and

rocks, holes, or sudden changes in the river

pulled us out of a human narrative, to see

channel obstruct the flow of the water. River

that there is a much larger world at work

rafters characterize turbulent flow by its

that has nothing to do with us.

irregular velocity and movement, reserving the term chaotic flow to describe the most dangerous parts of a whitewater river, where the river’s movement cannot be anticipated.

—Lan Samantha Chang

ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM

born Los Angeles, CA, 1947

Glacial Outflow, Otto Fjord, Ellesmere Island, Canada Cibachrome print, 1994; 24 1/16 × 30 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1250.2022

Of Barry Lopez’s many books, my

Glacial valley

favorite was Arctic Dreams—it

A glacial valley is distinguished by its

completely changed the way I viewed

distinctive U-shape: a broad flat floor flanked

the Arctic. I was so inspired I wanted to

by high walls of rock. Such a valley has been

see it for myself, and in 1994 I joined an

bulldozed wide by a glacier scraping its way

Explorers Club group that was going to

down an existing V-shaped valley, created by

attempt crossing through the Northwest

a preglacial river. Glacial valleys are common

Passage. During that voyage we also

in the mountains of the American West and

took a flight to see to the high Arctic—

Alaska. In Prince William Sound and southeast

Otto Fjord was the northern most reach

Alaska, some of these classic-shaped valleys

of that flight. The fjord has seen epic

start deep in coastal mountain ranges and

glacial retreat, the image shown here

run into the sea later to become water-filled

where a side glacier used to be.

fjords. California’s Yosemite Valley is one of the United States’ most celebrated glacial valleys, and John Muir was the first to explain its icy origins. In his 1912 book The Yosemite, he writes: “These bald, westward-leaning rocks, with their rounded backs and shoulders [facing] the glacier fountains of the summitmountains, and their split, angular fronts looking in the opposite direction, explain the tremendous grinding force with which the iceflood passed over them.”

—Carolyn Servid

MARK KLETT

born Albany, NY, 1952 My Camera at the Head of Sinbad, San Rafael Swell, Utah 5/22/93 Gelatin silver print, 1993; 15 15/16 × 19 13/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1252.2022

I first met Barry Lopez in 1989 at a

Swell

memorial for writer Edward Abbey,

Though many first picture a swell as a

held outdoors near Moab, Utah, east of

feature of the ocean’s surface, the term is

where this photo was taken. The event

also used to identify a long, roundly arched,

was unpublicized, spread by word of

often isolated elevation on the surface of the

mouth to friends, family, lovers of the

Earth, created where soil absorbs a great

canyonlands, writers, and wilderness

deal of water. Used in this way, the term

warriors who had been influenced

usually includes an adjective, such as broad,

by Abbey. There were hundreds in

bulging, undulating, protruding, round, or

attendance and Barry was one of the

oval. Isolated swells are sometimes called

speakers. Afterwards I approached him,

domes or arches, though these terms are

and he said to me privately that the only

technically inaccurate. Swells are correctly

thing useful about being celebrated was

called rises when found on extensive plains in

that it gave one the ability to introduce

combination with the depressions known as

people to others they were unaware of,

swales, the rises being part of an undulating,

but should know—that it was important

wet-and-dry, swale-and-rise topography,

to use notoriety to enable connections

formed by the differential melting of glacial

that could create a difference.

ice, which once stretched for hundreds of miles across the Midwest. Perhaps the bestknown swell in North America is the domal San Rafael Swell in southeastern Utah. From the air, its eastern front resembles a fifty-milelong wave advancing across the desert, even to its seeming to break in a sea of froth over a spectacular “reef” of white Navajo Sandstone along its eastern perimeter. Formed forty to sixty million years ago, this two-thousandfoot-high swell bowed up so slowly that three rivers in the area—the San Rafael, the Muddy, and the Price—were able to maintain their courses across the uplifted land. They continue to cross the swell today.

—Terry Tempest Williams

STUART KLIPPER

born New York, NY, 1941

Confluence of the Buffalo River (Flooded) and the Red River, Clay County, Minnesota, from the series The World in a Few States Chromogenic development print, 2013; 12 × 37 1/4 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1195.2022

I go out into the world, I look around,

Americans or competing settlers and traders.

and find what’s there. I have made

Hence, Washington Irving notes in his book

photographs in all fifty states; scoping

Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond

out the lay of the land and what has

the Rocky Mountains (a glorified history of

been wrought on it. I find evidence of

John Jacob Astor’s fur trade empire): “At

the land we’re on and the world we find

length it was found necessary to establish

ourselves in; where we’re at, and who

fortified posts at the confluence of the rivers

we are; what we’ve done; and, where we

and the lakes for the protection of the trade,

can go. I simply like the feeling I might

and the restraint of these profligates of the

be making pictures for my grade school

wilderness.” Writing about confluence sites

geography books.

in the Great Plains, Ian Frazier notes: “The reason no city grew at the confluence of the

Confluence

Missouri and the Yellowstone is that in 1866

The place where streams converge

the Army built a post called Fort Buford a few

and unite is their confluence. North

miles east of Fort Union, and in 1868 created a

America’s two great rivers, the

thirty-mile-square military reservation with the

Missouri and the Mississippi, meet

post at the center. Since the reservation was

on the northern edge of St. Louis.

closed to all settlement, the city which people

The confluence of the Allegheny and

eventually built was farther down the Missouri,

Monongahela Rivers in Pittsburgh

at the junction of the Little Muddy River. Today

forms the Ohio River. Similarly,

this city is called Williston, North Dakota, and

the Kansas River, formed by the

it gets much of its income from oil, and its long

confluence of the Republican and

commercial highway strips wax and wane.”

Smoky Hill Rivers, flows about 169 miles eastward to its confluence with the Missouri River at Kansas City.

And a place called The Confluence, in Canyonlands National Park and named by John Wesley Powell, is where the Green and Colorado Rivers meet. Many of the early thriving communities in the American colonies began at a confluence, since rivers were necessary for trade and the transportation of goods. Such trade often required the construction of forts to protect traders from the real or perceived threats of local Native

—Jeffery Renard Allen

PETER LATNER

born New York, NY, 1950

Mississippi River Valley at Dusk, La Crosse County, Wisconsin Gelatin silver print, 2000; 17 × 21 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1194.2022

Trempealeau County in western

only slight rises above the general horizontal

Wisconsin is bluff country—hilly, rugged,

line of the glacial plain, is called swale-and-

steep. It’s what the glaciers missed.

rise topography. Hoosier Prairie, on the

The swale in the picture is part of the

southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, is a

Mississippi River valley itself, in descent.

typical example. With less than a ten-foot

Off in the distance the river is barely

change in elevation across its 430 acres,

visible— that’s how wide the valley is.

the nearly treeless plain is equal parts dry

And at dusk, it’s perfectly still.

and wet, its swales harboring ecosystems of great biological diversity. Rich plant

Swale

communities, including bracken and sweet

In The Land of Little Rain, Mary

ferns, originally established thousands of

Austin describes a typical Paiute

years ago on sand dunes above the prairie,

encampment as being “near the

survive today in the protection of the damp

watercourse, but never in the swale.”

swales. Another example of extensive swale-

In constructing his “campoodie,”

and-swell topography, which disappeared

Austin goes on to say, “the Paiute

almost completely with agriculture in the late

seeks rising ground, depending

1880s, is the area around Dallas and Guthrie

on air and sun for purification of

Counties, Iowa, which was carved during

his dwelling, and when it becomes

the Wisconsin glaciation. Once a mosaic of

wholely untenable, moves.” The swale

wetlands and rolling savanna bordering the

avoided by the Paiute—and every

Mississippi River, the area must have been a

other knowledgeable camper—

hush of relief to migrating waterfowl.

is a marshy or moist depression (sometimes mimicking a stream course) in a gently rolling landscape.

These elongated hollows were likely created by fingers of glacial ice that melted more slowly than the rest of an ice sheet, depressing the ground beneath them as they did so. (At the same time, the ground between the swales absorbed some of this meltwater and rose). In Florida, poorly drained swales alternate with beach ridges to form dune-andswale topography. In the midwestern prairies, a series of swales in an area of little vertical relief, and with

—Terry Tempest Williams

DAVID MAISEL

born New York, NY, 1961 Terminal Mirage 14 Pigment print, 2003; 29 × 29 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1280.2022

In 2003, Utah’s Great Salt Lake shifted

if rainfall exceeds the rate of evaporation

into a drought condition, which caused

and recedes if evaporation exceeds rainfall.

Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork

This shifting shoreline plays havoc with local

Spiral Jetty to reemerge from the waters

roads. The Salton Sea, created in 1905–1907

of the lake. That shift from invisible back

when the Colorado River burst through

to visible inspired this series of aerial

poorly constructed and maintained irrigation

photographs of the lake and its environs.

controls south of Yuma, Arizona, and flooded

Terminal Mirage 14 depicts a zone of the

an ancient lake depression in the Sonoran

lake quite close to Smithson’s Jetty. The

Desert in California, is another inland salt

horizonless image is completely abstract

sea or saline lake. Mono Lake, near Lee

and nearly without scale. Its blood red

Vining, California, on the rain shadow side of

waters and bleached, salty shoreline call

the Sierra Nevada, is an alkaline lake. Here,

to mind an alien planet or perhaps the

evaporation concentrates naturally occurring

interior of the human body.

alkali salts that form a thin crust on the surface of the water. Nevada’s Carson Lake, whose

Salt lake

waters contain a high concentration of sodium

A large body of water with a high salt

sulfate and lesser amounts of the carbonates

content, situated in a sere landscape,

and chlorides found in all briny lakes, is the

with no outlet to the sea, is known

archetype of a bitter lake. Many mineral lakes,

as a salt lake. Utah’s Great Salt Lake,

strangely to some, teem with bird life. In Salt

the shrunken remnant of Pleistocene

Dreams, William deBuys’s finely observed

Lake Bonneville, is so salty a swimmer

account of the Salton Sea, he describes the

can float on its surface without effort.

mismanagement of water, the response to

In her poem “Salt Air,” Sharon Bryan

cycles of drought, and the population and

writes: “You cannot sink into this

development pressures that are a part of the

25 percent solution,/ it hosts no life

social history of the West’s mineral lakes.

but the microscopic/brine shrimp’s, which must trace a narrow path/ through blazing crystal knives.” In his essay “The World’s Strangest Sea,” Wallace Stegner described Great Salt Lake as a thin horizon line “of quicksilver, of lead, of improbable turquoise, of deep-sea cobalt, or of molten metals, depending on the conditions of the day.” Because it’s part of a closed system (the Great Basin), Great Salt Lake rises

—Terry Tempest Williams

LAURA MCPHEE

born New York, NY, 1958

Irrigator’s Tarp Directing Water, Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho Pigment print, 2004; 31 5/8 × 40 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1282.2022

A man drives a quad across a pasture

Sawtooth

to a ditch edged with daisies. He digs

Sawtooth is an adjective used to describe

sod until water flows into the ditch and

a range of mountains or a single ridge in a

across a blue plastic tarp weighted

series of peaks that resembles the jagged

with stones. Redirected to grow grass

edge of a saw. “The best place I have found to

for cattle, the water comes from a

glimpse the western land as it was in the last

stream originating in the White Cloud

[the nineteenth] century, without squinting

Mountains. The man might stop to

too much, is in the Sawtooth-Stanley country

survey the worm fences that mark

in south central Idaho,” writes Harlan Hague

private land. He might glance toward

in his article “The Sawtooth-Stanley Basin

the Sawtooth Mountains and public

Country.” In addition to this classic range of

land his family helped preserve. He

sawtooth mountains, other examples include

might consider a time when there were

the ancient Sawtooth Mountain Range that

no fences or ditches and Shoshones

anchors the coast of Lake Superior along the

hunted elk, pronghorn, and salmon on

north shore, and Sawtooth Mountain, found

their summer range.

in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area south of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

In his poem “Steel Mountain,” from Sawtooth Country, David Beisly-Guiotto writes of standing atop this mountain in Idaho: “sheer sky, blue air chipped by white peaks/far as we can see.” Those jagged sawtooth peaks.

—Pattiann Rogers

ANDREW MOORE

born Old Greenwich, CT, 1957 Broken Pivot, Cherry County, Nebraska Pigment print, 2013; 30 × 40 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1284.2022

The owners of this field are growing

Aquifer

alfalfa, nestled against the broken land

Water, the treasure of the Earth, covers

descending from the plateau above.

two-thirds of the planet. Some is visible,

Their irrigation pivot seems to be

but much lies beneath the surface, hidden

missing some sprinkler heads, marked

waters traveling through sand, rock, and

by the cascades erupting along its span.

gravel. These hidden seas are created in

In this part of the Sandhills, it’s a short

part when rain and snow trickle downward.

reach down to the massive Ogallala

Sometimes rivers dive deep and enter holds

Aquifer. However, due to the fragile

of water beneath even parched ground.

sandy soil, most of the farming in this

These stores of water are called aquifers.

area is limited to growing seed potatoes,

The Ogallala Aquifer is the largest on the

so the aquifer hasn’t been so severely

continent, reaching from the plains of South

depleted, unlike further south on the

Dakota to Texas. The aquifer is declining by an

High Plains in the water thirsty cotton

average of 1.74 feet a year—over one million

farms of Oklahoma and Texas.

acre-feet—so excessive is the demand for agricultural and domestic purposes. In places in this region the land is actually collapsing.

Native American people of several tribal traditions have long said that prairie dogs “call the rain.” Like all Earth’s waters, aquifers rise and fall with the moon, and as it turns out, this slow, strong pumping in the aquifers beneath prairie dog towns is what draws rainwater into those aquifers, replenishing them. Where prairie dog holes have ceased to exist, due to land development that has destroyed their habitat and the slaughter of prairie dogs for sport, the soil has become so hard rain can no longer reach the aquifer. The rain in fact has disappeared.

—Linda Hogan

ERIC PADDOCK

born Boulder, CO, 1954

Loveland Pass, Colorado Pigment print, 1994; 12 × 17 9/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1255.2022

My pictures concentrate on landscapes

Shoulder

that lie between the extremes of

A bench running along a slope, parallel to

wilderness and metropolis—places

a valley below, is called a shoulder, as is a

most of us overlook because they are

short, rounded spur on a mountainside. The

too familiar or because they do not fit

term is also used to designate the crease in

conventional standards of worthwhile

a glaciated valley where its steeply eroded

scenery. Natural beauty and human

lower slopes meet the gentler angle of its

intervention sometimes seem to balance

upper slopes, land that remained above the

in landscapes such as these, if only

ice flow. The margins of a road are also called

briefly. In the most ordinary places,

shoulders, if they’re flat enough and wide

and even in landscapes threatened

enough for a vehicle to pull over safely.

by industry or urban sprawl, there can be a subtle underlying peacefulness.

On good days, it is possible to sense this calm beauty and to feel a deep belonging and hope.

—William Kittredge

MARY PECK

born Minneapolis, MN, 1952 Following the Route of the Keystone XL, Syncrude Tailings Pond, North of Fort McMurray, Alberta Pigment print, 2017; 22 × 28 5/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1256.2022

Barry Lopez wrote, “Your Pipeline work.

Boreal forest

Holy. It confirms me in my resistance.”

South of the treeless Arctic tundra, a forest

I never discussed the work with him, or

shawl wraps eleven percent of the Earth’s

asked about his comment, but from the

northern terrestrial surface. This circumpolar

tenor of our conversations over many

boreal forest is white spruce-dominated,

years I know he saw the holy not only

carpeted with lichens, moss, orchids, heaths,

in the very remote and wild places he

quilted with peat bogs, and cut by cold, silty

had experienced, but also in peopled,

rivers. In Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez

unprotected, unspectacular, and

describes one view of this landscape: “a

very ordinary places like the country

backdrop of hills: open country recovering

the Keystone XL pipeline would cut

from an old fire, dark islands of spruce in an

through. My resistance, and certainly

ocean of Labrador tea, lowbush cranberry,

it was his, is to the relentless and

fireweed . . . each species of leaf the invention

seemingly remorseless defilement of

of a different green: lime, moss, forest, jade.”

people and place.

Boreal forces shape this forest: hot summers of endless daylight; frigid, dark winters; spring floods; permafrost; cycles of insect infestation and fire that decimate vast acreages. Yet fauna thrive: red squirrel, mink, moose, bear, wolf, lynx, marten, red fox, vole, muskrat, beaver, grouse, ptarmigan, porcupine, caribou, snowshoe hare, salmon, sheefish, whitefish, northern pike. And flora: spruce, tamarack, paper birch, quaking aspen, balsam poplar, blueberry, crowberry, Labrador tea, willow, cranberry, saxifrage, prickly rose. Indigenous people, to this day, rely on an intimate knowledge of geography to subsist on these animals and plants. Some nonNatives also pursue this intimate geographic knowledge of the boreal forest. For several years, the poet John Haines homesteaded in the boreal forest south of Fairbanks, Alaska, hunting and trapping for subsistence, receiving the forest’s spiritual and artistic sustenance. Of this time Haines wrote, “I am living out a dream in these woods. Old dreams of the Far North.”

—Eva Saulitis

EDWARD RANNEY

born Chicago, IL, 1942

Canyon del Muerto, Arizona Gelatin silver print, 1987; 12 13/16 × 18 3/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1258.2022

Looking into the deep space of Canyon

Canyon

del Muerto in Arizona, it was immediately

Canyon is a general term with a heady

clear to me that the early morning

array of specifics. It may be as “simple” as a

shadows and strong sunlight were

cleft between steep walls or as complex as

creating a structure I wanted to work

the Grand Canyon or Mexico’s Barrancas

with. The image on the 5 x 7 inch ground-

del Cobre—miles across, layered in their

glass of my view-camera, appearing

depths like ragged, inverted cordilleras.

upside down and reversed under the

In the Southwest, canyons are assertive

dark cloth, clarified what I had hoped

landscapes. Aridity sharpens their bones.

to see—a view encompassing both

Rivers may run through them—open arteries

depth and expansiveness. Technical

in a carapace of rock; others flow only with

details do not explain how some images

blow-sand and chokestones. Canyons come

allow us to understand a landscape

blind, box, side, slot, hidden. They stair down

more clearly, but I am convinced that

and pour off. They gooseneck. They hang.

abstract elements within a photograph

Muley Twist, Desolation, Snap, Lavender, Blue

can provide a structure that enables the

Canyon, Rain Canyon—canyons are where

picture to surpass mere description or

you want to live merely on behalf of their

fleeting drama.

names. The Hopi word pösövi means “canyon corners,” as if one quirky, prismatic facet at a time were all you could manage in this seemingly irrational geography of space and rock.

—Ellen Meloy

JEFF RICH

born Atlanta, GA, 1977 Slough and MS-25 Bridge, Iuka, Mississippi, from The Watershed Project Pigment print, 2013; 19 × 23 13/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1260.2022

The Tennessee River Basin of the

Slough

twenty-first century is a place of

A slough—also slow, slew, sloo, slue—is a

contrasts. Hidden around every river

narrow stretch of sluggish water in a river

bend is something unexpected. Around

channel, inlet, or pond. A slough can also be

one you’ll find a threatened fish and

a marsh, swamp, bayou, or any soft, muddy,

mussel species hatchery, while a

or waterlogged ground. The great, flat

few miles down the river you’ll come

city of Chicago is built on filled sloughs, or

upon Oak Ridge National Laboratory,

swampy bottomlands. Slough is also a verb,

established in 1942 as a Manhattan

meaning to mire in a slough or swamp, and

Project site, where it produced the

“to be sloughed” can mean “lost in a swamp.”

uranium-235 used in the assembly of

Used as slang, “to slough in,” or “slough up,”

the world’s first atomic weapon. And if

is to arrest or imprison, to be inhibited, or

you return to Swan Pond Road, all that

bogged down. Nineteenth-century travelers

is left of the Guptons’ farm is a newly

reported horses sinking up to their necks in

landscaped clearing that is paved with

sloughs that looked no deeper than a puddle.

walking paths.

Prairies, especially those radiating from the Mississippi, are (or were) riddled with sloughs, and sloughs run along the St. Paul, Pacific, and Sioux City Railroad tracks and other elevated rights-of-way, providing ideal homes for muskrats.

—Donna Seaman

MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF

born Atlanta, GA, 1979

Littoral Drift #1223 (Chattahoochee River, Atlanta, Georgia 09.26.18, Draped on Long Island at Confluence of White Water Creek) Dynamic cyanotype, 2018; 11 15/16 × 9 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1262.2022

This work stems from my fascination

Littoral drift

with the nature of our relationships to

Littoral means of or pertaining to the shore,

the landscape, the sublime, time, and

and littoral drift is material moved along a

impermanence. Entitled Littoral Drift,

beach by a littoral current, a current carried

a geologic term describing the action

by waves breaking at an angle to the shoreline

of wind-driven waves transporting

and moving parallel to and adjacent to the

sand and gravel, the series consists

shoreline within the surf zone. Littoral drift

of camera-less cyanotypes made in

is, then, the material waves and wind work to

collaboration with the landscape and

shape coastlines, depositing and rearranging

the ocean, at the edges of both. The

the sand, rock, gravel, bits of shell, and

elements that I employ in the process—

other debris to form shoals, spits, bars, and

waves, rain, wind, and sediment—leave

beaches. One example of a high-littoral-drift

physical inscriptions through direct

zone is California’s Santa Cruz Harbor, where

contact with photographic materials.

up to 327,000 cubic yards of drift is deposited each year, enough to cover a football field to a depth of 184 feet.

—Gretchen Legler

MARK RUWEDEL

born Bethlehem, PA, 1954

Hells Canyon Creek, Snake River Drainage Gelatin silver print mounted on board, 1999; 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1264.2022

Place names evoking Satan and his

Hell

minions suggest a dominant attitude

In nineteenth-century America, hell was a

on the part of settlers of European

generic term for a rough or difficult stretch

origin towards the “New World” and it

of country, such as the wildly eroded Hell’s

is no coincidence that the less the land

Half-Acre in Wyoming. Similarly, the thermal

resembles Europe, as one moves from

features of Yellowstone Park were originally

east to west, the more the name of the

called Coulters Hell, after the explorer and

Devil appears. Desert lands in particular

mountain man John Coulter. The word was

were seen as desolate wilderness,

also used to designate the most lawless

and, in the Judeo-Christian tradition,

sections of frontier towns like Fort Worth and

wilderness is cursed; it is the land of fear,

San Antonio, as well as particularly dangerous

populated with demons. Environmental

and rough parts of the urban landscape,

historian Roderick Nash wrote: “The

such as Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. In

identification of the arid wasteland with

the southern Appalachians, a hell is a dense,

God’s curse led to the conviction that

extensive growth of laurel or rhododendron.

wilderness was the environment of evil, a

Horace Kephart, in Our Southern Highlanders,

kind of hell.”

defined the term this way: “A ‘hell’ or ‘slick’ or ‘wooly-head’ or ‘yaller patch’ is a thicket of laurel or rhododendron impassable save where the bears have bored out trails.”

—Charles Frazier

MIKE SMITH

born Heidelberg, Germany, 1951 Blue Hole, Carter County, Tennessee Pigment print, 2011; 7 1/2 × 9 3/8 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1266.2022

For over thirty years a print made and

Blue hole

given to me by Cole Weston of his

Blue holes, deep depressions filled with water

father’s image of Charis floating in the

sometimes so intensely blue they appear

viaduct hung in my office and later

bottomless, are one of the spectacular

my studio at East Tennessee State

formations of karst topography: limestone

University. Edward Weston’s famous

bedrock sculpted by the dissolving effects

floating figure is arguably better than

of rainwater or groundwater. Though there

my 8 x 10 inch fuzzy floaters. But the

are many North American examples, such

elevated vantage point, a handful of

as the Blue Hole in northwestern Ohio, most

supporting actors, and the presence

famous is the Blue Hole sixty miles off the

of a wider landscape establish a

coast of Belize, a haven for deep-water

social context to my picture, which

scuba divers. Located in the aquamarine

was the purpose of this project. I

shallows of Lighthouse Reef, this blue hole is

believe the father’s watchful (or more

a near-perfect circle more than a thousand

likely, suspicious) eye on me helps

feet across, its deep indigo water a result of

date the image.

its four-hundred-foot-depth. Though now submerged, it formed on dry land, either as a cavern whose roof finally collapsed or as a sinkhole. Then melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age flooded continental margins along the Atlantic coast, turning this land formation into one in the sea. The eerily pure color of a blue hole many not always signal depth: A shallow blue hole in the New Jersey Pine Barrens sometimes called the Jersey Devil’s Bathtub owes its saturated hue to the purity of strongly upwelling spring water—undoubtedly also the force that created the formation.

—Pamela Frierson

JOEL STERNFELD

born New York, NY, 1944

Rim View Trail, Page, Arizona, August 1983 Digital chromogenic development print, 1983; 16 9/16 × 20 11/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1267.2022

Page, Arizona was founded in 1957 as a

Plateau

community for workers and their families

An extensive area of nearly level land that

during the construction of the Glen

rises abruptly above a surrounding landscape

Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. Six

on at least one side, known also as tableland,

decades after it was built, the dam and

is called a plateau. Canyons often encroach

the body of water that it formed, Lake

on or dissect the plateau’s flat surface, and

Powell, remain controversial. In 1981,

it is distinguished from similar formations by

Edward Abby said “Surely no man-made

its breadth—the Columbia lava plateau of

structure in modern American history

eastern Washington and Oregon, for instance,

has been hated so much by so many,

is different from the isolated prominence

for so long with such good reason as

of a mesa, is larger than a butte, is flat, and

the Glen Canyon Dam.” As the worst

presents a dramatic vertical fall on all sides.

drought in 1200 years continues in

Plateau also designates the American Indians

the West, the future of Glen Canyon

who inhabited the plateau country between

Dam and consequently of Lake Powell

the Cascades and Rockies, and the food-

becomes unclear. In time, residents

gathering culture there.

of Rim View Trail may look out at the wondrous Glen Canyon as it was before the digging began.

—Larry Woiwode

MARTIN STUPICH

born Milwaukee, WI, 1949

Sand Mountain, Nevada Pigment print, 1980; 14 1/16 × 55 15/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1202.2022

Dunes occur from Indiana to Mars.

on the sheltered, leeward side. Coarse sand

Those in the western United States don’t

produces rounded dunes without these

rival the Sahara’s, but they are set like

features. One of the largest dune fields in

gems wherever they occur. Nevada’s

the United States is the Algodones Dunes,

Sand Mountain is smaller than most

extending southeasterly more than forty miles

dune fields, but more beautiful than

from Glamis in Imperial County, California, to

any I have seen. It is luminous, glowing

the southwestern corner of Arizona and into

in an already shimmering sage desert.

Mexico. The highest dune on America’s East

This picture pays homage to Timothy

Coast is the 140-foot-high Jockeys Ridge

H. O’Sullivan’s 1867 view made while

on the Outer Banks of North Carolina; it’s

working on a federal survey of the West,

an example of a coastal dune. Sometimes,

as I was while making this panorama a

continuing wind causes dunes to move—

century later. O’Sullivan’s vantage point

as at White Sands, New Mexico, where the

faces northeast from the toe of the dune;

dunes of loose gypsum sand move twenty-

mine from the south looking north.

four feet a year. If the winds and sand supply diminish, an advancing or migrating dune

Dune

might acquire a covering of vegetation and

Wind and a generous supply of

settle down as a fixed or stabilized dune.

granular material are needed to make

The dune environment often has unfamiliar

a dune, which can arise in arid places

acoustic properties and dune-created wind

or along the shore of a lake or ocean,

patterns that sculpt the features of the dune

or even along the banks of a river

field. Wanderers among dunes may feel a thrill

such as the Arkansas River in western

in their alien presence, be enchanted, or, like

Kansas. Dunes are classified by their

early saints, see visions in mirages and hear

shape, which is a function of sand

voices in the falling sand.

and topography interacting with the wind. Sand particles begin to move when wind velocity reaches about eleven miles per hour. The particles move by skipping over the ground, a motion called saltation. The grains are kicked briefly into the air and then fall with a forward glide, hitting other grains on the ground and putting them into motion as well. Relatively fine sand collects this way to produce dunes with a clearly marked crest that drops off to a steep slip face

—D. J. Waldie

WILLIAM SUTTON

born Toledo, OH, 1956

Comb Ridge, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Pigment print, 1989; 7 × 9 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1268.2022

I live in the West because of its

Comb ridge

topography and its abundance of

A comb ridge is a sharp mountain crest

federal public lands. The eleven western

eroded by glaciers or water to look jagged,

states contain eighty-five percent of

saw-toothed. Because of the pinnacles and

all the public lands in the continental

notches along its crest, a comb ridge—the

United States, and almost one-half of

expression is often used interchangeably

these states’ total area is held in the

with arête—resembles a rooster’s comb. It

public domain. From the drama of red-

is the acute and rugged divide between two

rock canyons and alpine mountaintops

aggressive glacial arenas. In the dryland west,

to grassland meadows and arid deserts,

a comb ridge is a single fold of upturned rock

our public lands contain beauty that any

that has sharp teeth cut by water erosion.

of us can freely access and engage. We

An example is Comb Ridge, near Bluff, Utah.

hold this land in common, and what we

Other comb ridges can be seen in Grand

decide to do with it is an expression of

Staircase–Escalante National Monument,

our values and who we are.

Utah.

—Robert Morgan

BOB THALL

born Chicago, IL, 1948 Chicago (Chicago River. View East from the Roof of the IBM Building) Gelatin silver print, 1989; 13 9/16 × 16 15/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1270.2022

The cityscape of Chicago presents little

Portage

evidence of the natural landscape that

A portage is a path or passageway along

existed here before its founding. The

which canoes or other small boats and goods

city is very flat, almost all the streets are

are carried around obstructions in a stream

plotted on a precise grid, the lakefront

or between navigable bodies of water. A

has been filled and shaped, and the

portage is also a place where such a land

Chicago River straightened and its flow

route begins or ends, and it refers, too, to

reversed. It is an unnatural landscape.

the act of carrying or transporting canoes

But Chicago’s founding and success

and goods overland, usually to skirt unman-

relied on the river’s potential for travel

ageable rapids or waterfalls. So established

from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi,

a fact of transportation were portages, there

and the city has cherished its lakefront.

existed a portage collar, a strap that passed

More importantly, Chicago is where I’ve

around the forehead and attached at each

lived my life, so I’ve always believed it is

end to the burden being carried, which was

the landscape I should photograph.

then supported on the back. A portage was no picnic, but it made traversing the wilderness possible—eventually there were even portage railroads. Most portages were only known locally, but one became famous: the Chicago Portage, which made possible the crucial water route from the Great Lakes to the mighty Mississippi.

—Donna Seaman

TERRY TOEDTEMEIER

born Portland, OR, 1947

Palomino Lake, Malheur County, Oregon Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 × 18 5/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1272.2022

In the course of taming and civilizing the

Basin and range

West, photographic concerns turned

The extension or stretching of the Earth’s

to other issues—the land as a land of

crust normally results in downfaulted valleys,

opportunity, a source of scenic splendor,

or grabens, and upfaulted mountains, or

a threatened wilderness, a bombing

horsts. North America’s huge geological prov-

range, a strip mall, a source of pollution.

ince of north-south–oriented mountains and

My focus: the land (physically) remains,

valleys created in this way is known as basin

and we ought to try to understand what

and range country (roughly 400,000 square

it is. That the land is beautiful is the

miles) and runs between northern Mexico and

strongest clue I have towards a greater

southeastern Oregon, and the Sierra Nevada

sense of unity.

of California and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. It includes parts of all the major North American deserts—the Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan. Death Valley, on the Nevada-California border, reaches a maximum of 282 feet below sea level, while the Panamint Mountains just to the west rise to some 11,000 feet in elevation. At the foot of such snowy ranges as the Ruby Mountains in Nevada and Steens Mountain in Oregon, peat-bog marshes form despite the aridity of the basins, providing havens for migrating waterfowl. Runoff from Steens Mountain flows through glacial valleys to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and drains into a series of alkaline playas where the waters evaporate.

—William Kittredge

GEOFF WINNINGHAM

born Jackson, TN, 1943

Allen’s Landing on Buffalo Bayou, Houston, Texas Photogravure, 2001; 7 1/8 × 22 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1199.2022

Most Houstonians are aware that Buffalo

Bayou

Bayou was crucial in the founding

Bayou is a word that sounds French but is in

and early development of our city, but

fact of Choctaw origin, deriving from bayuk,

few have taken more than a passing

meaning “small stream.” In recorded usage

glance at the stream as it winds its way

since 1818, bayou most commonly refers to

through Houston. From the time I first

marshy offshoots and overflowings of lakes

photographed the Buffalo Bayou, over

and rivers in the delta of Louisiana and the

forty years ago, I wondered where and

Gulf area. In a region of mostly swamps and

how the stream began. Did it come

marshy prairies, the bayous are spaces of

bubbling out of the prairie as a primordial

open water, sluggish or stagnant, often the

spring, or was it formed by the gradual

abandoned channels of the river delta cut

confluence of numerous little creeks and

off into oxbow lakes in the river’s variorum

tributaries?

history of trial and evolution. Bayou can also refer to a secondary channel, away from the mainstream, where the current is slower and the volume smaller. Sometimes a tributary is referred to as a bayou, as is any sluggish stream. The word can be said to refer to any slow water in a marshy area, if not dead water perhaps sleeping water, or dreaming water.

—Robert Morgan

DENNIS WITMER

born Lancaster, PA, 1957

Hanging Valley, Brooks Range, Alaska Gelatin silver print, 1996; 9 × 9 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1207.2022

My first encounter with Barry Lopez was

Hanging valley

in the summer of 1987, reading Arctic

A high valley that converges with, and breaks

Dreams while volunteering at a remote

off abruptly into, a deeper valley, often over

field station just above the Arctic Circle

a cliff, is known as a hanging valley. Hanging

in Northwest Alaska. His very first story

valleys occur when glaciations or water flow

includes a description of taking walks

erode the main valley to a depth well below

in the late evening when the sun hung

that of its tributary valleys. A hanging valley

low in the northern sky, encountering

might include a hanging glacier, or end in a

ground nesting birds, and his act of

waterfall such as Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite

bowing to them out of both respect

or Bird Woman Falls seen from the Going-to-

and gratitude. When photographing,

the-Sun Highway over Logan Pass in Glacier

I have tried to adopt Barry’s sense of

National Park. Seacoast streams that fall over

respect for the place, and often bow to

sea cliffs, which result from erosions caused

the place, and thank it for allowing me to

by wave action and tectonic uplift, emerge

make the pictures.

from hanging valleys. Washes in the American Southwest often form hanging valleys, such as the seventy-five-foot cliff where Johns Canyon ends above the gorge of the San Juan River in the Grand Gulch country of southern Utah.

—William Kittredge

WILLIAM WYLIE

born Harvey, IL, 1957

Cache la Poudre River, Colorado, from the series Stillwater Gelatin silver print, 2000; 17 3/16 × 21 9/16 inches Sheldon Art Association The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez S-1274.2022

From its source as snowmelt on the

Stillwater

Continental Divide to its confluence

Stillwater is a term that describes a curious

with the Platte on the eastern plains, the

phenomenon of quiet water. In the United

Cache la Poudre is in effect a “working”

States over two hundred places are named

river. Overutilized by agriculture and

Stillwater—including rivers, canyons, streams,

recreation, threatened by the possibility

ponds, even flats and towns. In the late

of a dam, the waterway is the focus of

seventeenth century one such town, bordered

much attention and debate along the

by the Hudson River near Saratoga, New York,

Front Range of Colorado. Although

was chronicled as a place where “the water

many sites retain the marks of human

passes so slowly as not to be discovered,

occurrences, the river itself remains wild

while above and below it is disturbed, and

and full of possibility.

rageth as in a great sea, occasioned by rocks and falls therein.” In the late 1800s the best-known city by this name, Stillwater, Oklahoma, formed near a back-eddied place on a creek. Lesser-known Stillwater towns in Nevada, Montana, and elsewhere also grew up around pools of tranquil water. Such cities, because of their names, are often presented as stereotypically tranquil places to live, as depicted in Richard and Florence Atwater’s Mr. Popper’s Penguins: “It was an afternoon in late September. In the pleasant city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper, the house painter, was going home from work.” Stillwater is a term also used by meteorologists in predicting storm surges. In deep water they look for the midpoint of the wave crest before it reels down; in shallow water they look for the trough and crest of the wave. The stillwater level is the highest water level measured if wave action were completely smoothed out.

—Elizabeth Cox