An idyllic scene in high desert range land.
Mike and I own 40 acres of “ranch” land about 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon at Howard Mesa. For the past three years in a row, I’ve spent a good portion of my summer camping out there with my dog, bird, and horses.
I’m an explorer. I like to look at a map, find a potential destination, then hop in my Jeep (or helicopter) and see what it looks like. On a summer day in 2006, Jack the Dog and I took the Jeep to follow some of the dirt roads that run through National Forest land just south of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. My objective was to take a photo of the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine as it made its way to the depot in Grand Canyon Village.
I wrote about that day in my blog, so I won’t spend a lot of time repeating myself here. I’ll cut to the chase.
This gate and corral was on one of the roads I followed near the railroad tracks before I got into the National Forest. Nearby were the remains of a few buildings. It had once been part of a train station where cattle had been loaded onto cattle cars and shipped south for sale and slaughter. Now it’s just a picturesque spot on a remote dirt road, captured with my camera during a Jeep outing with my dog.
Ms. Colter, a talented woman in a male-dominated field, designed the building to resemble the Native American homes built by the Hopi people on the Hopi Mesas. Having seen those homes firsthand, I can verify the resemblance. The building appears, from the outside, as a series of stone boxes, joined in an almost random pattern. As if a smaller home was repeatedly enlarged with additional rooms. This photo shows the front wall of one of those boxes with another wall (on the right) that’s set back.
A few years later, in February, I took my brother to the Canyon. We spent two nights in rooms on the rim and each morning, we went out to watch the sun rise. Each morning, the canyon was full of clouds. I don’t think my brother saw the inside of the canyon at all on that trip. But he did tell my mother that it was the coldest place on earth.
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