A glimpse of "Indian Country"

I am not sure where this shot came from or how it wound up in my picture collection but it really spoke to me and still does. This scene could be right out of Powerful Medicine, or you might see Adam Bolt of Rez Dogs and Scooter Trash zipping down this two-laner on his Harley.

I grew up with Arizona Highways magazines in the house--and many pictures a bit like this. The venerable editor of the magazine for decades, Raymond Carlson, often called Arizona, "The land of room enough and time enough." That is a pretty good description of the Rez as well--at least the region of the Navajo and the Hopi in the northeastern part of Arizona and a bit of New Mexico.

I drove across there a couple of years ago coming back to Colorado, then home, from a trip to the south. I can see in my mind a quilt, one of the pictorial ones, that shows the incredible nature-sculpted buttes and bluffs in their many colors, the expansive sky probably strewn with clouds like this one, and the tough foliage that grows in spots in the red sand. Maybe someday I will make it. But anyway, if you read either tale, visualize this scene as a backdrop for some of the action. It's the high desert country that my spirit calls home and that's why I write a lot of what I do.

The other two pictures are mine, not as great but then I am not a pupil of Ansel Adams or Joseph Meunch! Were that I had their talents.... Yes, the sky really is that blue--this was in mid-September after the summer rains were gone and before winter began to approach so it was the clear, bright days of early fall. Which happens to be my favorite season when I am in my heart's home....