In a castle dark

The second photo essay from Landergin ghost town is of the grain elevators and an abandoned farmhouse just the west of the graveyard of dead trucks. I say elevators plural because there three cylindrical elevators within the towering structure.

I can’t explain the appeal of elevators except to say that the soaring height of the vertical tubes seems outsized and ominous when plopped onto the plains of the Texas Panhandle or the big empty of, say, Kansas. You can see the monoliths across miles of grassy flats. They are beacons of a sort, erected as if to say there’s something here. Visualize a lighthouse protruding from a rocky promontory at the edge of the earth.

In Landergin I was transfixed by the fallow elevators, the empty farmhouse and fifty bent metal carcasses from last week’s post. Landergin in its heyday was barely there. At its apex in the 1930s 15 lonely souls and a couple of a stores called it home. The sign over the truck repair shop tells us there was once a restaurant, maybe gas station and truck stop.

Nothing captures my attention like nothingness.

Test pattern

 

Austin's Store, Randsburg, CA

After 15 years of my blog posting at around 4:00am every Monday morning last week it posted on Sunday afternoon when I finished writing and clicked Publish. This week it didn't publish at all as far as I can tell. Neither Peggy nor I got the email that indicates the post in online. It's disheartening to miss a post after something like 735 weeks without missing a post.

So, this is a test to see if you get the blog right now, 10:36am MST or tomorrow or not at all.

Good luck to me.

The photo above has nothing to do with anything.

Full Metal Jackets

We drove east on I-40 from Tucumcari to Oklahoma City, a stretch of ugly nothing punctuated by the occasional grain elevator and a mile long feed lot whose odor stays with you for an hour. It’s not a trip you take lightly. Actually, it's not a trip you want to make ever. But we had to and there we were midway between Godforsaken Ron Jon, New Mexico and OKC.

Forty miles before Amarillo, speaking of ugly nothing, I saw a towering elevator on the horizon. I am drawn to cylindrical forms anyway. As we came abreast of the elevator, I saw a line of semi-trucks and semi-trailers lined up along the north frontage road. It was like the back-up at an inspection station at some state line somewhere. The vehicles were all pointing west as if waiting to enter New Mexico.

It was odd. I couldn’t explain why there would be a dozens of dead trucks in the middle of no damn where. Come to think of it I still don’t know why. And damned if I’ll go back.

We didn’t stop for photographs or for an explanation, but I filed the sight under “have to stop here on the way back.”

I had the bent metal cemetery in my mind when we headed back to Taos on Saturday. For reasons I can’t explain I knew that the the ferrous conglomeration was going to be the very next exit. And, sure enough, in the distance I saw the elevator in question. I didn’t know the number of the exit, the name of the town or if there was name for the place at all. I learned all that via Google and Google maps in the comfort of my office.

The place that I later learned is ghost town of Landergin, Texas gave me a passel of worthwhile photographs and two blogs worth of fodder.

Today’s chapter features the bodies of the dead trucks and next week’s will be the grain elevator looming over the whole shebang.

Landergin, it turns out was founded by the John and Pat Landergin whose father had escaped Ireland’s Potato famine of the 1840s. It began as a cattle ranch and when the Chicago Rock Island and Gulf Railway came to the Texas Panhandle in 1908 the town of Landergin was born. Then the nearby town of Vega was founded, and John Landergin opened the First State Bank. The brothers bought more ranch land and in 1912 built a mansion on Amarillo’s Polk Street. Their company floundered after John’s death in 1923 and their holdings were auctioned off.

As of 1936 Landergin had one store and 15 residents. By 1980 two businesses remained and today there appears to be a truck repair shop and the hulks 50 or so vehicles that have had their last rites.

Oklahoma OK

Buick Valve In Head Motorcars

Two weeks ago, Peggy and I drove to Oklahoma City. It’s 450 miles of flat and mostly ugly, especially the Texas Panhandle part. It's a vast nothing punctuated by the occasional grain elevator and a mile long feed lot whose odor stays with you for half an hour. But the trip was essential since Peggy was part of the prestigious Small Works Great Wonders show at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. According to the museum, “The exhibition features works by 100 of America’s finest artists.” With that billing she had to attend and, as her spear carrier, I came along for the opening shindig. Turns out the 200,000 square foot museum was epic in scale, had the largest collection of paintings by the Taos Society of Artists that I’ve seen and the Small Works Great Wonders opening was boffo. That’s theatre lingo for huge crowds and huge sales. 

Coffee with a splash of Buick

Nichols Energy Services

The museum alone was worth the trip and Oklahoma City isn’t the backwater I have avoided like the plague for decades. It is after all in deep red Oklahoma and my expectations were muy low. 

But, cowboys and cowgirls, Oklahoma City was a real city, had a measure of sophistication, a bounty of charming historic neighborhoods and quite a food scene. I am chastened by my misjudgment of the place. Next year I’ll almost maybe look forward to returning.

We stayed in Bricktown in a decent hotel but in a neighborhood long past its prime. Once a vibrant entertainment district Bricktown is a somnolent, shabby cluster of 1980’s chain restaurants and karaoke bars. It’s the kind place with the kind of restaurants that, and I quote, “Appall me.” Bad chain restaurants make me lose my appetite until I find redemption in a well operated local establishment. 

I have a nose for good restaurants if I do say so myself. So, to escape Bricktown I found an all-day breakfast place at the corner of NW 10^th Street and Broadway. Breakfast is my favorite meal as you know. In the neighborhood called Automobile Alley, so called because it was once ground zero for car dealerships, were myriad locally operated eateries including the worthy Hatch Early Mood Food. It served one Hell of breakfast and boasted a buzzy clientele that streamed in and out that Friday morning at 10:30.

Where good restaurants congregate you'll find a healthy residential neighborhood supporting them. Such was true in Automobile Alley. Handsome brick car showrooms had become cafés, bars, restaurants, fitness studios and hip looking engineering firms. 

And more importantly as Automobile Alley gentrified it kept its early 20^th century bones and a trove of Art Deco signs the likes of which I’ve never seen. I haven’t done the neighborhood justice with these meager offerings, but you get the picture. 

High wire act

The stairway to nowhere

And there was an architectural novelty, a spiral fire escape suspended in the alley between Broadway 10 Chop House and the parking garage where I was standing. The metal snake led nowhere and didn’t reach the ground. It was mysterious and playful at the same time. The relic was salvaged from Marion Hotel across the street and became a quirky piece of public art.

The Marion is becoming luxury apartments which will make the lovely folks at Broadway 10 and Packard's where we dined muy happy.

Sublime Solitude

Nested in the rolling desert is a trim single wide and a shed.

Connecting the Grand Canyon to the Four Corners are two-lane roads that traverse Navajo and Hopi country. For the second time in three months, I’ve driven those roads. In September we drove US 160 from the Grand Canyon to Chambers, took a right through Tuba City and on to the Four Corners and Shiprock. As I expressed in an earlier post, I was more enchanted by those 150 miles of stark emptiness than by nine days at the Grand. More recently I drove to Bluff, Utah after photographing Mesa Verde and Hovenweep. As I drove to Bluff on San Juan County Road 162, I saw a part of the Navajo Nation I’d never seen. It was as captivating to as the Navajo Trail, perhaps more so because it was even less populated. And that’s saying a lot. It was on that short stretch of road that I came to understand the chest filling appeal of the Navajo homeland. It’s well established that I am drawn to forever vistas. It’s the number one reason I give for choosing to live in Taos. But there’s more to it than that.

Scattered homesteads flicker below a wall of red rock.

Tonalea Sundown

Navajo Handmade Jewelry Here

The Four Corners and the Navajo Nation’s expanse and epic skies dwarf those of my chosen home. That big empty, those towering mesas, buttes and outcroppings reduce the mark of man to insignificance. We are dwarfed by the immensity of the earth and the heavens. I was once again enchanted by the vast emptiness and by the spare habitations strewn like specks against the towering immensity of the place. The Navajo Nation boasts a population density of 6.6 people per square mile on a sprawling reservation that's larger than Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined. Manhattan sports 77,781 per square mile. It's hard to grasp. In Navajo Country the immensity of Mother Earth puts us in our very small place. That juxtaposition of the forever and the ephemeral is breathtaking

Nestled into the arid landscape are Navajo and Hopi homesteads, so small they’re easily missed. More often than not they’re trailers or manufactured homes with a corral, and sometimes a Hogan. Seen out of context they speak of poverty and desolation. But, looking more thoughtfully at the hardscrabble tableau, there’s space and grandeur in every direction. That’s the kind of wealth you cannot buy. One can imagine simply being and contemplating the land and sky at daybreak or sundown. That was my realization when I pondered a simple Navajo community glittering against a red mesa. The serenity of the scene is inexorable. The towering silence is meditation.

The Watchtower at Desert view

The Watchtower at Desert View

As I began to research the antecedents of Mary Colter’s iconic buildings at the Grand Canyon, I referred to her recently republished 1932 book Watchtower at Desert View. It became my roadmap for a Four Corners photo safari and, potentially, an article about Colter for Shadow and Light magazine.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. See Round Tower on the far right.

Round Tower at Cliff Palace

In her book subtitled Manual for Drivers and Guides, Colter gave special credit to Round Tower at Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park for being the inspiration for her Desert View Watchtower and to Hovenweep for being the most complete repository of Pueblo Indian architecture and construction in the Southwest. In her words, “There is no area in the United States with more archeological interest.“

Her plainly worded and highly detailed manual set me on a path to Mesa Verde near Cortez, Colorado and on to Hovenweep which straddles the Colorado-Utah border some 70 miles northwest of Cortez.

Mesa Verde sits on two mesas rising 8,500 feet above the Montezuma County valley floor. It was impressive in scope but lacked access to the major sites, Cliff Palace, and Long House. I had intended to photograph Round Tower at Cliff Palace to show its influence on Colter’s design of Watchtower. That, in fact, was my primary objective for visiting Mesa Verde. The closest I could get either site was 400 yards, so I was unable to capture the extraordinary stone and mortar work of the Ancient Puebloans a thousand years ago. And while I was able to get record shots of Cliff Palace and Long House, they fell far short of “art” and didn’t do justice to the craftsmanship on display.

Twin Towers, Hovenweep National Monument

Detail, Twin Towers at Hovenweep

Detail, Desert View Watchtower

Fortunately, Hovenweep made up for it. Tucked into the Colorado-Utah border, the compact monument afforded access to all the important sites via the Little Ruin Trail. From the trail which dropped into the shallow canyon and back up the other side I could get within a body length of every ruin. The only thing between me and the elaborate rock walls was an unobtrusive cable strung between permanent stanchions. Now I can show examples of Ancient Puebloan stonework and contrast it with the rock walls of the Watchtower. Notably, Colter employed local Hopi craftsman to apply the rock and mortar cladding of her Watchtower which was in actuality a steel and concrete structure.

The Desert View Watchtower is 70 feet tall making it, according to Colter, the tallest of the many towers that populate Navajo and Hopi country. That contention is disputed by some.

The lines and proportions of the Round Tower at Cliff Palace informed the design of the Watchtower at Desert View though the raw materials were very different than those at Mesa Verde. The rocks at Mesa Verde were carefully hewn. However, the stone available to Colter was very similar to that of Hovenweep as was the exposed position of the Watchtower akin to the towers at Hovenweep. And so, mortar less permeable than the mud used on Mesa Verde’s sheltered towers had to be used on the Watchtower. Photographs of the details of Hovenweep’s towers became the models for Colter’s masons. And the rocks for the Desert View Watchtower were used as found, another departure from Mesa Verde. The inspiration for the shape and taper of the Watchtower may have been Round Tower but the construction materials and application were all Hovenweep.

Connecting the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde and Hovenweep among others are two-lane roads that traverse Navajo and Hopi country. For the second time in three months, I’ve driven those roads. Next time I'll share my thoughts on the big empty that draws me so. 

 

y tuned, explorers.

Attitude Adjustment

The western view from Park Point, the height of land in Mesa Verde

8,500 feet, 30 degrees and blowing a gale

I've learned a lot about myself the last five days. I am, in short, a quivering vessel of nerves. What I've attributed to being disciplined and results oriented may be something more. On the journey from anxiousness to anxiety I’m speeding north at 90mph.

I’m so anxious to get to point B that my pulse soars to 11 on scale of 1 to 10 before I hit the road. I pack my gear so quickly that I regularly forget something. I could stock a haberdashery with the garments I’ve left in hotel rooms the last fifty years. On Thursday evening when I unpacked at our guest house in Oak Creek Canyon I didn't have the power supply for my laptop. I'd left it in my hotel room in Flagstaff. Thankfully, housekeeping turned it in to the front desk and I was able to pick it up Friday morning. But it was nerve wracking and cost me two hours I can't afford to lose

Manifestations of my impatience are many. I could publish a coffee table book of the photographs I could have taken if I’d found the brake pedal. Even more times I haven’t stopped at the store that’s on my way to the buy the milk or AAA batteries that I know we need. Apparently, I’d prefer to make a special trip. The milk and battery thing actually happened Friday morning after my self-inflicted jaunt to Flagstaff. I’m not sure I’m trainable.

If recognizing your demons is half the battle, I recognize my demons.

There’s always something eating at me. I gnashed teeth for three months before I pulled the trigger on my new mirrorless camera kit, didn’t I? Would I have deserved it less if I’d bought it in the first place?

Today’s matter o the moment is getting TSA Pre-checks on our Santa Fe to LaGuardia tickets. Since I can’t see it in print I’m not confident that we’ll be in the short line that dark Wednesday morning in December. The United agent in Bangalore, don't get me started, who took our Global Entry info assures me we’re all set. I’m doubtful. And, I’ll agonize till I know.

All of this leads to an attitude adjustment that I embraced on Thursday. My life change includes the willingness to go with flow, to say yes more readily and to be less rigid with the obligatory components of my life, namely a daily Instagram post, a weekly blog and bi-monthly contribution to Shadow and Light magazine. Oh, and four hours of cardio and three of upper body work every week.

Already the new more submissive paradigm had me having a beer with lunch on the patio of the Indian Garden Store in Oak Creek Canyon on Friday. I haven’t had a midday libation since 2014. And I extended my visit to Sedona for another day simply because folks wanted me to stay till Sunday. Those adjustments were pleasurable and I felt good about them.

But the flip side is that I’m writing this stupid blog at 10:45 Sunday night. So, I didn't have Sunday in Taos to write my blog, process photographs from Mesa Verde, Hovenweep and the Navajo Nation or workout. And I didn't post to Instagram for two days, the first such failure in 15 years.

This more fluid lifestyle is going to take some getting used to. I don’t know where and how discipline and commitment will coexist with flexibility and pleasure. I haven't found the balance so far.

This stream of consciousness is brought to you by the images within, images that have nothing whatsoever to so with the text.

Route of the Silver KIngs

The Evansville Mine #1

Evansville with a slag heap and Prospect Mountain in the distance.

With my interest piqued by my first visit to Leadville in August I returned last week to partake of the mining museum and to add to my portfolio of photographs of Leadville’s abandoned mines. In Leadville’s heyday from 1879 to 1893 there were 2,800 patented claims, 1,600 prospects and 1,300 shafts. It was, in short, a big deal. The boom had a short but epic life and the opera ended with a whimper when the US Treasury stopped buying prodigious amounts of silver to back up its Silver Certificates. Then the value of silver didn’t support the high cost of extracting the mineral. The silver’s still there, pilgrim. You just can’t afford to extract it. The singing may have stopped in 1893 but the last diehard kept at it till 1999.

The remains of the Berndell and Witherall Smelter. Mount Massive looms to the west.

In 1879 there were 17 smelters. None stand today but the immense slag heap created by the Berndell and Witherall La Plata smelter testifies to the breadth and depth of a decade of pillage and plunder.

Hopemore Mine and Mount Evans.

Upper Oro Mine on Breece Hill.

Upper Oro and Blue Sky.

As I drove the Route of the Silver Kings I tried to identify and photographs the mines I missed in August. Given Leadville’s storied past I had expected to find the definitive map of the mines. Instead, thanks to a docent at the mining museum, I was armed with a suspect hand drawn sheet which was definitely not to scale. Couple that with the fact that almost none of the mines had signs. So, I’ve identified the mines with a high degree of uncertainty. Sometimes nailed it. Other time it’s a wild ass guess.

I am please to report that for the first time ever I have three subjects for my Telling Stories byline in Shadow and Light magazine. Last week I wrote about the lowly corral. And I have a story percolating about Mary Colter, the iconic architect of the Southwest and boom and bust Leadville is also a contender.

It's an embarrassment of riches. I guess I'll know which one wins the sweepstakes when I know it. I have a week to figure it out.

Don't fence me in

A crude Cowboy built corral with Mount San Antonio looming to the north.

The cattle chute to nowhere

Looking west toward the Cruces Basin Wilderness

One of evocative western icons is the lowly corral. I’ve never met a corral I didn’t love. The ones strewn across the high desert of New Mexico are usually made of the materials readily at hand and, as such, are crude affairs that bend and yaw with age and the unsparing elements at 7,500 feet. This individual represents that cheap and resourceful ethos. Make it cheap, fast, and lasting. Make it easy to repair by a cowboy or shepherd with nothing but nothing but pliers, wire cutters and a length of wire, barbed or otherwise. The corral in this tale sits akimbo on the west side of my beloved US 285, a two-lane road that cuts a diagonal route across New Mexico from West Texas and into Colorado. The soft-shouldered form of volcanic San Antonio Mountain lies just beyond. Beyond Mount San Antone, sometimes called Mount Baldy, a sign says, “Welcome to Beautiful Colorado.” I will be so greeted this morning as I drive north to Leadville. 

Framed by barbed wire

Empty in the big empty

This tidbit is a warm-up for my November-December article in Shadow and Light magazine. That’s unless I’m deterred by the proceeds of my photo safari to Leadville’s silver mines.

Low hanging fruit

El Salto from the El Salto neighborhood of Arroyo Seco. 

For several weeks in late September through mid-October Taoseños are flushed with a bounty of rich autumn hues and the epic skies for which northern Mew Mexico is famous. It’s also the time in which capturing the wonder in my favored black and white may be a losing battle. At this time of year you could drop your camera and a get a pretty picture of New Mexico’s fall splendor. But it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a transcendent photograph.

El Salto from Highway 150.

Heart of Stone with El Salto on your right. This is from Valverde Common in downtown Taos.

The Immel's aspen stand.

A more abstract conception of the abandoned cottage next to Casa Immel. This one at least strives to be "art."

A little black and white for what ails you. 

So, with that modest preamble here are some Kodachrome moments that are postcards from El Norte durante el otoño. If the damn leaves would just fall. I could get back to my monochromatic mistress.

In the meantime, you get what you get.

A man of few words

El Salto from State Road 150 in Arroyo Seco.

A splash of early morning sun on the Hacienda de Los Martinez

My amigo Dado Lucena of Socorro. 

Aspen detail with shallow depth of field.

As the sun falls.

Soft as a rose petal

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks learning to use my new Sony a7r llla. The ‘a’ means it’s the latest version of the camera. Most of my remaining gray cells have been committed to understanding the mechanics of the camera. I was less driven my imagery than technology. Still, I shot enough to proclaim the switch from Canon to be a success or at least to be very promising. Any qualms I had about a mirrorless unit not standing up to the DSLR have been assuaged and I’m ready to hit the bricks and to reignite my creative fire.