hot rocks

These rocks sit on a sandstone table

on the deck up at the ranch.

They were all collected within a couple of square miles of the house. Click on them a couple of times to take a closer look. Seems some of them were pressed into layers by the weight of the world and some of them got blown out of a volcano.

On these hot days, I can relate to both.

july moon

There are no tripods in heaven.

Perfection is overrated anyway.

a flower's dream

I wish I had a buck for every photograph ever taken of a night-blooming cereus. Who could resist trying to show the slow-motion yet visible unfolding of that exquisite flower at least once? Millions of pictures are taken of the process, as if to prove the unbelievable. A camera cannot, however, record that fragrance. It remains imaginable only to initiates. I won't go on. Assuming there have been an infinite number of images made, I'm sure there have been even more inadequate attempts to describe it in words.

This is more about demonstrating one of the few things I can do with my new iPhone. No one told me it would require an advanced degree to run the damn thing, but its camera seems to be very user-friendly. So I let it have a go at the cereus:

Hmmm... not bad for incandescent lighting.

Then I found the flash.

The vain gardenia tried to compete.

At that moment, an amazing thing happened.

I don't know if it was the iPhone or the cereus,

or maybe it's just my imagination,

but, to me, this looks like a picture of a flower dreaming.

What do you think?

erosion

Looking northeast from Rabbit Mountain,

the shape on the left is not a caldera.

It's an eroded vestige of the bottom of the tropical inland sea

which once ebbed along the Rocky Mountains' eastern slope.

Like the rest of the Front Range, it's littered with sea shells.

The mountains themselves are eroding geologic upthrusts.

Looking west from Rabbit Mountain, the river carves out the little lost canyon.

The mountains make the weather;

the land and the sky are inseparable.

There is nothing subtle about this place.

dawn at the ditch

If I ever had a subtle bone in my body,

I obviously broke it, too.

rockets