iron slag dump

What looks like a mine in itself is actually excavation of an iron slag dump — being mined for aggregate. The dump is part of an enormous area around the town of Cornwall and specifically the Cornwall Iron Furnace that was the site of the largest (at the time) and longest-running iron mine in the US. It operated continuously from 1737 until Hurricane Agnes flooded the pit in 1973.

iron slag dump being mined for aggregate, Cornwall, Pennsylvania, June 2014

skies from Hawk Moon Ridge

skies from Hawk Moon Ridge, Glade Park, Colorado, July 2013

There is always something to watch in the skies here. Especially in monsoon season: watching with hopeful eyes for some kind of build-up suggesting that, yes, there will be some rain eventually. It can be quite sudden, or simply tantalizing in character, and, thankfully, so far, there are no nearby fires to cloud the air with haze or burn the house down! The electricity has gone out twice, and once the Valley Electric guy drove in to check — said that the transformer for this branch of the grid is located on what he termed “lightning alley” — a ridge about a mile away to the west where they are always having strike outages.

sunset in the east/west

sky, Glade Park, Colorado, April 2013

Dona and I take the new truck up to Tree and Pascal’s place, almost on the Utah border, to pick up jetsam following their somewhat forced emigration to a new life in France. The reward is a spectacular and rapidly evolving sunset in the space of ten minutes or so. The sky moody, and then the double red rainbow. Incredible!

greater sky, Glade Park, Colorado, April 2013

sky, Glade Park, Colorado, April 2013

panorama

panorama, Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge, Colorado, November 2012

After breakfast and packing up we head down to the Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge, under a wide and very blue winter sky. The refuge is empty, the Visitor’s Center boarded up, we park and wander down the Rio Grande. Here it is a slow-moving, muddy, turbid affair a few tens of feet across. This area is full of oxbow lakes and paleo-channels. Before agriculture came, before terra-forming, agro-chemicals, and water controls, it must have teeming with birds and other wildlife. We spot a bald eagle on a large cottonwood tree, but it flies on before we can get anywhere near. Loki climbs on the huge stacks of cut hay.

at The Center

at the Center of the Universe, San Luis Valley, Colorado, November 2012

Up early and out from Alamosa, first, passing the Buddha altar in the lobby of the Comfort Inn. First stop is the Center, on the way to the Sand Dunes.


at the Center of the Universe, San Luis Valley, Colorado, November 2012

Day 4 – another shortish circuit

Steamboat Rock, Echo Park, Colorado, April 2012

Going to the top of Pat’s Draw then around above Mitten Park, another perspective on Steamboat Rock, and back down via a small cave that caught my eye a few years ago. Overflowing bat guano seeps from some of the smaller cavities, etc.

Day 3 – a short circuit

Steamboat Rock, from the Mitten Park trail, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, April 2012

wanted to check if a round-about way to get to the top of the bench was possible via heading to Mitten Park, and ascending the end of the bench there. nope, not without some serious bouldering or even technical climbing. got up pretty far, but the as the rocks are severely distressed at the fault itself, everything gets unstable. I quit where the trees stopped growing! good day for just looking around at everything along with a little initial off-road cardio. the cryptobiotic soil is always something to visually decode along with the lichen and other symbiotic expressions.

Day 2 – a short circuit

Steamboat Rock, Echo Park, Colorado, April 2012

a short circuit to recall the textures and to reacquaint the senses, the body, with the essences of place — sky, rock, earth, plants, former occupants, etc: the basics. starting with a quick overview of Echo Park from the southern wall, then following that complexly eroding wall along to Pool Creek, then across to the west to some nice petroglyphs.

Echo Park, Colorado, April 2012

evidence

triptych, dry wash with detritus from flash flood on burn scar upstream, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, August 2011

The scar from last year’s Medano Canyon forest fire is hit by a flash flood a couple days before I arrive at the park — the water had no place to go but down, where it raked through the dry washes. When it peaked it simultaneously inundated a quarter-mile of the Medano Pass jeep trail. Further evidence was a strange trail of flotsam — charcoal and black mud — stretching out into the dune field, that and the relatively green vegetation for this time of late summer.

pixelache over

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.