A Tonto Inventory

During the summer of 2003, I spent a week rafting on the Colorado River. Our flotilla bounced, rolled, and cheered its way down the river's major rapids, but there was also ample time for floating on the current and letting the Grand Canyon's magnificence wash over us. At night, we cooked and camped on the river's beaches. A few memories of the trip are especially clear: I recall encouraging the youngest members of our party to avoid harming the spiny lizards they chased around camp; rejoicing when I encountered rattlesnakes and scorpions during side hikes; and, on the last night of the trip, listening to a passionate talk by one of our guides about the Colorado's dwindling water flow. Above all, though, I remember the sublime beauty of the landscape.

Christopher Reiger
"Greater short-horned lizard; Fire Road 1170;
Tonto National Forest, AZ; August 2013"

Until this summer, ten years after that unforgettable trip, the river week was my only experience of the American Southwest, and I've wanted to return to the region for some time. When a good friend (and fellow natural history nerd) called me earlier this year and suggested we carve out some time to visit Arizona's Tonto National Forest, I was easily persuaded.

We spent most of our weeklong visit exploring the high desert trails and fire roads of Tonto's north central tract, but we also had an opportunity to spend a little time in the National Forest's southern reach, at the edge of the Sonoran Desert. It was a treat to meet so many species new to me and to have intimate encounters with other animals, like elk, that I'd previously seen in habitats very different from that of the high desert.

Chris McCaw: Drawing Time

Chris McCaw
"Sunburned GSP#420 (Arctic Circle, Alaska)"
2010
Unique gelatin silver paper negative
12 x 20 inches

Chris McCaw created the arresting pictures on view in "Ride Into the Sun," the artist's winter 2011 solo show at Stephen Wirtz Gallery (San Francisco, CA), using an unconventional technique. The artist loads handcrafted view cameras as large as 30 x 40 inches with expired silver gelatin photographic paper, tilts the camera lenses skyward, and opens the shutters for hours. Even on cloudy days, the photo paper is soon overexposed. As time wears on, however, the light-sensitive chemicals that coat the paper are solarized, and the prints' tones are transmuted in curious ways. In many of McCaw's works, the sun appears as a dark, arcing streak and the landscape and sky as shades of grey. During some of McCaw's longer exposures, the sun's brilliance, laser-like, burns through the paper, tracing its progress as a charred tear.

Big Sky Country

Christopher Saunders
"Whitenoise no. 1"
2008
Oil on linen
24 x 18 inches

In a 2009 post about painter Christopher Saunders' "Whitenoise" series, I recounted philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's hierarchy of aesthetic experience and connected it to Saunders' work.

"In his volume The World As Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer elucidated a scale of aesthetic experience. At one end of this spectrum, he described the 'Feeling of Beauty' as 'Light...reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt [the] observer.)' At the other end of the spectrum, the philosopher positioned the 'Full Feeling of Sublime' and the 'Fullest Feeling of Sublime.' These categories are described, respectively, as 'Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects.),' and 'Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature.)'