Ho Ho Ho

Season's Greetings

Thinking Spring

"O, wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"                              

                                                               Percy Bysshe Shelley

Walking In Your Footsteps

Mother and Son

From The Archives: Sunset Silhouettes

"At sunset, nature is painting for us... day after day... pictures of infinite beauty"

                                                                                                                John Ruskiin

Busy life is keeping me away from my camera and my blog. I miss it a lot. Maybe I should commit to a 365 project for 2011?? Scary thought.

Old Man and Cigarette

From The Archives: Family Picnic

On The Streets of Denver, Part II

Dog Day Afternoon

On The Streets of Denver

Music on 16th St.

If you ever visit Denver, this is one must see destinations.

A Prairie Dog Companion

"Prairie-dogs are abundant...; they are in shape like little woodchucks, and are the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable. They are never found singly, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants; and these towns are found in all kinds of places where the country is flat and treeless."  

                 Theodore Roosevelt (about the area that became Theodore Roosevelt National Park)





This extremely cute animal, once a major component of Great Plains life, was unfortunately the victim of a wide spread extermination by human.  Once there were vast prairie dog towns stretched for miles across the open plains. In 1901, scientists surveyed a single Texas "dog town" covering 25,000 square miles and had an estimated 400 millions (that's 9 zeros) prairie dogs. 


Unfortunately, prairie dogs were often considered pests and their fragil habitats were destroyed by ranchers who were convinced that were damaging the food source of their cattle. Extensive poisoning programs and other bad practices virtually eliminated the prairie dog and many of its predators from vast areas of the plains. The ranchers failed to realize that the removal of prairie dogs caused undesirable spread of brush that does more harm that any benefit that could be gained.


Today, you can find scattered populations of prairie dogs in protected areas like national parks, monuments, grasslands, and wildlife refuges.


Source: NPS.gov 

From The Archives: The Horse and Carriage

From The Archives: Central Station

Blue Drops...

Red Sunrise

Afternoon Nap

The Horse At The Horizon

St. Mary Lake, Glacier NP, Montana

"Far away in Montana, hidden from view by clustering mountain-peaks, lies an unmapped northwestern corner- the Crown of the Continent. The water from the crusted snowdrift which caps the peak of a lofty mountain there trickles into tiny rills, which hurry along north, south, east and west, and growing to rivers, at last pour their currents into three seas. From this mountain-peak the Pacific and the Arctic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico receive each its tribute. Here is a land of striking scenery"
                    George Bird Grinnell, The Century Magazine 1901

Portrait

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

"If everything's ready here on the Dark Side of the Moon... play the five tones"
                              Project Leader in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

Mount Moriah Cemetery: Deadwood, SD

"My dearly beloved, if I am to die today and never see the sweet face of you again I want you to know that I am no great man and I am lucky to have such a woman as you"
                               Wild Bill Hickok

From Wikipedia:

Mount Moriah Cemetery on Mount Moriah in Deadwood, Lawrence County, South Dakota is the burial place of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Seth Bullock, and other notable figures of the Wild West. By tradition, the American flag flies over the cemetery 24 hours a day, rather than merely from sunrise to sunset.

Fence

Still Life

Torches and Pitchforks

From The Archives

During this past week, there have not been any new photos to put on this blog. So, Here's some of the older ones that scored more favorably on the "Interestingness" scale on Flickr.