So much jumpy uncertainty, I hunker down and move slowly — one hand on the rail, like a sailor in rough seas. Excursions have been more common than I anticipated, but have somehow filled less space on the calendar. When not in the field, I have been working through imagery collections from the second half of last year, playing ‘catch-up’ while insisting it is disciplined productivity. I still feel far behind while, at the same time, struggling to find what it is I want to say.
In a recent conversation with my father, during my regular visit to Grand Junction CO, he asked why I do this, as he watched me piece together a blogpost about Avocets in WordPress. I was stunned for a moment; mostly because I lacked a quick answer. Moments earlier we had been comparing and reliving our long personal relationships with National Geographic magazine — he still turns the pages of the print edition with its distinct yellow binding, while I scroll through my digital subscription. It retains, somehow, that seminal curiosity and spark of discovery that become precious gifts when passed down generations and across communities. So, after consideration, I told my dad that I am simply a photographer, writer, and publisher, packaged as a ‘Personal Geographic’ and hoping to provide a bit of his gifted curiosity and discovery to my 50 or so subscribers here at TrailOption. Is it true? Certainly. Am I successful? Maybe.
I do feel great pleasure commissioning excursions to satiate my geographic curiosity. I have a need to write about what I see and feel, in all the places I am fortunate to visit and among the species and processes I experience every day. I could raise the bar and consider actual publication, as I do when organizing geoarchaeological research for presentation in peer-reviewed journals. But today I can be the publisher (if wanting for true editor) and keep the avocational and amateur pleasure of sharing through a website, a substack platform, and a random, inconsistent social share. My voice is lost and quiet in the slop-shouted gloom of a long media scroll, but with some curiosity and discovery, I will be found. My only regret would be not trying and, of course, there is no trying. Only doing.
Excursions
At TrailOption this spring you will find stories of Monitor Valley with less emphasis on high points, Hamlin Valley and obsidian studies, Hart Mountain and blue highways, and the beautiful quiet of photographing American Avocets. Links are embedded above, or you can take a quick jump to the Fieldnotes blog here.
I have also been working through imagery – during the relative quiet (at home at least) of winter and spring – from two trips that have taken a long time to digest. I have completed a large collection of images from Antarctica with a similar collection coming for Zambia. Those stories are building, and photo selection has been difficult. In the meantime, I continue to practice with smaller, local collections taken throughout the past year. It is the doing that needs doing; much more to come, happily.
Research Recces
I have had the continuing pleasure of research on the Old River Bed Delta, Utah, where we continue to puzzle through the geomorphology and archaeology on the changing delta lobes of the Latest Pleistocene and Early Holocene. I also had the good fortune to consider a very different landscape in the coastal forests of Redwood State Park in northwestern California.
In the meantime it was ‘conference’ season. I had a poster presentation at the Society for California Archaeology in Palm Springs, CA, where I also donated several images to the fund-raising auction. I have also just returned from San Francisco where I attended the Society for American Archaeology meetings, leading a geoarchaeology field trip and presenting another research poster. Always happy to share the posters if anyone is interested (contact me through TrailOption).
Lastly, I had the great pleasure of watching Aiden Hlebechuk, a graduate student at UNR, complete and defend his thesis on the paleoecology and archaeology of Macy Flat – the place I was returning from when I located the Avocets in Surprise Valley. Being on a thesis committee can be challenging, but Aiden met any critique with added motivation and, often enough, challenged some of my basic assumptions about the paleogeography of wetlands in small basins of the High Rock Country. Congratulations to Aiden, and all the students out there, moving forward with their curiosity and discovery. Keep challenging us.
See you out there
As always, I appreciate everyone visiting and subscribing to TrailOption. Navigating the uncertainty of the things we cannot control, our sense of curiosity and discovery is our resistance to the berating news cycle of increasingly bad decisions. Public science remains a foundation of who we are, and I think something most are interested in, if we have the time to pause and consider the world around us. It is ‘why I do this’. And there is no reason to stop.
Keep going.
The Antarctica picture is stupendous ❤️