A running conversation between the freeze and the thaw…
Ice Dances
All posts by tjccamas@comcast.net
Time On Earth, Vol. 1
In his 2016 book The Big Picture, Cal-Tech physicist Sean Carroll brought eternity and the cosmos down to Earth, so to speak, by noting that a contemporary human can expect to live for roughly 3 billion heartbeats. He wasn’t trying to be dour or morbid, just trying to help put our individual existence in the context of deep time, given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth itself 4.5 billion years old, as best we can tell.
Maybe you don’t need a photographer to console you, to point out that a lot can happen in the time and space of a single heartbeat, or the blink of an eye in which a quality moment can transpire. But it’s true and there’s nothing more satisfying for a photographer than a well-focused instant of reflected light that reveals beauty, poignancy and perhaps a lasting hint of the eternal.
—-tjc
Red HIll at John Day Fossil Beds 
Canada geese at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ 
Ancient slab of Belt Basin argillite in a crib of Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River 
Magpie briefly still in a wintering locust tree 
River bank ice droplets, Spokane River 
Autumn at Tumwater canyon in the Washington Cascade range 
Flowing water and Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River 
Autumn on the Spokane River west of Spokane 
Frost on the marsh, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 
Clarno volcanic rock formation, John Day Fossil Beds 
Lichens on Grande Ronde basalt, Riverside State Park, WA 
Latah Creek near Spokane, WA 
Blue Darner dragonfly at a scabland marsh 
Ice age flood cobbles on Spokane River shoreline 
Young mule deer buck, Riverside State Park 
Water flowing over ice age flood cobbles 
Precambrian granite formation atop the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming 
Morning snowfall, Coeur d’Alene Park, Spokane, WA 
Winter at Soda Lake, north of Othello, WA 
Raindrops on lupine 
Saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert near Phoenix, AZ 
Ice age flood cobbles, Spokane River 
Sunset at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ 
Autumnal ash leaves, Fish Lake Trail in the Latah valley near Spokane, WA 
Schnebly Hill sandstone formation, Sedona, AZ 
Ice bobbins, Latah Creek
The Old Testaments
Images from a long summer on the rocks
I remember two things about my first visit to the Grand Canyon. The first is we all got in trouble. By “we” I mean the four oldest of the Connor children who were deemed old enough to know better than to go over the barrier along the rim. The second is the layers in the rocks, all the way to the bottom, thousands of feet below.
The idea that the Colorado River carved its way to the impossibly deep bottom was clear enough, yet still hard to imagine. That had taken 6 million years. What wasn’t so clear then is that the youngest of the rocks the river had cut through—the limestone/marble of the Kaibab Formation—are more than 250 million years old. That’s about 3.5 million human lifetimes. There’s no need to run the math for the deepest rocks in the chasm, the 1.7+ billion year old gneiss, schists and granites that make up the Vishnu Formation. At that trench of time, we are so deeply into the unfathomable that the mind twists and spins.
I can’t well explain the comfort I receive being in the presence of very old rocks. It’s just better—here—that I not try, that I just let the rocks speak for themselves in the photographs. Most of the images are from travels in the summer and fall of 2021, often with some of my favorite people, children and dear friends who allow me to just climb and wander up and down range from time to time, to visit with the earth and the rocks, and the ever-changing light. —tjc
To see and read more, click on the number “2” below…
A Beautiful Wounds Sampler
Open Gallery for Reviewers
